Help me upgrade my laptop?

Prozac the Robert · Post by **Prozac the Robert** » 2005-12-13 04:12pm

Right, so my laptop is a Dell Latitude D600. I guess my first question is whether it's worth upgrading. After all, only a few things can be upgraded, and the other parts might hold it back. It has 512MB of ram, which it came with. I could upgrade as far as 2GB, although I'm not sure I'd want to pay that much.

The thing on crucial.com sugests the following parts:
512 and 1GB

So: is that a good recomendation? Can any one sugest a good suplier of the stuff in the UK? And how far is it worth upgrading?
I guess the hard drive might be upgradeable, it's currently at 37GB and not that far off full, but I have no idea what kind of replacement is required. Of course I'd then have to re-install everything which would be a hassle, but I guess extra space is worth it. Provided of course that it doesn't cost too much money.

So, there you have it, I don't really know what I'm doing, but I thought it possible someone here might take pitty on me. Any advice from people who've upgraded similar laptops is quite welcome, as is anything else anyone feels like contributing.

General Zod · Post by **General Zod** » 2005-12-13 04:17pm

What all do you use it for? Do you do any type of gaming at all? Or video editing? Or just generic stuff?

If it's just generic stuff, document processing, watching the occasional video, music, surfing the web, etc. then an upgrade won't really affect things all that much with the ram you have. If it's for something like gaming, well, you might be better off getting a new laptop. Frankly dells are shit for gaming.

Prozac the Robert · Post by **Prozac the Robert** » 2005-12-13 04:49pm

Mostly just general stuff. I've been playing a bit of Civ 4 recently, and I suspect a bit of ram would improve that, but I doubt I'll be buying any new pc games for a while. Also, it seems to be a little slower than it might be generaly, but perhaps that's just the slow acumulation of random junk.

Vendetta · Post by **Vendetta** » 2005-12-13 06:18pm

Scan can do you a 1GB SODIMM for £76.96 plus a bit for delivery. They tend to be pretty good, I've bought from them before.

Extra memory will certainly help with Civ, which has a lot to keep track of (and a big old late game memory leak to boot). It will help with the bit-rot you're probably undergoing which is making everything else slow as well, but to actually cure that you need to format and reinstall.

Prozac the Robert · Post by **Prozac the Robert** » 2005-12-13 07:03pm

Vendetta wrote:Scan can do you a 1GB SODIMM for £76.96 plus a bit for delivery. They tend to be pretty good, I've bought from them before.

Extra memory will certainly help with Civ, which has a lot to keep track of (and a big old late game memory leak to boot). It will help with the bit-rot you're probably undergoing which is making everything else slow as well, but to actually cure that you need to format and reinstall.

Cheers for the link.

Hmm, if I'm going to reinstall anyway, anyone know if there is a bigger size of hard disk that this thing will take? Is there a generic laptop hard disk type, or are they specific to different laptops?

General Zod · Post by **General Zod** » 2005-12-13 07:08pm

Prozac the Robert wrote:
Vendetta wrote:Scan can do you a 1GB SODIMM for £76.96 plus a bit for delivery. They tend to be pretty good, I've bought from them before.

Extra memory will certainly help with Civ, which has a lot to keep track of (and a big old late game memory leak to boot). It will help with the bit-rot you're probably undergoing which is making everything else slow as well, but to actually cure that you need to format and reinstall.
Cheers for the link.

Hmm, if I'm going to reinstall anyway, anyone know if there is a bigger size of hard disk that this thing will take? Is there a generic laptop hard disk type, or are they specific to different laptops?

Some laptops will only take certain types of hard disks. For example, you'll be pressed to fit a Toshiba hdd into a Thinkpad, which specifically tends to use IBM drives. But you should be able to buy replacement/upgrade drives from the manufacturer with little problems.

Master of Ossus · Post by **Master of Ossus** » 2005-12-13 07:50pm

I recommend buying ONLY 1GB sticks of RAM for laptops, since that way if you want to upgrade again from 1.5 GB to 2GB you only need to buy one more 1GB stick and replace the 512MB one.

If you bought 512, and then wanted to upgrade to 1.5 or 2GB, you would be out the money for the 512 and would have to get another 1 or 2GB stick.

And, yes, buying RAM is the best way to upgrade almost all laptops--especially since you only have a half gig.

Netko · Post by **Netko** » 2005-12-14 02:25am

General Zod wrote:Some laptops will only take certain types of hard disks. For example, you'll be pressed to fit a Toshiba hdd into a Thinkpad, which specifically tends to use IBM drives. But you should be able to buy replacement/upgrade drives from the manufacturer with little problems.

Now, it might be true in certain cases (stranger things have happened) but laptop hard drives are standardised pretty much the same as regular harddrives (main diffrence is that laptop drives are smaller) so there shouldnt be problems in general with pluging in any laptop hd. As far as capacity goes there shouldnt be any problems on modern laptops with essentialy any capacity.

Master of Ossus · Post by **Master of Ossus** » 2005-12-14 09:53am

mmar wrote:Now, it might be true in certain cases (stranger things have happened) but laptop hard drives are standardised pretty much the same as regular harddrives (main diffrence is that laptop drives are smaller) so there shouldnt be problems in general with pluging in any laptop hd. As far as capacity goes there shouldnt be any problems on modern laptops with essentialy any capacity.

Thinkpads are notorious for attempting to circumvent the standardized 2.5" HDD by doing things like only allowing for VERY strange consumer-end HDD's (ie. the 1.8" HDD used by their tablet lineup--which prevents it from being upgraded since no one makes HDD's that size that are bigger/faster than the one it comes with).

Glocksman · Post by **Glocksman** » 2005-12-14 12:30pm

Dell is actually quite good at providing documentation on upgrading their laptops.
I upgraded my old Inspiron 1100 by adding RAM, replacing the celeron with a P4, a bigger hard drive, and adding a DVD/CDRW drive.
Here's the service manual in HTML for the Latitude D600 series.
It's probably a bog standard 2.5mm HD, but you can pull the old one out and look up the model to make sure.

phongn · Post by **phongn** » 2005-12-14 01:47pm

Master of Ossus wrote:Thinkpads are notorious for attempting to circumvent the standardized 2.5" HDD by doing things like only allowing for VERY strange consumer-end HDD's (ie. the 1.8" HDD used by their tablet lineup--which prevents it from being upgraded since no one makes HDD's that size that are bigger/faster than the one it comes with).

My ThinkPad T22 very much uses the standard 2.5" form factor (I swapped out the 30GB IBM OEM drive for a faster 40GB Toshiba one). I've never head of any people having trouble with the A, R or T series.

The X40-series uses the 1.8" hard drives since they are smaller and thus IBM could shrink the size down even more from the X30-series.

Glocksman wrote:Dell is actually quite good at providing documentation on upgrading their laptops.

Bah, IBM Hardware Maintanence Manuals rule them all