Inspiron 600M Upgrades

I have an Inspiron 600M as you read in the title. I want to upgrade it a little instead of buying a whole new computer b/c I like the size of my laptop and that it already has my settings and stuff. It has an Intel 855PM Chipset, 30gb hard drive, and 256mb RAM. I know what I need to upgrade the RAM but I'm not sure what kind of processors and hard drives I can get to make my computer run a little faster. also what graphics card do you suggest?

 

Graphics cards cannot be upgraded in ntoebooks, and processors are generally quite difficult. The RAM and hard disk are the easier components to replace. The RAM required for the notebook id DDR SODIMM RAM, and the hard disk required for an upgrade is an IDE (ATA) one.

 

Would it be better for me to upgrade to a bigger internal hard drive or just get an external? Can I upgrade the motherboard/chipset? Would upgrading the RAM allow me to turn the graphics on games up higher?

 

I have a 600m. I upgraded the RAM to 1.5 GB and replaced the original hard drive with a 120 GB drive. External hard drives are useful if you are not traveling much. I prefer to have all my materials with me on the notebook.

Upgrading RAM will not help with graphics on games. The 600m (at least the one I have) has a soldered in 32 MB RAM video. And adding RAM won't affect the video RAM.

By the way, I recently set off a 45 GB partition using Gparted (a free partioning tool) and installed Vista Ultimate on that partition as dual boot to see how the machine would work with Vista. It's decent. It won't use the aero effects, and the games (that's what made me think of it) crawl, but for regular work it's nice.