Future proofing your soon to buy laptop

ok, i keep tell people at work about future proofing a laptop. Can you guys and
gals explain it so they can read it and understand it.

question asked are video card/ harddrive and cpu. any information will be helpful to these poor souls

 

Harddrive are completely upgradeable as long as you stay within the same connection type. For example, if your laptop is on the older side and it uses the IDE/ATA interface for harddrives, the fastest drive you can get is the Samsung HM160HC. If the system uses SATA discs, the fastest mechanical drives at the moment are the 320gb 7200rpm series. It is very easy to upgrade the harddrive.

Memory is also very easy to upgrade. Just make sure that you buy memory which is compatible with your system. Run CPU-Z and go into the memory tab if you are not sure which memory your system uses. If your system uses DDR memory, than you need to buy DDR sodimm memory. If your system uses DDR2 memory you need to buy DDR2 sodimms. If your system uses DDR3 memory, than you need to buy DDR3 sodimms.
You cannot use DDR2 memory in a DDR system, they will not fit. Each memory type is keyed, so you cant put a DDR3 card in a DDR2 slot, and you cant put a DDR2 stick in a DDR slot.
Memory types are backwards compatible because of the JEDEC standards, so if your system uses PC6400 memory, it will also be compatible with ddr2 Pc5400, PC5300, and Pc4200.
For DDR its Pc2100, Pc2700, and PC3200.

The cpu is also upgradeable, but this almost always requires you to take your laptop completely apart. To upgrade your cpu you need to first identify your CPU, and its socket type. You can only upgrade to cpu's which use the same socket. So if you have a T5300 socket M intel cpu, you can upgrade to a T7200, T7400, T7600. If you have a T7100 santa rosa socket P cpu, you can upgrade all of the way up to the T9500/X9000. If you have a T5800 monteveina cpu, you can upgrade up to the X9100, P8600, T9400 and so forth. Just make sure that the cpu you buy is for the same platform. You cant install a socket M cpu into a socket P motherboard, and you cant use a monteveina chip in a santa rosa motherboard.

The video card is the least upgradeable part. Only about 5% of laptops sold have an upgradeable graphics card. The only way you can upgrade is if 1) the system has an MXM type graphics card, where you can remove it and upgrade, or 2) the system was offered with a variety of graphics cards.
If your laptop has MXM, please note that their are many types of MXM, which are based off of different sizes, and power requirements, so please make sure you upgrade to a gpu which is compatible. Check out "MXM-Upgrade" for more information.
If your system was sold with different video card options, you can upgrade as long as you are upgrading from dedicated gpu to dedicated gpu. Example, the Dell E1505 was sold with the ATi X1300, ATi X1400 and nVidia 7300. You can install any of those cards in the system and they will work. In the inspiron 9400, you can upgrade the X1400 to a 7900GS, 7900GTX, or quadro FX2500M.
However please note you cannot upgrade from an integrated graphics card to a dedicated one. It just cannot be done.

I hope this helped,
and oh yeah
4700th Post

K-TRON

 

brilliant post K-TRON. Very informative.

 

Great post indeed!

Those upgrades will void the warranty though, right?

 

Wow, concise. Haha.

 

Regarding the warranty thing it would depend on the different warranties that are offered with the laptops. Certain warranties allow users a degree of DIY upgrades. For instance, (Quoting the only example I know), Zepto allows users to upgrade their RAM and Hard Disks without voiding the warranty, other companies might not have that lee way. I assume that it's also safe to say that changing your graphics module and or CPU will void the warranty for almost all companies, which is why people tend to only change the thermal compound, or modify the heat sinks (Adding the copper plate for the XPS M1530) only after their warranty expires.

 

Are there any faster low-voltage processors in the P8600 Family? (25W TDP)

 

So basically, the most important things to consider are the CPU socket type and the GPU. Unless you're buying a more expensive gaming laptop to begin with, the only real option is to buy the best GPU you can afford to begin. As for the CPU, this is less critical for the most part, but purchasing a more upgradable socket to begin with (e.g. socket p) is probably better if you seriously intend to upgrade in the future.

However for the most part aside from adding ram and a faster/bigger HD there is often little value in upgrading the notebook - for the cost, it is generally better to buy new.

 

The highest right now is P9500 and in December, P9600.

Just a general comment, future proofing laptops (even desktops) isn't really it worth it imo. If you look at old laptop CPUs, they're still rather expensive (ie. T7x00 series for Santa Rosa). Memory and hard drive are doable, but don't give much of a performance boost as most systems today will have 2-4GB and well maybe SSDs will give a benefit but the factor here is when they will be affordable.

 

All I can really say is that the computers I've reformatted with Tiny XP run so fast considering their Pentium crap processors and tiny bit of RAM. It's 4 years later and they can still be used effectively with the Same OS that most of the world uses today. Don't look completely at the hardware, software has a lot to do with it too. XP slows down, get a tiny strealines build and re-image your HDD whenever you feel slow.