Laptop Upgrade
We all outgrow our computers fairly fast, I know I do. I will buy a computer that I think is a good deal and it will be sufficient for a few months but eventually I need more. More ram, more hard drive space, better graphic, more! Well that was the case about three months ago. I started needing more hard drive space for this laptop that I got around Thanksgiving 2007. I thought while I am in there I will increase the ram too so off I went planning the upgrades, what I would buy and from where.
I did some pricing to find out the best place to get the parts from but I already new where i was going to buy from, trusty old NewEgg. I pick up most of my computer parts there so why should this time be any different? Well I decided on a 320GB hard drive from Western Digital that runs at 7500 rpm but had a power saving feature that would slow it down when it didn’t have to run so fast. I also picked up two 2GB ram modules. Now my computer uses 32 bit Vista so it will only actually use around 3 GB but hey the stuff wasn’t real expensive. I think my total came to around $180 or something like that and when the stuff arrived it didn’t take me long to install the ram and boot the computer back up.
The hard drive, well that was a different story. For one I didn’t have the system software disc, the laptop just didn’t come with one. For another reason I really didn’t want to reinstall all of my programs. I mean that junk takes hours when it is all said and done. So I started browsing forums for cloning topics, hard drive transfers, and such. I posted a few questions and then when I thought I had it figured out I tried it. My first attempt didn’t go too well. I cloned the drive, installed it, and it would not boot. So attempt 1= fail. Back to the old drawing board I guess. So I studied some more and tried it a few days later. This time I used a different program to clone the drive but I did it after booting into DOS. Before I shut the computer down to reboot into DOS though I had to clear the registry of a few items that assigned drive letters to each hard drive. It took about an hour to clone the drive and once it was finished I shut the computer down, installed the new drive, and booted it up. Attempt 2= Success! After the boot up I tried all of my programs and everything was fine except one. Adobe wanted me to re register but other than that I have had no problems.
With the upgrades done I have seen a nice little boost in load times, my games are a little faster and easier to play, and overall performance has improved to a degree that I am very pleased with. The bad thing is, this may be all of the upgrades that I can make to this computer. I will probably keep it for another year or so and start looking for another laptop but in the mean time it does everything that I need it to do. You never know, I may just get more than another year out of it, I guess it just depends on what my needs will be this time next year.
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