Since I was 13 I was fascinated with computers.  Ever since I first saw the Commodore 64 PC I wanted a computer.  Over the years I have had quite a few ranging from desktops, towers, servers, and laptops.  One thing that was always part of the old days in computing was upgrades.  Upgrades are replacing existing technology with newer technology as updates are mostly software related (this is not a rule but what happened most of the time).  Upgrades can be simple, adding more memory or complex, adding a faster processor or larger hard drive.

This time I am dusting off the old tool bag and going after a performance upgrade to my existing laptop.  Its 3 years old but still capable of running most of the stuff I need it to; digital darkroom, office, games, etc.  It is getting rather slow and I may decide to give Windows 7 a try, or not.  My current PC is not too old, well for human years that is, I bought it 2 months before I moved to China from Circuit City during a year end sale, a couple of years before they went out of business.  Its a Toshiba Satellite M55-S139 (PSM53U-00K008). 

The stock stats are:

• Intel Celeron M 380 / 1.6 GHz
• ATI Radeon Xpress 200M video (shared RAM)
• 512 MB RAM and I added 256 MB the day I got it
• 80 GB w/ 5400 rpm Hard Disk
• 24x/8x/2x DVD±RW (±R DL)
• IEEE 802.11b IEEE 802.11g Fast Ethernet NIC

I also got an extended life battery to go along with the stock battery for those trans-Pacific flights.  The laptop has only 1 card slot which I use for my Firewire or IEEE 1394 connection to my digital camcorder.  I like many of the features of the laptop, namely the entertainment feature – allowing you to watch a DVD or listen to a CD without booting up the OS and that saves battery life for movie watching.  The centerpiece of the system is its gorgeous 14.1 inch high gloss wide screen display that has even survived a round with my daughter and a ball point pen. 

As you can tell from the above the laptop was not all that state of the art 3 years ago, but it wasn’t too shabby for under $1000 with RAM and extra battery.  Over the years it has slowed down to the point where I have to configure programs to run in striped down fashion to load in a timely manner.  I used to wipe all my hard drives and re-install the OS and reload programs each year, thanks to Windows anti-piracy policy I can no longer do that.  Believe me, it makes a world of difference to do a fresh install from a hard drive cleaned out of all data, including the MBR and boot partitions. 

Recently I have been becoming more and more frustrated in my laptop’s performance.  Add this to the video filter issue I have and ever growing collection of photo editing software and new USB HDDs to hold photos, music (yes we can still legally download MP3 from music studio websites in China), and video and the system is bogging down in its everyday activities.  This has led me to looking at Windows 7 as I was going to avoid Vista as much as I avoided ME.  The Vista tool tells me aside from RAM and a few programs, like Adobe Pro 6, I am ready to upgrade the OS.  This brings me to the upcoming project, upgrading the hardware of the laptop.

As the specs above show the system is lacking in RAM and hard drive space, the focus of the upgrade.  I would also like to get a BlueRay RW drive but that is not vital.  Now the Toshiba Satellites are known for being picky with RAM, and as it came with 512 MB and only has 1 expansion bay it will require a little extra work to upgrade.  Next is the hard disk that seemed ok in 2005 as I already had a 80 GB USB drive to store music and pictures on.  So the goal is to increase RAM to 2 GB, the manufacturer’s recommended ceiling for this motherboard, and to get a larger HDD.  The RAM is the easy part.  After some checking I found I need RAM with the following specs: PC 4200, DDR2 @ 533MHz, 1.8V, Non ECC, 200 pin SODIMM available in 1GB cards.  As the stock RAM is 512MB that means I will have to remove the keyboard and take out the stock RAM and insert a 1GB chip and another 1GB chip in the expansion bay.  It is best to get RAM in pairs, from the same manufacturer and the same size as the parity makes it easier, mixing and matching to save a few dollars is not worth the potential headache – especially in Shanghai.

As I will have the keyboard off anyway I am going to swap out the HDD for one with more capacity.  I was originally looking at a Western Digital Scorpio 250 GB monster, tripling my current drive space, until I read the reviews on how unreliable they were.  It seems that the Scorpio drives have a real world satisfaction rate of just below 75%, for a hard disc I am not comfortable with anything below 85%.  Of course this Western Digital is cheap, less then $100 so it does fall into the ‘seems too good to be true’ category.  I will settle for a 160 GB drive but am still searching.  Once selected I will then try to get the parts from reputable places here I can return them is they are faulty (a rarity here).  I have my eye on a few drives but will have to dig into their reliability a bit more.  As I get it all sorted I will post the progress, process, and results.  It is fairly simple and much easier then swapping out a proprietary power supply with a stock one in my Dell 8100, building my server from an old IBM, or my never ending projects of the IBM PS2 and getting its OS2 Warp to get onto the internet, I have it working but getting a NIC to work has been problematic with PCI cards and not ISA ones.  Follow along as I track down the parts for the laptop, tear it down, then migrate the OS and data onto the new drive.