Upgrades Made Before School...Suggestions Needed

In college, I will be using a laptop I won in 2005. It hasn't been used very much besides web surfing because it is not as quick as my desktop. I will be bring this laptop to school with me, but before I do I want to upgrade the ram, hard drive, and optical drive. I could use some suggestions on what specific products I should look into.

The current setup is as follows:

Sony Vaio FS500

Processor: Intel Pentium M 1.6 GHz (Pentium M 730)
Chipset: Intel i915GMS (Support up to 2GB or ram, I believe) (Speed unknow)
HD: ATA 30GB (speed unknown) (brand unknown)
Ram: PC2700 512mb in slot 1 (Nanya Technology) and PC2700 256mb in slot 2 (Infineon)
Optical Drive: DVD (speed unknown) (brand unknown)

I want ram, HD, and optical drive upgrades that will significantly boost overall performance. I want to be able to notice the upgrades. I will need atleast 80GB of HD space and 1GB ram. I will not be playing games, but will be doing basic computing like music, videos, photos, mild photo editing, Reason (music producing software).

Processor: Intel Pentium M 1.6 GHz (Pentium M 730)
Chipset: Intel i915GMS (Support up to 2GB or ram, I believe) (Speed unknow)
HD: ?
Ram: ?
Optical Drive: ?

I'm not looking to spend top dollar, but do want the best "bang for buck" upgrades for my laptop.

What do you suggest?

 

Well, you can upgrade the processor to the Pentium M 770 at 2.13Ghz, but it may be an expensive upgrade.

The memory used by your system is PC2700, but you can use PC3200 sodimm memory if you so want.
Your system only supports 1Gb of memory, so you can get 2 x 512mb of either PC2700 or PC3200. (This is DDR Sodimm memory) the PC3200 will automatically downclock to PC2700 speeds.
This means you only have to upgrade the one 256mb card to a 512mb card to max out your memory.

The harddrive can definitely be replaced. Your harddrive is an ATA 2.5" mobile harddrive.
The fastest 2.5"ata harddrive is the 250GB WD ata laptop harddrive (~$130)
The most bang for the buck internal ATA drive would be the Samsung 160Gb 5400rpm ATA harddrive (~$65-70 from E-WIZ)

I hope this helps

K-TRON

 

This link has all the HDD's for your machine NewEgg has. I have the HITACHI Travelstar 5K160 as having lower latency and faster seek time than the SAMSUNG HM160HC 160GB and it costs $74.99. Here is link to RAM for your notebook I checked PC3200 also but was not cheaper.

Here is a link to marketing specification manual for your machine maybe it will help with what optical drives were in the machine so what you could put in.

As for how much RAM the notebook can make use of you said you thought 2GB and K-Tron said 1GB. Who is correct? Well in the manual I linked it says 1GB, but that might not be correct. I would like to know if K-Tron found his info in a similar way to how I did. I do not believe the manual is necessarily correct. Here is why, the chipset supports 2GB, if when the notebook was made 1GB sticks were not common Sony would not include that in manual. Yes the system does not have to take advantage of all features. Or could be BIOS limited. But I think there is a better than not chance 2GB is supported from the documentation I have seen. I think when released 2GB was not available so manual reflects that. It is a gamble and up to you.

 

I'm still unsure of how much ram I can install. I'm having trouble finding internal cd rw/dvd rw drives. Do they not make upgradeable internal drives?

 

I would sell the laptop as is and then buy a cheap new one ($550-600).

 

Not a bad idea! I have the cost of RAM and HDD at about $250 add the DVD even more. Best Buy has a Compaq and Toshiba for $449.99. Pentium Dual Core, 120GB HDD. Cost you $35 to upgrade to 2GB RAM not a bad deal.

 

crucial.com is where i bought memory and a new graphics card for my system they are pritty cheap compared to all of the otherers out there

 

I thought about that too, but with the upgraded HD and ram, will I really see a difference in overall performance with simple, everyday computing?

 

I wouldnt put much money into it, its an older system, and you are going to want a faster laptop for college.
The pentium M is decent for simple website browsing and typing, but if you are going to be doing and adobe cs3, or image editing, cad or anything like that, your system is going to get bogged down pretty quick.
A dual core system would be a much better system for you.
A memory upgrade and decent harddrive upgrade is about $60 for the memory, and $100 for the harddrive.
It would be better to put this $160 and the $400-500 from your system, to put towards a new laptop,
You would be surprised, that you can get a pretty awesome laptop these days for $600-800.

Their are also lots of great deals in the buy and sell section for slightly used laptops.

K-TRON