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Lincoln
Snapperhead
Lincoln
16,163 Posts
20 Jul 2006, 1:46am

SM Guide: Upgrading your notebook PC

Check out how to go about upgrading your notebook PC!

The easiest and most efficient upgrades you can make to a notebook PC are usually the memory and hard drive. Short-Media shows you what you need to know to boost your performance.
A standard notebook hard drive operates at 4200 RPM (rotations per minute) while modern desktop drives spin at 7200 RPM. This lower speed means slower access to information, which means more time drumming your fingers. Furthermore, notebooks are often sold with only 256MB to 512MB of memory, which is also often shared with the video card. This can cut usable memory by as much as 25% in some cases!

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profdlp
Off To The Gym
profdlp
21,407 Posts
20 Jul 2006, 3:58am
Great article. I would never have expected such a dramatic improvement.
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TheLostSwede
Where's the ****ing beers?
TheLostSwede
3,220 Posts
20 Jul 2006, 7:41am
Excellent article that really shows that the harddrive is the culprit in a modern Laptop. If the ram gets low, the harddrive have to do the job for the ram and with a 4200rpm drive, it cripples the machine.
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GHoosdum
tequilavangelist
GHoosdum
10,369 Posts
20 Jul 2006, 1:54pm
Exactly - it's completely logical, but I really didn't think of it until I was doing the analysis. The hard drive doubly cripples the machine.

Here's an example - I've played UT2K4 on this machine before and after. Level loading times went from several minutes before the upgrade, to half a minute or so after the upgrade. This made the game actually playable, because after the upgrade I was able to get into a match at the beginning instead of the middle.
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Komete
DIY Haxx0r
Komete
968 Posts
20 Aug 2006, 5:36pm
Hi good article. Did you by any chance time xp boot up times with a stop watch? I see you have a bench of hd boot times in mb/s and was wondering if your boot times were now half the time.

Hard drive – XP Startup
4.74 MB/s
7.19 MB/s
51.67%
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GHoosdum
tequilavangelist
GHoosdum
10,369 Posts
21 Aug 2006, 2:19pm
Unfortunately I didn't get a chance to manually time the before and after boot times - I can say, however, that the boot is subjectively much faster with the new hard drive.
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LyubinVadim
New to the neighborhood
LyubinVadim
1 Posts
5 Sep 2006, 7:14am
That idea really works! I use ABS Mayhem F22 R40 Intel Core Duo T2400(1.83GHz) I've bought on eBay. I work with graphics on it. And it really goes smoother with extended RAM (from 512 to 1024Mb).
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profdlp edited : 5 Sep 2006 at 9:50pm .
RWB
Thank God for Blue Monsters
RWB
7,370 Posts
5 Sep 2006, 7:42am
When I upgraded my 5400RPM 40GB HDD on my lappy with 100GB 7200RPM I also noticed a huge difference all around. I was utterly amazed becuase I wasn't expecting anything more than just some load times to decrease.
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tbp07
New to the neighborhood
tbp07
1 Posts
10 Apr 2007, 8:42am
Has anyone had heat problems with replacing the 4200 rpm drive with the 7200 rpm? Thx for the reply
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Vicar
Heaven Is Beautiful
Vicar
138 Posts
10 Apr 2007, 10:41am
Nice article
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