Upgrade your old laptop yourself

By cropp
Rank: Wiz
Rating: 85%, 184 votes

posted on Mar 15, 2008

There are actually a few things you can do for a dinosaur laptop (other than waiting for the asteroid to appear in the sky). Here are my top three suggestions:

Squeeze in as much RAM as possible. If you have a spare SIMM slot, put in the largest-capacity module you can find. You may have to throw away what's already in there--likely a 16MB module--and replace it with a 32MB or 64MB one. Memory was so expensive five years ago that vendors often skimped on it, but now that prices have plummeted, you should pack in as much as possible. (You may also look around for a chip doubler--a SIMM two-for that lets you put a pair of chips where there's only room for a single.)
Get a huge, honking hard drive. You should be able to dig up a compatible 10GB or 20GB drive. What's great is that it'll run at 4,200rpm (compared to the 3,600rpm drive you currently have), which will result in better performance. Save all your precious data, swap the old drive out for the new, and fire it up (crossing your fingers that the OS sees the new drive). Take note: You'll have to preload an operating system onto the new drive or load it on the fly.
Accelerate. You'll want to configure Windows to run your hard disk and graphics card at their maximum speeds.

Hard drive: Go to the device manager, select the drive letter, and pick the Settings tab. Check DMA for best performance. For Windows 2000, go into the hard drive's properties, open Disk Properties, and check Write Cache Enabled.
Graphics card: On your desktop, right-click and select Properties. Select the Advanced tab, then click the Performance tab. Push the slider all the way to the right.

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Comment #1

posted on Jul 17, 2008

By robert1355
Rank: Apprentice
Rating: 0%, 0 votes

some of the old laptops hold a MAX of 64, 126 256 mb pc66 or pc100 ram... and can only hold a max of like 20-30 gb hdd.

Comment #2

posted on Jun 18, 2008

By Wizard Prang
Rank: Master
Rating: 88%, 10 votes

Play nice... not everyone has a brand-new Notebook, and not everyone can afford one.

Also, it is amazing what you can do with an old laptop and Win98/DamSmallLinux/Puppy Linux.

Comment #3

posted on May 16, 2008

By bytje
Rank: Apprentice
Rating: 85%, 2 votes

look 64 mb you can buy an 2gb for the price of 64mb

how old is this topic??????

15 years or what

Comment #4

posted on Apr 15, 2008

By freezer117
Rank: Wiz
Rating: 83%, 66 votes

Also try a Linux light distribution such Puppy which can revive your old laptop

Comment #5

posted on Mar 19, 2008

By knightwalker
Rank: Apprentice
Rating: 0%, 0 votes

errr... when was this tip written, in 1999? 16/32 MB of RAM? 20GB hard drive? I haven't heard of such configurations any time in recent memory... thanks for the effort of putting up tips but this is extremely dated information, though I see that it was posted this week itself.

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