I want to upgrade my Dell Inspiron 9300

Hello,

I bought my Dell Inspiron 9300 back in 2004 or 2005, and I want to try and upgrade it. The only thing I have upgraded is the hard drive, when the original went dead a few years ago.

I really love my laptop, love the display, and I want to keep using it. My battery is shot, so I have to be plugged in to use it, and video seems to get stickier as time goes on.

I run Ubuntu, and my system info reads:

Memory 1001.9 MiB
Processor Intel Pentium (R) M processor 2.13GHz
Graphics Gallium 0.4 on ATI RV370
OS type 32-bit
Disk 154.5 GB

I'm not a gamer, and the most graphics-intensive video I run is an HD movie or something on youtube.

I see where I can get a new hard drive (this one is starting to get sluggish), but I need advice on what type of video card to get, and if I can get a new battery. I'm also curious if I can get a new processor, more memory, and basically an entire makeover to bring my machine to modern times.

Thanks for any help and advice!

 

Graphics card: If you only want to watch Youtube videos, there's no point in upgrading this. There's a couple of slightly better options available, but I don't know them off the top of my head.

Processor: You can get the 2.26GHz Pentium M 780, but you'll be paying something like $50 for an extra 133MHz, which is completely and utterly not worth it.

Memory: You should be able to use at least 2GB of DDR2. Any speed of DDR2 should work, though I'd be cautious about getting PC6400. PC5300 or PC4200 is more or less guaranteed to work.

 

Thanks Commander! I actually just watched an HD youtube video, and it was very sticky, so I feel like I really do need to upgrade my video card. I also have an MP4 video I try and play, but it just can't seem to handle it.

Do you think my video sluggishness would improve with more memory?

 

As far as I know, none of the GPUs offered in the 9300 support any sort of modern video offloading... your Youtube video is being decoded by your CPU. That being said, since you don't really have much of a CPU upgrade path (and even if you really wanted to spend that $50 on the 780, I doubt it would help), I would recommend you start saving up for a new laptop if you want to play those videos.