Is it worthwhile to spend $ 160 to do the upgrade for this 2nd hand laptop

Hi there

Got a 2nd hand VGN-SZ491N with 2GB (Max out) with a 160GB 4200rpm drive and running Vista Business 32 bit now. If I need to speed up this laptop performance, is it worthwhile to spend $ 160 for a used OCZ 60GB SSD ?

Or should I format the current drive and install Windows 7 Ultimate 32bit OS instead ?

Or just get a new 7200rpm HDD instead ?

Please kindly help me to make a quick decision.

 

The hard drive is always one of the bottlenecks in a system. Recommend for your older system a 7200 RPM hard drive - you'll see a noticeable improvement from the 4200 RPM version. Also if have WIN 7 available recommend that too. Much snappier than Vista.

 

Will 7200rpm drive consumes more battery power ??

 

Not from what I've experienced. The largest drain on the battery is the display.
In past notebooks did not really see any changes in battery performance from the hard drive swap, but sure did notice the improved start times, loading times and overall responsiveness.

 

Also you can actually upgrade that notebook to 3GB memory (despite what Sony's specifications say). Technically 4GB can be installed, but it will only recognize 3GB. You will need the latest BIOS for this.

Typiing on an original SZ160P/C right now with 4GB installed/3GB usable, all running on a BIOS released for the SZ4xx series.

Edit - interesting - when I first installed 4GB, the BIOS and Windows would only see 3.0GB, not ~3.2GB like you'd get with most 32-bit systems and 4GB installed... well, a couple of months ago I upgraded the BIOS to one a couple of versions newer than the one I had used to get 3GB going initially, and now Windows is reporting 3.12GB memory and the BIOS now shows 3.2GB. Woo hoo, an extra 200 megs to play with!

 

It only shows 3.12 because the chipset memory controller is 32 bit, so that is all it can physically address.

 

I'm aware of that, but it's interesting that on the SZ160's original BIOS the max was 2.0gb, when I initially bought 4gb to upgrade the stock 1gb the SZ4xx series BIOS I flashed only showed 3.0gb, but now with a yet again updated BIOS it manages to show 3.2gb. Not bad for a 4-year old laptop.

 

Thanks for all your input and I never though of my SZ4 laptop can accept 4GB of RAM. So I will start from there.

Have a nice weekend.

 

Do a forum search for a thread on upgrading the SZ1 to Windows 7... there's a link in there to the latest available BIOS.

 

Like a lot of "common knowledge", this isn't necessarily true. If you take the improved SSD support out of the equation (as you did when you recommended a HD over an SSD), W7 isn't much snappier than Vista.
Benchmarks show them to be almost identical, which isn't surprising considering that W7 really is Vista with minor changes; if anything, W7 can be slightly slower than Vista.

I always find it amusing how much people can hate Vista and praise Windows 7 -- for the exact same things!

 

No issues with Vista either - use it at work. Just the improvements seen in WIN 7 for some features and it's a nice upgrade.
Both are nice stable platforms built around security (Vista and Win 7).
Vista - did some tweaks to a few things and worked very well
Win7 - works right out of the box - nothing to tweak

 

It depends on the test as to which of the 3 wins and who takes second. Even then, it's just a benchmark, real world experience for me, Win7 wins.

Xp Sp3 with SP3 and all patches runs like a dog on 1gig or less. Vista runs like a dog on 1gig period. Win7 actually runs slow, but decent and doesn't crawl when you add in printer drivers or patches like XP starts to do. XP is showing it's age, it's just patch on top of patch on top of patch.

Add more ram and Win7 continues to get better.
Vista, you need a ton of ram to even run okay. Yes, they may be similar and have similar underpinnings, but so did XP and Win2k. So did Win95, 98 and ME. Ask any Win98 fan to go to ME or 95 and see what they say.