How would I go about upgrading the RAM on my Latitude D800?

Looks like this notebook might just last another 6 years. I wonder how much one of those 1.8ghz Pentium Ms are.

The only thing that's concerning me is all the complaints about DOA drives or, worse, drives crashing within a few months. This one's worked fine for years, it's just small...are hard disks today just made with lower quality overall?

 

It's about $50 for the 1.8GHz Pentium M 745. Most of the ones I've sold have gone for about that, but you can obviously find 'em cheaper if you look hard. Dunno about hard drives these days; I'm 75% SSD now, just one desktop away from 100%.

I've got an 80GB PATA drive made by Fujitsu in an external enclosure though. It was made in 2006 and still going strong. It's been buffeted and dropped maybe once or twice now and it still works fine. It's got a protective sleeve though, so you can interpret that how you want.

 

See the Service Manual.

See the quick guide to cloning and the Service Manual. I expect the HDD to be PATA (44-pin connector) which will limit your choice. The Samsung HM160HC may be a good choice for performance even if you can't use all the space.

John

 

I'm more concerned with low heat/noise than speed. Which hard disk would be my best bet for that?

 

When I upgraded old 40 gb Fujitsu to the Samsung HM160HC, my temperatures dropped significantly. While I haven't actually measured the temperature difference between the two drives, I can tell you that with the Samsung my drive felt a lot cooler. My left palmrest used to get pretty hot when I still had the Fujitsu, but now it gets warm at best, and this is with the computer running 24/7. On top of that, the Samsung is quieter, bigger, and faster. It was a worthwhile investment for my Inspiron 8600.

I think theres a chance that you can use all 160 GB on one partition if you were to purchase the Samsung. My Inspiron is from the same era as yours, and while the bios wasn't able to see all 160 GB, I was able to when I ran windows XP.

With regards to hard drive quality today, I personally think hard drive quality has improved over the years. All new hard drives also come with a manufacturer warranty, so if something were to happen, you'd be covered for that.

Just out of curiosity, what kind of Pentium M do you have?

 

It's the one in my sig, the 1.6ghz. I don't have anymore information on it.

 

Just picked up 2 1GB sticks of Kingston PC2700 memory for $49.99 each at Microcenter. Newegg has better deals I'm sure but I don't feel like waiting. I saw a display for the Samsung HM160HC where they have all their older OEM parts, but the bin with the sign for it was empty. They didn't have any non-SATA laptop drives except 250/320gb WD ones, unless there were others in the OEM bin which I didn't feel like sorting through (none of the bins were labelled except the empty samsung one).

Will I need to set the memory speed in the BIOS, or will it detect automatically?

EDIT: Setup went fine, everything's all right so far, but it's recognized as 266mhz. There was no way to change it in the BIOS. Also the initial bootup took WAY longer - is that just a first time memory test thing, or will it hang at the Dell BIOS screen every time now?

 

oh
and what pagefile size would you recommend now? I have min and max at 768mb, but I shouldn't even need that much - should I?

(keep in mind my limited HDD space)

 

Well, it really depends on your usage. If you don't get even close to using 2 GB of RAM, you can probably safely reduce the number to 512 mb or less. Honestly, it really won't save you that much hard drive space though, unless you disable it completely.

As for your memory running at 266 mhz, I'm not completely sure how it works. I'm not certain what limits memory speed (but I'm hoping to find out from some other enlightened forum member!)

 

I'm giving serious thought to upgrading the CPU also. Would the Pentium M 780 work with my chipset, or would I need to go with an older Pentium M?