I’m just curious what sort of things are relatively easy to replace in a laptop. I’ve put it in GQ because I’m not asking for what I should change, I’m asking what things are relatively easy to change. By “relatively easy,” I mean things like changing the RAM. Harder things, I understand, would be things like trying to change the video card.
By the way, I have a Dell 1420.
So, I’m wondering, if I wanted to make my computer run faster, cooler, more efficiently, etc. What can I upgrade easily enough myself?
RAM and possibly your hard drive depending on where it is located. That’s about it. For a variety of reasons notebooks are not really designed to be significantly upgraded.
Depends on the laptop in many cases. As far as speeding it up more RAM helps in some cases but other than that I don’t know what else you can do to speed it up. Some machines can use a bigger battery to have longer battery life , Dell has that for some machines.
RAM will be pretty simple for most models; doubling your RAM doesn’t suck too much more power but can give you a much snappier-feeling machine. Open the case and count the available slots. Your best bet is to take out the factory RAM and fill the slots with the biggest sticks that will fit until you get at/near 4GB, where Windows PCs see very (very!) little additional advantage.
The hard drive(s) may be fairly simple but also a little pointless to replace unless you can find a solid-state disk that uses less power and has no moving parts. SSDs are still an emerging tech, though, and you’ll want to read some benchmark tests before buying – they are a specialist’s tool that improves one particular kind of I/O at the expense of most other operations’ speed.
Larger batteries (usually they look like scuba tanks hanging off your machine) can hold a charge longer and are ideal for cross-country or cross-ocean flights.
The CPU will be buried in pretty deeply, but with clever Googling you can probably find a better (higher-power) CPU that will fit as a replacement. It will probably suck more battery, though, and monkeying around that deeply may knock one of your external ports loose leading to gremlins. If you want it to run cooler then consider either downgrading the CPU or underclocking via the BIOS.
The motherboard is basically a custom fit part for the plastic shell of your laptop; it is unlikely that any motherboards except possibly those made by the same laptop company will fit, and even then it’s a long shot and not worth the hassle. For most laptops today, the video is integrated into the motherboard and so is impossible to replace.
If you have a Windows PC you could change to Linux or setup the machine to dual boot Windows and Linux. Most versions of Linux are free so there is no cost to do that.
Not sure why replacing a HDD would be a little pointless, there are 500GB laptop HDDs available now that were either completely unavailable or extremely expensive just a couple years ago. You are also leaving out an important part about SSDs–where they are only good for a limited number of read/write cycles before going poof…!
I agree that upgrading to a bigger conventional hard drive can be a good idea. More storage space, and bigger drives actually tend to be faster for some things. Since there’s a greater density of data in the same physical space, bigger drives have better read/write speeds.
However, these days for SSDs the limited read/write cycles isn’t an issue for everyday purposes. Modern flash memory has wear-leveling algorithms that prevent a single block of memory from being “used up” before the rest of the drive. Also, when you have a 64 gb flash drive, and 100,000 write cycle limit, it takes a hell of a long time to wear it out. 6.4 petabytes of writing, at a 300 megabyte/second write rate, gives you about 250 days of constant writing. That’d be no good for a heavy-use server, but it’s hardly a problem for desktop use.
Upgrading memory is always a good idea. Go to crucial.com and download their utility that scrutinizes your system and tells you exactly what your options are. Buy the maximum.
You can also “upgrade” many functions nowadays using USB peripherals that formerly required major surgery. Such things as external Hard Drives, sound cards, network cards, TV receivers, etc.
On my WallStreet (G3 Mac PowerBook vintage '98) I upgraded the following over time:
• hard drive, several tmes, culminating in running two internal HDs both 60 gigs / 7200 RPM
• RAM, from 128 MB to 512, in a couple of stages
• optical drive: was removable, replaced the device insde the module with a CD burner.
•CPU: was on a daughtercard, G3/300 MHz, replaced with 3rd party daugtercard with G4/500 MHz
• design flaw, cheap potmetal screen hinges would wear out after 3+ years, had them replaced with sturdy titanium/steel, stll going strong. I wasn’t brave enough to do the surgery myself.