Alienware Upgrade

So I bought an Alienware m9700 last year(ish) because I am in college, and wanted a computer that was portable, but could also play games. Unfortunately, my computer seems to be lagging behind current technology now, and was wondering what kinds of upgrades would be possible/recomended.
My laptop's current specs are:

AMD Turion 64 Mobile 2.4GHz
RAM - 2gb
VideoCards- GeForce Go 7900gs 512mb (I believe there are two, however I'm not sure how to verify that. . .)


So my only real questions are what can I/should I upgrade. Any suggestions/tips?
If more details are needed, let me know - I'll include anything I can.

Thanks!

 

Go to device manager to see if you have two Geforce 7900GS cards. Your CPU is already the fastest available from AMD's mobile line.

In terms of hardware, your system is not outdated. If it feels too slow, you might just need a reformat or fresh install.

 

I'll probobly try to reformat sometime over the weekend. I tried running 3DMark06 and got around 2,000 which seems terrible. Was running like max of 14 FPS and during the CPU test was at like 0. Makes me wonder if I should try to move up to a dual core processor or something (If they even make mobile ones) to try and get evened out in that. Maybe my system just has issues with 3DMark, though.

I checked the device manager and two showed up. Thanks alot, was always wondering how to check!

 

Oh I thought you had a Turion X2. Unfortunately, the Turion single core and dual core versions use different sockets. So you can't upgrade to a dual core Turion.

Basically, it is not worth upgrading the notebook at this point.

 

Yeah, you have either the ML-42 or ML-44 both of which use Socket 754. It is also the fastest available processor for Socket 754, so you're pretty much at a dead end there.

 

Dang. So it is way too expensive for me to buy an entirely new laptop, and the heat from the machine melted off the serial number, so I can't even trade it in (I looked it up anyways, and it isn't even worth it in the end.) Is it even possible to upgrade at this point? If it isn't, any rough estimates on how much it would cost and what I would need to do would be greatly appreciated.

 

The GPU *may* be upgradeable (If this is a re-branded Clevo or something it'll probably have an MXM connection), but a more powerful, compatible card will probably cost a lot more than it is worth.

You can go for 4GB of memory and that will be real cheap right now, but again, it's unlikely to give you a huge performance boost especially if you don't have a 64bit OS to take advantage of the whole lot.

In general, I don't think it is worthwhile to upgrade this thing.

 

Okay, well. . . Even if it isn't worth it, what would I need to do? Replace the motherboard and the processor? Is that all? Where would you recomend looking/how could I look into doing this (for example, what type of components would I need, how would I figure it out)? I understand that it is probobly not worthwhile, but I would feel pretty bad if I didn't at least do a little research into it. Thanks for all the answers.

 

Basically it comes down to replacing the motherboard.

Laptop motherboards are almost always proprietary to the chassis, though in some very rare occasions two generations of motherboard with use the exact same chassis. Unless you can find a better board that does use the exact same chassis, the upgrade will almost certainly not work. There's a whole slew of compatibility problems here, again, it's almost certainly better not to try.

But in the small chance that you can replace the board, it will probably offer support for a better processor and you can go ahead and buy whatever processor fits. If your first GPU was not soldered to the motherboard, this possibly existent better board should not have a soldered GPU and you will be able to pick and choose again.

HDD and RAM would probably be compatible without any glaring issues.

But at this point I'm pretty much humoring you. It is probably cheaper to buy a new laptop (and definitely less hassle) if you're going to take it this far. Various flavors of m9700 are still selling for roughly $1500 to $2000 on ebay and you can guy that Gateway 8800M GTX thing for under $1500 which will probably kick the crap out of ML-42/44 and 7900M GS SLI.

 

Thank you so much, I really appreciate you taking the time to humor silly questions (seriously, thank you very much!) You've helped alot, and i'll deffinately start looking around at maybe a new laptop. Thanks once again, really appreciate it.

 

The Gateway mentioned above is the one in my sig. It's a great system, with an INCREDIBLE price of 1250.00 on sale now at Best Buy. Your Alienware should get you a fairly decent price should you decide to sell it.