Back To School Upgrade Guide: How To Revive Your Old Laptop Discussion

[dietcokefiend]

Don't have the budget for a new laptop this school year? The team at NotebookReview.com is here to help make that old notebook last a few more years. When looking to upgrade your personal notebook make sure you research online to find out how far you need to go to access the part you will be replacing. Our little guide examines a wide range of laptops that all require different ways to get inside to make upgrades.

Read the full content of this Article: Back To School Upgrade Guide: How To Revive Your Old Laptop

[Jason]

Nice article. One thing I'd mention is about the 7200RPM vs 5400RPM.

You can not generalize and say that 7200RPM will be faster then 5400RPM.

My Latitude E6400 has a 250GB 7200RPM that does about 60MB/s in HD tune.

My new Latitude E6410 has a 640GB Samsung 5400 RPM that does 75MB/s.

Platter density comes into play when comparing larger 5400 RPM drives with smaller 7200RPM drives. Sure if your comparing 500GB 5.4k vs 500GB 7.2k, then the 7.2k will win out.

[dietcokefiend]

Yea it really helps though when comparing current generation models though. My old 7200.2 seagate would lose the sequential MB/s battle against most modern 5400rpm drives but as soon as you started working with random transfers the faster spindle speed won out.

[pitz]

LCDPARTS.net has some interesting LED upgrade/retrofit kits for LCD panels that use CCFL lighting. So if one's backlight is on the fritz, and/or if a new inverter is required, going to a LED conversion might make sense.

For some panels, apparently, a LED retrofit can double the brightness. As soon as the postal strike in Canada is over, I'm ordering a kit for my machine (WUXGA, panel rated at 12k hours, already have ~14k on it!).

[debguy]

Recommending Ubuntu in this article for performance reasons is a bad idea. If you make the step from Windows to Linux because Windows is too bloated you'll chose a lightweight distro like Crunchbang or Salix, but not a heavyweight with messed up dependencies and Compiz.
I wish people who include Linux recommendations in their articles would get informed about Linux first before shouting "Ubuntu" because it's the only Linux they know.