I am breaking the upgrade of my laptop into 3 separate posts, memory and hard disk, re-imaging, and reloading settings.  As with all things planned for in the real world this project did not go as initially thought.  It all started going downhill at stage 2, procurement. 

As previously stated I was wanting to accomplish 2 goals, increasing physical RAM to 2GB and increase the hard drive to 250GB, well that didn’t happen.  In getting the memory we ran into a glitch, so I shifted efforts to the hard disk.  In researching the Western Digital (WD2500BEVE) Scorpio ATA-6 internal hard drive I found some bad reviews and with further digging discovered the drive was about 80% reliable, and that is about 18% too low for my liking.  I then looked at ratings among my alternates and decided to go with the Samsung HM160HC ATA/IDE after reading about its speed, low power, quiet operation, and reliability comments over the past 9 months.  The price was just a small amount cheaper then the WD drive and it came with a warranty, something of a novelty here.

Next up was getting the RAM.  This was supposed to be the easy part, 2 year old RAM that is available for around $30 per 1GB stick and from almost every online vendor in the States.  We went to the Cyber City at Xujiahui and found out that nobody there had a PC-4200 533Mhz chip, well almost.  Instead of getting 2GB of RAM I only got 1GB.  NOTE, I previously stated the RAM was 768MB, wrong.  The laptop shares RAM between the ATI video board and the motherboard.  I have doubled the stock 512MB RAM to 1GB (1024MB) and it was only using 768MB for the system.  The chip they tried to sell me was PC-6400 800MHz set, thank goodness my wife insisted on a receipt and business card because the chips didn’t work.  After taking in the laptop and sitting with the kiosk staff trying everything they finally found a used 1GB chip from a Japan laptop.  I ended up with 1 – 1GB chip and 1 – 512MB chip (even hit up the Toshiba kiosks and ran dry there too).  After the 256Mb for video I now have 1.25GB RAM for the system, and that seems to have made a world of difference.

With all the parts now together, the hard disk arrived the afternoon we got back from the Cyber City, it came time to prep the system for the new hard disk and OS build.  For those who have only dealt with a PC fresh out of the box this will seems insane, for those who have done it before the pain will be laughable.  Before I put in the new hard disk I had to make sure I have all things ready; current laptop drivers downloaded, XP SP3 downloaded, most important XP hotfixes downloaded, most current utilities and tools downloaded, formatting the new Samsung drive (to save time), etc.  After all this was done and I transferred my files and settings to a backup drive I started the dirty work. 

Laptops in general are easier to work on now, most of them are modular and make access panels so you don’t have to tear down the whole thing to replace one part.  I was thinking I would have to take off the keyboard, I was pleasantly surprised to find Toshiba made this easy as the HDD access is right on the bottom, just remove 1 screw and there you go.  Swapping the drive was a snap, the new drive was not too thick and it took less time to install it into the laptop then to get the old drive into the USB external drive case.  Getting the two drives installed and working took less then an hour, that was the easy part.  Next blog – installing Windows and driver fun!