The 20-year reign of sealed, proprietary laptops is nearly over. Today's mobile PCs are well on their way to becoming almost as upgradable as desktop PCs. You can often swap out everything from the memory to the CPU and, in some cases, even the graphics card -- pretty much everything under the keyboard, other than the motherboard.
Not all laptop lines are equally upgrade-friendly, though, and most vendors still resist articles encouraging readers to grab their screwdrivers and muck around inside their laptops. (We're not sure whether they're worried about accidental hardware damage or lost service revenue.) In general, you'll have an easier time working on a second-tier brand, or a whitebook, because the internal components in these models are usually easier to reach and replace.
To illustrate the process, we picked an example of a good whitebook model: the Intel Centrino-based Asus M6000N with a 1.4GHz Pentium M processor, 256MB of RAM, and a 5,400rpm 20GB hard drive. (Asus ships bare-bones laptops to many resellers, so you just may have one.) We updated these components to a 2.0GHz Dothan Pentium M processor, 512MB of RAM, and a 60GB hard drive. The cost of these three upgrades was US$1,139, total. You could probably buy a brand-new laptop for about that price, but it wouldn't be as well configured. What's more, if you don't feel like making such a major investment in an aging laptop, you can choose one or two of the three components to keep your clunker running a little while longer. We'll show you how to upgrade each one, starting with the hard drive.
One word of caution: Before you try any of this at home, take heed of the industry-standard warning. Once you upgrade your CPU or hard drive, you can kiss your warranty good-bye. But if you're ready for an upgrade, your warranty's probably long gone anyway.
This story originally appeared in Computer Shopper magazine.
 | ||
|
||
| ||
Step 1: Getting startedLike this article? Click below to send it to your mobile for free!
N/A
19/12/2004 11:41 AM
An excellent and informative artical
Report offensive content