Old Body, New Parts

so i have an old dell studio 1535 (but with the 17" monitor). old girl has served me well for nears and together we've edited hundreds of photographs. but she's old now, slower and is having problems here and there.

i researched new laptops and unfortunately the industry is run by the casual purchaser and not the hardcore users and the 1900x1200 resolution screens are nowhere to be found.

is there ANYWAY i can keep my old chassis, but swap out the guts to have a new, powerful machine in the same old body with the monitor? the real estate is that important to me.


thanks in advance.

 

It would be easier to remove the screen of your existing notebook and try to shoehorn it into a newer machine than trying to keep the old chassis. Even then, that's no guarantee it would work.

There is one notebook currently in production that has a 1920x1200 screen, the 17-inch version of this:

Apple - MacBook Pro - The new MacBook Pro. Huge leaps in performance.

 

Can get a 15/17" HP 8530W/8730W off ebay with a 1920x1200 LCD. They support Core2Quads, so could upgrade to a QX9300, unlock multipliers with Throttlestop and get some very reasonable performance at an ultra low cost.

 

Don't buy the Mac, it's overpriced, and doesn't even work that well compared to modern PCs.

 

Definitely not what you want to hear, but you may just want to use an external display.

Is your main task photo editing? Maybe just an SSD and a clean install will suffice for you?

 

+1. A SSD in the primary bay and could move the HDD into the optical drive bay as shown in http://forum.notebookreview.com/har...rage-using-optical-bay-caddy.html#post4936086 .

Consider too that the HDX9000 folks have pinmodded a E0-stepping X9100 to run on their PM965 chipset, overclocking them up to 4.0Ghz using Throttlestop. Runs cooler than a X9000 and is cheaper on ebay too. See http://forum.notebookreview.com/8125412-post4565.html . That would give a boost in performance for sure.

 

Don't even think about 'upgrading' this old platform.

Time for a new system (w/possibly an external monitor for your editing needs).

SATA 1.5 spec's and a Core 2 Duo platform will simply suck your 'upgrade' money and leave you with little more performance for your efforts.

You don't mention what software you use for your photo-editing but an SSD will more than likely not improve things for you (especially if you're using LR).

Photo-editing needs a screen/monitor with a lot of real estate - but even more it needs tons of RAM (8GB min.) and a modern quad-core platform to really fly (not to mention Windows 7 x64 too).

Even an 'entry-level' SNB system paired with an external monitor will bring you a bigger performance/productivity boost than anything you can do to this old platform.

Say good bye to the old girl - say hello to Sandy (bridge).

 

previous gen elitebook 8740w /8740p have 1200 screens.