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How to upgrade a laptop computer - Upgrading Laptops or
Notebooks
First, let me repeat, you should never buy a used laptop
with the intention of upgrading it.
If you've owned a laptop
since buying it new or it was given to you as a
hand-me-down, upgrades are always worth looking at if you
have the money and are looking for a little more
functionality. The easiest and most effective upgrade most
laptop owners can make is upgrading the RAM. A second hand
notebook with 32MB of RAM will see a major performance
increase (especially when you open multiple windows) if you
upgrade it to 64MB, and a notebook with 64 MB will run "like
new:" if you add 128MB for 192MB total. Laptop RAM is
usually upgraded by removing an access panel on the bottom
of the notebook, secured by a single screw, and installing
the new SODIMM.
The whole trick is making sure your laptop doesn't already
have the maximum amount of RAM installed, and buying the
right module. I suggest using the memory finder at
crucial.com. Now comes the bad news. The RAM is the only
internal laptop component that can be easily upgraded, if at
all. The problem is three-fold. First, laptops are highly
proprietary, and upgrade parts like a CD burner that will
fit the physical form and provide the right connector aren't
always available. In some instances, you may be able to use
the outer plastic bezel from the original CD-ROM to match a
new CD record to the body of the notebook, but it still has
to be a supported model. Second, these parts are so much
more expensive that desktop components that it's not funny.
Your best bet is to buy "pulls," components scavenged from
broken or discarded units, but even these aren't cheap.
Finally, the laptop BIOS may not support the new CD or DVD
drive, or even a larger capacity hard drive. I wouldn't fool
around with flashing the laptop BIOS unless you are
absolutely desperate, because if it goes wrong, you'll be
left with a brick.
So, have we eliminated ever recording CD's or increasing the
storage capacity of your old laptop? Absolutely not.
Notebooks are designed to work with peripherals, and as long
as you have a USB 1.1 or better port, you'll have no trouble
finding external drives that will not only work with your
old notebook, they'll be portable to any other computer you
have now or may purchase in the future. For moving data
between computers or storing relatively small (up to a
gigabyte) amounts of data, jump drives are a great solution.
You can carry a jump drive on your key chain (and many are
designed for just that), and read the data on almost any
computer in the world. You can also connect to a router for
high speed internet access through your USB port, or through
the RJ-45 network port, if your laptop is equipped with one.
Another handy notebook upgrade is an external mouse and
keyboard. A simple USB splitter for less than $10 will
provide both ports in one convenient rat tail, especially
handy if your notebook only has a single PS/2 port for a
keyboard or a mouse and you can't find a PS/2 splitter.
You can't upgrade the motherboard or the CPU in your laptop.
You can't even replace them cost effectively in most cases
if they fail. The same obviously goes for the screen and the
video adapter (built into the main board), but you can hook
most notebooks to an external monitor if your screen is
failing and you aren't ready to replace it. Of course, you
can add almost any capability to a notebook if it supports
PC cards, sometimes referred to as PCMCIA (Personal Computer
Memory Card International Association) cards, but they
aren't cheap, and the software drivers may not be available
for your older operating system, so read the specs
carefully. Also, PC cards for storage devices are much
thicker than cards for memory or communications, so you may
only be able to use PC card at a time, even if your laptop
has two PCMCIA slots.
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