Re: advice on upgrading hard drive and cpu of laptop
> First, the hard drive: the main reason I want to upgrade is to get
> something faster. My HD is a 6G Hitachi that came with my Vivante
> when I bought it almost two years ago. I find it to be very slow.
> Can anyone recommend a faster drive, which is also relatively energy
> efficient? 8 to 9G would be perfect. Can anyone guess how many rpm
> my drive would be? I can't find this in any of the docs. Will any
> 2.5" IDE drive work?
I assume you are looking in the Laptop documentation. If you pull out the drive itself, and then go to the drive manufacturer's website and get the
documentation for the hard drive, it should have the specs.
Every modern (1990->) laptop I have taken apart (maybe 20 of them) has used a standard 2.5" drive. The thing you have to watch out for is the height
- some laptops require slimmer drives than others. Depending on the mounts you also may not be able to mount a _slimmer_ hard drive, although I've
always been able to make a smaller one work.
As someone mentioned there is often an adapter involved, but under/inside/behind that is a standard drive.
I don't know if 2.5" drives are any faster now than when you bought your laptop. I upgraded the drive in my ~3 year old laptop (and it was
discontinued then so probably 5-year-old technology...) last summer (2G->12G) and it is a little faster. Also a lot noisier when spun up.
I didn't buy the new one for performance but for more storage at minimal cost. I forget the specs but I think it has slightly lower energy usage as
well.
> My CPU is a Celeron 300. I chose this because it was inexpensive and
> doesn't consume much power, but now I'd like a bit more speed, maybe
> 50 to 100% more. Would something like a Celeron 500 be a good option?
> Or a Pentium? Or something from AMD? Will any mobile chip fit into
> my motherboard? How will the energy use of a modern 500MHz cpu
> compare with that of a two year old Celeron 300?
None of the modern laptops I have taken apart used a standard socket. The CPU is either soldered on to the mainboard, or it uses a proprietary
carrier, which means that the only source of an upgrade is the vendor.
My laptop is a P166MMX and it serves me fine for everything except games and heavy calculations. I use it for word processing, spreadsheet, C and
Java development,and of course surfing. When I need to run really heavy calculations I usually still develop the code on it and then ssh to my
Duron-980 at home or my PIII-733 at work to run it. I use the Duron mostly for games.
Best,
Steve Stancliff
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