How To Upgrade Your Laptop

Posted on 3 Aug 2004 at 17:36

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Is your portable PC looking sluggish and under-specified next to the latest Centrino models? Don't rush to replace it - you can improve its performance and give it a host of new features for a fraction of the cost. MARTIN COOPER explains how.

If you bought a laptop a few years back, chances are it was your pride and joy. Over the years, it has served you well - but these days, it's sadly showing its age. Programs take longer to load, and dawdle while you're tapping away, rather than zooming about like they once did. And then there's the constant chatter of your hard disk as it tries to find the files you're after on its increasingly cramped platters.

And aside from the gradual decline in performance, you've begun to notice friends and colleagues brandishing laptops with a host of new features. Whereas you have to connect to a network using a heap of cables, they can swan down to Starbucks and connect wirelessly to broadband. Hooking up an external hard disk or CD writer to your machine's old-style USB 1.1 connectors is out of the question - they're just not fast enough.

So what can you do? Is your laptop destined for the scrapheap? The obvious answer is buy a replacement. You can now get a fast and feature-packed laptop for less than six hundred quid.

But what if you don't have £600? Well, there's no need to write off your chances of cashing in on all those new features just yet. There's a simple solution - upgrade your laptop.

Yes, we said upgrade. We realise that the prospect of taking apart a notebook PC is probably quite a scary one - a bit like taking a screwdriver to a priceless Swiss watch. In reality, it's much easier than you'd think. To prove the point, we'll show you how to improve performance, install a new hard disk and add those fancy new features such as USB 2 and wireless networking.

Planning your upgrade
A laptop whose hard disk is chock-full of old games, seldom-used utilities, iffy Internet programs and other software junk will crawl along. To improve its performance, your first job must be to remove the detritus. We discuss how to do this in detail on the opposite page.

Once your clean-up has been done, you'll be in a better position to judge your upgrade options. If you're looking for a straightforward upgrade with a decent potential jump in performance, your best bet is to add more memory. Microsoft reckons Windows XP needs a minimum 128MB of RAM to work efficiently. Experience tells us that 256MB is a more realistic figure. With only 128MB available, Windows soon runs short of memory. And when Windows hasn't enough memory at its disposal, it commandeers an area of the hard disk. Accessing the 'swap file', as this area of disk space is known, will markedly slow down your machine. Its hard disk supplies data at a fraction of the speed conventional memory can.

What about the processor? Surely that would be the best way to improve performance? Well, yes. But in all but a few cases, it's impossible. Rather than dropping into a socket as they do in desktop PCs, the processors in laptops are usually soldered on to the machine's motherboard. It's an upgrade you approach at your peril, which is why we won't be exploring the process in this feature.

If you're still running short of space after cleaning up your existing hard disk, upgrading is your only option. You can avoid the fuss of digging into your machine by plugging in an external hard disk (after, of course, you've fitted USB 2 ports). But it's hardly the neatest option - and installing a new internal hard disk is, in most cases, surprisingly straightforward.