Upgrade my Inspiron?

Hey all, I'm new around here. I've got a Dell Inspiron 8100 and it's done well for me for the last couple of years but obviously it's gettin pretty old. However, I'm a poor college student so I can't really afford a new laptop so I've been looking into upgrading my current one. I've been looking into this for a while now and I have to admit it's pushing my geek level a bit. It's weird how hard it is to find parts, especially upgrade parts, for laptops. Anyway, I've got the RAM side of things taken care of but I'd like of like to upgrade my graphics card or GPU or whatever. I've found some but I can't really find good answers as to rather they are compatable with my system or not. Can someone help me out here? I'm looking for something so I can play at least most of the newer games. At least 128mb. Help?


Oh and I don't know if it's possible or not but I'd really like to upgrade my processor. I haven't spent as much time on this so I'm kinda ignorant on this front right now so any info would be really helpful. Also, I found this site about some sort of upgrade kit for laptops. Anyone know how legit it is?


Thanks a lot!



-Ryan

 

If you do all the upgrades, it will cost you the same as a new laptop. I doubt you will find a netter graphics card with out paying a arm and a leg.

 

Well, I get get my RAM for like 80 all together and I wouldn't mind paying for a new graphics card. I'd rather just upgrade this as opposed to getting something new because my budget wouldn't let me get any kind of really good new one anyway and I can upgrade a little at a time. You do have a point though.

 

Your graphics card is soldered to the motherboard. It is not very easy to replace. If you want better system performance, rather than upgrade th CPU, upgrade to a faster hard drive like a 7200RPM. With a faster hard drive system performance should be quite good. Much better than if you upgraded to a 1Ghz PIII.

 

My cpu is actually a 1.2 gig. But my graphics card is soldered to the mobo? That sucks...I'll check out the hard drive though. Thanks!

 

You can ONLY upgrade the graphics card in that 8100 if your laptop has a dedicated graphics card already AND IF dell has an upgrade available for that particular model, otherwise you cannot upgrade it as laptops do not follow a standardized form factor like desktops do.

 

his graphics card is not soldered to the motherboard it is a interchangable board, i have the same laptop and the available options are:

32mb geforce 2 go
64mb geforce 440 go
64mb Radeon 9000
64mb quadro go 700

of these the quadro is the best because it is actually a rebadged gf4 4200 go, 1.2ghz is the fastest P3 mobile cpu available but they did make the desktop one up to 1.4ghz with 512kb cache, you cud try n put one of them in it but it might catch fire, however ive got a 1.2 and a quadro and i can play games like ut2004 and halflife 2 (admittedly at low settings) fine

 

Those cards won't get you to far in terms of performance today - the performance level will stay around the same as it is right now. In addition, these cards will get you almost nowhere if you're trying to game - they're really outdated.

 

Upgrading will cost more than buying a new laptop

 

i switched from the 32mb geforce 2 to the 64mb quardo 700 (4200 go), it more than tripled my framerate in quake 3 and let me play games like ut2004 and half life 2, the cards are mobile versions of the gf2 mx and gf4 ti4200 cards, if you dont think theres a performance difference between them your mad

 

I would say it really isn't worth the extra $ to upgrade an old P3 laptop. If it's even possible it would take a lot of time, and $ to get it to run those newer games. I would say... Sell your laptop on ebay, then buy somthing like the DV4000 or the E1505 with the X1400 when it comes out. Those are both cheap 1k laptops that will play your games great!

Also ubersonic trippling the framerates doesn't say too much, unless you have numbers. If it was running at 5FPS and you tripple it to 15FPS that's still not really at a playable level.

 

Hmm...

I don't doubt the performance gains of putting in a better GPU - I'm not saying that older games won't play better - they were made for that type of hardware during that time period, so there'll be a bigger performance gain. However, if you try running higher-end modern games like BF2 or Doom 3 for example, you might notice a slight increase in performance - not as big, but as you said, it might let you play them at a "playable" framerate. However, for the amount of money, I believe you're better off getting another notebook unless you absolutely cannot.

 

Mine is almost as old and outdated as yours. I upgraded my wirless recently to .g which was nice and also recently upgraded my memory which was also nice its now maxed out except on the hardware front. I'm not sure whether I want the better drive or not because I get by fine with the 5400rpm one I have now, even though its only 40gb I just delete what I don't need/want and maintain the drive. I wouldn't bother upgrading, for your money you'd get a much better deal moving to a midlevel/cheap system I'm saving for the next 1-2years for my next one.