About upgrading notebooks...

I read in the Notebook reviews and database that the Gateway P-series can be manually upgraded. I've been thinking about buying the P-6831 and manually upgrading the CPU to a T8300 because of the cheap price, but the screen resolution and quality has been the only thing holding me back. Is it possible to manually upgrade other brands of notebooks besides Gateway?

 

of course. some are easier than others though.

 

Oh awesome! Then I should search for some cheap laptops with high quality screens and resolutions.

I've already found an Intel Core 2 Duo Moblie T-8300 CPU in one of the retail stores but I'm having trouble finding either Nvidia Geforce 8800M GTS or GTX SLI GPU sold in a box. Is it only possible to manually upgrade everything else besides the GPU or have I not been searching hard enough?

 

CPU - upgradable (subject to BIOS support)
HDD - upgradeable (subject to the same thickness)
RAM - upgradeable (up to 4GB usually)
Optical drive - swappable

However, please assume that you are stuck with whatever GPU that the computer comes with. The GPU is not normally an upgradeable part (and how to upgrade the GPU is such a frequently asked question that some of the regular inhabitants here get irritated when it is asked yet again).

John

 

There are situations in which you can upgrade your screen as well. If a certain line of laptop (for example, a Dell M1530) came with displays varying from WXGA to WUXGA, there is a good change you can swap your screen for any of the screens that were initially offered with the laptop. Sometimes a particular laptop chassis is shared by many lines (for example, Dell E1505, 6400, Vostro 1000) and the screens from all those lines will be interchangeable.

It's not as easy to replace a screen as memory or a hard drive, but it's possible.

John Ratsey's pretty much got the general gist of it all. CPU, RAM, HDD all usually pretty easily upgradeable. Optical drives a bit tougher and very rare cases for GPU (in those cases it's generally fairly easy, though).

You can also usually upgrade more tiddly bits like wireless cards, bluetooth modules, or batteries.

 

When thinking about cpu upgrades bear in mind that some laptops have a large panel you can remove from the bottom that (usually) makes upgrading the cpu pretty easy. Asus are renowned for having these. However a lot of companies just put in small individual panels for hard disk, ram and wifi card and you'll need to dismantle the entire laptop to get to the cpu which is a time consuming and much more difficult task.

 

Thanks for the info John. Much appreciated. Then I guess settling for the gateway's 1440x900 screen resolution will be fine. I just hope I'll still be able to enjoy future games to come with that screen resolution. Thanks for all your inputs you guys.

 

1440x900 is no slouch when it comes to the laptop market. Unfortunately unless you're both

A. Willing to spend
B. Don't mind having a large machine

Your laptop is not going to be able to consistently max the newest PC games. Of course that doesn't mean you can't play a lot of awesome games (or even newer games on lower settings) with some of the smaller and cheaper notebooks.