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Hi All
I've finally managed to get the dead hard drive that was on my laptop out of its cradle (damn overtightened screws...) and have also decided while I'm at it to give my memory an upgrade.
The machine itself is by no means a power house in fact I think it has a measly 1.4Ghz from a centrino chip but even so I don't really want to junk it. I've taken the old hard drive out which was a 60GB Hitachi Travelstar 4200RPM ATA/IDE drive but I'm not entirely sure what to replace it with. I quickly measure it and so far as I can tell it's a 3.5 inch drive so I guess that leaves me with quite a choice in that department.
Now, the current 512MB of memory was never really enough but the other problem is that it comes from a strange manufacturer. I managed to do a bit of Google searching and have found the exact module I have which can be found here. Annoyingly most of the specs there just confuse me and I don't want to whack in some brand new RAM and have issues. There are only two slots so I was thinking of leaving this current module out and replacing it with either 1 or 2GB sticks to give the laptop a bit more oomph.
Ideally I want to keep costs down to a minimum as the laptop was a really cheap piece of kit to begin with so it's hardly worth pumping a lot of extra cash into. I've seen quite a few well priced things on ebuyer so if I can get hold of any of these goodies I will be a happy man
.
Once, I've got the hardware sorted I really need to consider what kind of OS to run. I was pretty keen to go with something like Ubuntu as it can tackle most day to day chores and with a bit of luck will work with my hardware (and it's free). The downside to this is that it would be pretty cool to have PhotoShop on the laptop and obviously I can't have that if I decide to go with Ubuntu (I would prefer not to confuse matters with a dual boot). I currently have a fully paid for license of Windows XP Professional but I'm not sure how well this will perform even with these upgrades installed so I think I'm going in circles a little bit over this.
Any help would be great as you can see, I'm a bit clueless as to what to do.
I've finally managed to get the dead hard drive that was on my laptop out of its cradle (damn overtightened screws...) and have also decided while I'm at it to give my memory an upgrade.
The machine itself is by no means a power house in fact I think it has a measly 1.4Ghz from a centrino chip but even so I don't really want to junk it. I've taken the old hard drive out which was a 60GB Hitachi Travelstar 4200RPM ATA/IDE drive but I'm not entirely sure what to replace it with. I quickly measure it and so far as I can tell it's a 3.5 inch drive so I guess that leaves me with quite a choice in that department.
Now, the current 512MB of memory was never really enough but the other problem is that it comes from a strange manufacturer. I managed to do a bit of Google searching and have found the exact module I have which can be found here. Annoyingly most of the specs there just confuse me and I don't want to whack in some brand new RAM and have issues. There are only two slots so I was thinking of leaving this current module out and replacing it with either 1 or 2GB sticks to give the laptop a bit more oomph.
Ideally I want to keep costs down to a minimum as the laptop was a really cheap piece of kit to begin with so it's hardly worth pumping a lot of extra cash into. I've seen quite a few well priced things on ebuyer so if I can get hold of any of these goodies I will be a happy man
.Once, I've got the hardware sorted I really need to consider what kind of OS to run. I was pretty keen to go with something like Ubuntu as it can tackle most day to day chores and with a bit of luck will work with my hardware (and it's free). The downside to this is that it would be pretty cool to have PhotoShop on the laptop and obviously I can't have that if I decide to go with Ubuntu (I would prefer not to confuse matters with a dual boot). I currently have a fully paid for license of Windows XP Professional but I'm not sure how well this will perform even with these upgrades installed so I think I'm going in circles a little bit over this.
Any help would be great as you can see, I'm a bit clueless as to what to do.
