NP300E5C-A09US Upgrading

Ive been upgrading my newest series 3, mostly just for the fun of it. Heres how its gone so far.

HDD upgraded to momentus XT 750gb gen 2 hybrid drive -

although win 8 didn't upgrade the hdd rating from 5.9 - there is a very noticeable speed improvement with both boot times and overall responsiveness. NOTE! if swapping the hdd on a win 8 machine, save yourself some headache and burn an OEM or RTM win 8 dvd first - I had purchased win 8 pro upgrade but its not worth the headache on a fresh install. Win 8 kept trying to use the Bios key which is win 8 core and halting the installation (no prompts to enter new key). The oem win 8 installed with no issues. (minus that fact I see no way to reinstall the cyberlink software, any tips here would be great!)

upgraded ram to 8 gb -

twice this unit came with 4gb installed with a completely open slot. I originally could not find any 1.6 ghz ddr3 so I added a 1.3 4gb chip, which worked fine. I later swapped it out for a 1.6, which also worked fine. Win 8 exp rating jumped quite a bit in the graphics section with the 8 gb ram.

upgraded wifi to intel 6250 wimaxx

didn't really need the wimax but I already had this card so I used it. Really just wanted intel widi compatability (tested, works great with push2tv 3000 series, used intel display drivers NOT Samsung ones to get it to work). this was the most complicated upgrade, had to completely disassemble the unit to get to the wif card. no big issues, but broke off one plastic bit so a tiny screw under the battery no longer has anything to screw into - cosmetically, and functionally you cant tell - unless you take out the battery and look unfortunaly this card doesn't have Bluetooth, the 5ghz freq and twice the wifi speed is nice.

added a usb mini Bluetooth adapter. worked fine in win 8 without any additional driver downloads.

next mission is to swap out the I3-3110m with an I5. will post how that goes when I get it done

 

1. Regarding the Cyberlink software, if you had run the Samsung Recovery Solution (if still provided on new models with Win 8) on the original HDD then it should have a facility to make a backup drivers / software disk which you can use for reinstallation. Did you check if SW Update offers the Cyberlink software?

2. The as-supplied configuration with an empty RAM slot would mean that the RAM would be running as single channel which affects both the memory bandwidth and the integrated graphics performance. Adding more RAM boosts WEI (and actual performance because of dual channel and more RAM). This is illustrated by a table I posted here.

John

 

that was a negative on swupdate. tried a few different models and no cyberlink. about to uninstall swupdate, tired of it whining about not installing all the software (Norton anti virus).