SM Guide: Upgrading your notebook PC

LincLinc OwnerDetroit Icrontian
edited April 2007 in Hardware
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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Comments

  • profdlpprofdlp The Holy City Of Westlake, Ohio
    edited July 2006
    Great article. I would never have expected such a dramatic improvement. :D
  • TheLostSwedeTheLostSwede Trondheim, Norway Icrontian
    edited July 2006
    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.
  • GHoosdumGHoosdum Icrontian
    edited July 2006
    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.
  • KometeKomete Member
    edited August 2006
    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%
  • GHoosdumGHoosdum Icrontian
    edited August 2006
    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.
  • LyubinVadimLyubinVadim
    edited September 2006
    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).
    320018116760_0.jpg
  • RWBRWB Icrontian
    edited September 2006
    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.
  • tbp07tbp07
    edited April 2007
    Has anyone had heat problems with replacing the 4200 rpm drive with the 7200 rpm? Thx for the reply
  • VicarVicar Icrontian
    edited April 2007
    Nice article
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