Samsung x60 Laptop... Need advice on upgrade

I currently have a Samsung x60 that was bought for my brother.. and he recently just upgraded to a newer laptop for college, so of course I got to privillege of receiving his old Samsung x60...

It currently has only.. 60 GB.. on it running with 1 GB RAM. I was thinking of upgrading some parts on it and was thinking what would be viable options? I've seen other people do HDD swaps and updating the RAM.. was just wondering if there was anything else I should think about doing?

One last question... last time I tried installing Vista, the laptop wasn't playing any sound so I had to revert back to XP... I see that Samsung has released Vista drivers for the x60 so I'm assuming I could try updating again. Should I wait until after I upgrade the parts to update to Vista or would this not matter?

Thanks a lot for your time.

 

As far as I know any SATA 2.5" 9.5mm thick HDD should work OK. 250GB is now inexpensive and a size which will be useful for a year or two. This is a good price. The first of the HM250JIs were buggy but I believe Samsung have fixed the problems.

Play.com has a good selection of RAM. I would suggest a 2GB module.

Vista support on the X60 is patchy although there's a set of drivers here.
I think you are better off staying with XP.

John

 

i run vista on my x60, its absolutely fine.. it was fine even before the drivers were released if you did a bit of jiggery poker to get the sound working..

you should be able to upgrade the ram, cpu, harddrive and POSSIBLY the video card as i think they are not soldered in, but im unsure

ram and hdd will be easiest and not invalidate your warranty (if you still have one)

i was going to upgrade to a Merom chip and install vista x64 but i dont want to void my extended warranty...

 

Hm, thanks for pointing out some good deals. I've used the Vista interface for a few months and I didn't really like it at first, so I wouldn't mind staying with XP, even though I have gotten used to some of Vistas features...

I've seen a few different 5400/7200RPM models... would having a faster drive be much more influential to the x60 than a 5400, or should it be around the same? I've read some reviews about harddrives over heating and such too

The Merom chip installation w/ Vista x64 seems interesting, have you seen this done before? How hard do you think the installation would be..? Or would you probaly have some computer shop install it?




Thanks for the all of the replies--

 

See the Tom's Hardware 2.5" HDD charts for comparisons. Power consumption is an indicator of heat generated. I'm always short of space so I get 5400rpm. If you get a medium capacity then you need to look at the HDD model you might buy. 100GB on one platter will be faster than 100GB on 2 platters.

I can't comment on swapping CPUs. You may hit compatibility problems unless you get a new CPU which you know is supported by the BIOS (ie you change the CPU to one sold with another version of your notebook). And I doubt if you would notice the difference unless the replacement CPU is at least 25% faster than the old one. The X60 plus has the 64-bit CPUs, but not the original X60 series. Although much of the hardware is the same, the BIOS (and GPU) is different.

John