Laptop Upgrades - Parts or a New Laptop?

Many people often compromise and opt for laptop upgrades, but is this the best or even most cost effective route to go? Will we end up paying more in the long term as it may become obvious that no matter what upgrades we add we cannot get the laptop to run sufficiently fast enough for our requirements.
 

Sometimes replacing the whole laptop is the only way forward

The current average spec laptop is based around a dual core processor, 1.5gb or ram and a 60gb hard drive, and this is the lowest specification that I’d certainly want to run Windows Vista or 7 with.



There are two main factors that help us to decide if we need to replace or upgrade our laptop.

Sadly laptop upgrades do not include processors and graphics cards as they can rarely be upgraded, of course there are always exceptions to the rule, but in general no.

Processors

Upgrade
If a laptop has a dual core processor, either Intel Core 2 Duo or AMD’s Turion 64 x2 this is a good specification and components around this can be upgraded to enhance it’s performance further, this includes, the hard drive and RAM.

Replace
If a laptop has a single core processor and the purpose of upgrading is to increase performance, adding memory and faster hard drives will not make a huge difference to it’s overall performance and its better to invest in a laptop with a later generation of dual core processor, as above.

Graphic / Video cards

Replace
Even a laptop with the fastest CPU will flounder running the latest games if the graphics hardware is not up to spec, so if your seriously into gaming only a video card with dedicated graphics memory will suffice.

More on gaming laptops and what makes them a bit special

Upgrade
If your not into gaming, many laptops have a shared memory type graphics card that will suffice, shared memory graphics are slower than dedicated memory, but they are more than capable of running almost all other apps other than graphically intensive games

Hard drives

Replace or Upgrade
If you have a laptop with a very slow hard drive speed, this could in effect be the weak link in your computers performance, there are two distinct types of laptop drives serial and IDE, the serial drives are the later generation and the data transfer rate is quicker than the IDE type, IDE drives come in several different types, the fastest being 133mhz which is still slower than the serial types but not by much, another factor to look at is the actual drives rotational speed, this ranges from 4000, 5400 and 7200 revolutions per minute, for the most performance checkout the newer type of SSD or Solid State Disk

Cost
If you’re looking for a new laptop, but think it will cost too much, look around, a good Dual Core machine with around 2gb of Ram can be purchased for under £400, taking into account that your older laptop could be sold for in-excess of £100 on sites such as eBay now your only paying £300 for a new computer that will be much faster, does not see so expensive now.

Conclusion
As specified above laptop upgrades in terms of components are very limited as Processors and video cards within laptops cannot usually be upgraded, so if your looking to make a laptop run significantly faster or play the latest games, then the only real option is to replace your laptop.

If your finding the problem to be a slow hard drive, firstly make sure that the hard drive is not badly fragmented or needs to have a spring clean of all temp files and the like. If this makes no difference then the next step is to invest in a faster hard drive.

To be able to upgrade to a faster laptop hard drive we first need to find out what speed your laptop will support, there is no point in purchasing a 150mhz drive if your laptop will only support 120mhz.

If we go to device manager, you’ll be able to find out the model of the existing hard drive, if you Google the drives model you’ll be able to find out its specifications in terms of RPM and data transfer speed. Once you’ve done this you’ll be able to see what specs your replacing and what specs your laptop will support, giving you a clear picture of any performance gains you can expect.

Does adding more RAM make a laptop faster? Yes and No what I mean by this is, running a single task or application on a laptop with 1gb or 3gb or RAM will pretty much run the same, but open another 2 or 3 applications and the extra RAM will make a difference, as it can in effect hold more applications, rather than having to use the swap file memory which is far slower.

If you've decided to bite the bullet and replace your laptop

Read more on Laptop upgrades and find a laptop that is right for your needs

If your thinking of buying a laptop from an auction website
Read more on what to look for and how to purchase.

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