Whaddya think?

I installed Vista HP on my 3 year old Dell vostro 200 last week. After doing some initial tweaks I installed Office ultimate '07. Word, Excel, Publisher and the rest each opened in a split second, first time. I was a happy camper, especially when it appears I need to ditch the onboard graphics and install a seperate card - not a gamer, but some sights are scrolling like crap and my physical memory usage is about 1/2 of the installed 2 gigs and CPU usage is up with the new OS. Looking at an EVGA 430 or maybe even the 8400.

Any thoughts/suggestions?

Intel Core2 Duo E4500 @ 2.3ghz
2 Gig of Kingston ram
Intell G33 Express Chipset (on motherboard)
80 Gig WD SATA Hard Drive
Seasonic 350w PSU

Hi,

Come on! Nice try.

Upload some demonstrate-able video evidence to prove your claims.

No - seriously - one of the first things I did after tweaking the Vista OS and then installing Office '07 was to open some of the suites. And each of them did open extremely fast. I was surprised myself. Besides checking how quickly internet sites open, checking how Word, Excel etc. open is one of the first things I've always done after re-installing XP. And since I've never run Vista before, I was very interested to see how these apps opened with Vista. Hold on - I'm gonna open Access for the first time - ok less than 2 seconds - now InfoPath - same thing. Also same thing if I go in and dig up an old Word doc or a PP or whatever that hasn't been opened in ages. Just a fast as changing a tv channel. No reason to pull anyone's leg on this. As I said though, some things, like Yahoo News pages and their picture galleries, for example, are all gummed up; Yahoo news was kinda slow before with XP, especially after going through 100 or so photos. But no - the Office suites are popping up wham, wham, wham.

How about this one ( Newegg.com - EVGA 01G-P3-N958-LR GeForce 9500 GT 1GB 128-bit DDR2 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready Video Card ). I installed that on a similar system. Works fine.

Looks good on the EVGA 9500 - I'm also considering the EVGA 430. I haven't looked at graphics cards to closely over the years as the onboard video was always sufficient enough. So I'm learning now lol.

Any thoughts on the differences between the two cards and how they will affect the running of my Office programs?

For the office programs, it is probably neither here nor there. I would go for the most reasonable price. After you installed it, make sure you switch it in the BIOS.

Thanks guys for the advice. EVGA is offering a $15 rebate on the 430 that brings the price down to around $50, so I decided to go with that one. Looking forward to interacting here on the site!

Sounds like a good deal. Have fun.