Revamping my p-7811 fx

So I've had this thing for quite a while and made no upgrades to it and thought instead of buying a new laptop i'd just upgrade the thing.

I've had black screen issues.. etc.. so I decided to drop some dough on a new motherboard/gpu stock replacement which will be here next week.
-- Should I plan on reinstalling the operating system when I change it out? and should I make boot disks or something of the sort before ripping my laptop down? --

I also picked up an Intel SLGES T9800 2.93GHz 1066MHz 6MB Core 2 Duo for a pretty good price which will be here around the same time.

Should I invest in another hard drive and maybe up to 8 gigs memory as well? Also does anyone know of a blu-ray drive thats available for this model? Curious.

thx

 

You shouldn't need to reformat if it's the same motherboard.

Upgrade your Gateway FX P-Series Laptop with a “Blu-Ray Drive” Nu!Netherlands News Weblog

Not a specific guide for the p-78, but it should help.

edit: this should work but don't trust me until someone else confirms http://www.ebay.com/itm/HL-CT10N-BL...C_Drives_Storage_Internal&hash=item45f8781e14

 

Since the sme main board the only concern, other than if you use raid, is windows may want to be re-activated. You amy also find at first boot alot of the drivers reinstalling for the new resource assignments. I put in the P79 board and only issues with windows 7 were the sound card driver and os re-activation.............

 

I have not set up Raid because I did not have a 2nd hd in my laptop.. but will look into it this week once the new one shows up. I got the same exact hd as I already have so hopefully it pans out okay if I decide Raid0 is worth the effort.

I'm still running on Windows Vista and although I have read a few articles about upgrading to Windows 7, I'm still not sure if upgrading my OS will give me a noticeable performance boost.

Now my other question is... When I get the motherboard, cpu, memory, and hd.. Should I replace the items one at a time.. or can I just put all the new hardware in at once? I'm thinking I should just do the motherboard first.. then proceed with the rest once I know its working.

 

first get the MB to work. My methodology is one upgrade at a time. In this way if there is an issue you can determine what it is from............