advice needed on upgrading inspiron 9300

hi everyone

4 years back i spent a fortune (1900 dollars) buying an inspiron 9300 with 1 gig of ram, 256 mb nvidia card, 80 gb of harddrive. price included 3 year worldwide warranty by dell which proved very useful since in 3 years, they replaced my motherboard, my dvd drive and in the last week of my 3rd year of warranty my 1080p monitor!! god bless them.

now that its almost 4 years old, i am itching to buy a new laptop but decided against it thanks to recession and given the fact i rarely use my laptop not sure if plunking more cash makes sense

please let know if it makes sense to upgrade my ram to 3 gb and get a 320 gb 5400rpm hard drive and let me know the cost.

or you think it makes more sense to buy a studio 15 or dell hdx 16t for 800 dollars instead with blu ray and all that

please note that i rarely use my laptop, dont play games and only memory intensive task is home video editing and dvd burning...that too once in 6 months!!

 

Welcome to notebook review,

The inspiron 9300 is a pretty nice system.
It uses Pentium M processors. You can upgrade your pentium M up to the Pentium M780 (2.26Ghz). The M770 (2.13Ghz) is a better bang for the buck processor
I do not know if the BIOS supports more than 2gb of ddr2 memory.
It will read 2 x 1GB memory configuration of DDR2 memory such as PC5300

You can upgrade the harddrive as well,
however you have a PATA based laptop harddrive.
If you want the best performance you can get for your laptop you should look at two drives
The Samsung HM160HC (160GB 5400rpm PATA - single platter)
The Western Digital Scorpio (WD3200BEVE - 320gb 5400rpm PATA - dual platter)

These are the fastest drives for the 2.5" PATA interface
The Samsung will cost about $50-60
The Western Digital will run you a little more than $100

Here is my review of the Samsung HM160HC
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=264209

Please note the HM160HC and the WD3200BEVE are based on the same platter density. The only difference is the Samsung has one platter and two heads, while the Western Digital has four heads and two platters
As a result the Western Digital will be louder, run hotter and eat up more battery life.

K-TRON

 

firstly , no point upgrading ur laptop... and yes a dell studio 15 would own it anyway.... and BTW the HDX 16t is a hp laptop. I recommend that u get a refurbished asus G50 which comes with a great dual core and NVDIA Ge force 9800M GS which can own any laptop for that price range... it costs about 800-850 bucks from tigerdirect.. many have these laptops and most are in a great state... its a real bargain...

 

as the op said he doesnt play games or do any particularly intensive tasks so the upgrade would be more worth it as it works out much cheaper than spending 800 bucks on a new gaming laptop

 

I upgraded my 5 year old HP dv1000 just recently and got the WD Scorpio WD3200BEVE that KTRON mentioned (320gb 5400rpm). My old HD was also 80gb, and it was 4200rpm. I don't know whether yours is 4200 or 5400. The new hard drive has helped out a bit, and has definitely helped tremendously for loading programs. My 6 year old son has a Lego Indiana Jones PC game on DVD and he played it on my laptop today. It used to take 5 minutes to load up completely. Today it took around 40 seconds.

I bought it from PC Universe via Amazon's Marketplace, and they had a great $25 off promotion. So it wound up being $82 shipped, which was a great deal. I think that the promotion has expired. But if you're not desperate to upgrade you could keep your eyes out for a sale (at any retailer). If you do a google search for it, remember to include IDE or PATA among the search terms so you don't get the SATA model, which is cheaper.

NewEgg has it for $90 shipped, and thru tomorrow they have a 10% off deal on all hard drives, so that would make it around $81. A great deal.

 

if ur not playing games, and rarely use it, why bother upgrading at all?

anyway if i were u i'd just get an inspiron,studio, or latitude from the dell outlet.