Make your old laptop new again!

In this article I’ll try to cover laptop upgrades that will allow you to put new power into it. If you care about your notebook’s performance you can alter some parts instead buying a new one.

In this article I’ll write about my current laptop – Asus U30JC/i5 520M/4GB RAM/ 500GB HDD and what can be done to make it work faster.

A problem

Recently I was struck by low performance of my laptop. I thought it would be nice to give it to my sister and by a new one for myself. I did some research, but the result were totally unsatisfying.. It turned out that a new laptop with fair performance speed up, compared to my current one, would be approx. 2000$. A year ago i bought mine for 1300$. That gives 700$ for:

• better graphics card – better gaming experience
• keyboard with backlight – I want it sooo much!
• 2nd generation i5 or i7 processor
• 2-4 GB more RAM
• SSD disk
• slightly worse on-battery work time

I compared my Asus with some ThinkPads and Apple’s MacBooks. Even if I paid those 2000$ I would get only slightly better performance. And it’s hard to find all those features coming with 12 or 13 inches of screen. And 8 hours of on-battery life. Such an investment is a most poorly attractive.

So I got some ideas to solve above aspects.

Minor solutions

Gaming XP- I bought myself a PS3 It’s far better and there’s definitely more fun than I would get with laptop. Big fail – no Witcher 2 for PS3… I gotta live with it…

Backlight for keyboard – I got USB keyboard from Tracer. It’s awesomely blue and eases working late, as it can be seen on the left. 10$.

2nd generation i5 processor – my current socket is compatible with it, so it’s the matter of time I change the processor.

2-4 GB more RAM – As far as I know – my current chipset accepts up to 8GB/1333MHz – for 100$ I can get it. And I still have 600$ to spare!

Major solution – SSD, welcome!

SSD disk – it’s kinda problematic as long as I have one HDD in my laptop. Buying a 200-300G SSD drive would cost me too much. I have found alternate solution.

I haven’t heard about this much in Poland (a few threads on some forums), but according to the information from the US – it seems to be a great solution.  You can use the bay for CD/DVD drive! I assume you don’t use CDs often. I can’t remember what was the last situation I had to use CD or DVD.  The only thing I have to do now is to order a piece called 2nd HDD caddy (15$, directly from Hong Kong) and a SSD drive – I like Intel’s 320 SSD, 120G, 250$. A more detailed article can be found here. For some pictures use images.google.com and look for 2nd hdd caddy.

These caddies are available in 3 versions, for Macs (some special editions or something), 12mm and 9mm tall. I’ve checked my CD drive – it’s 12mm tall.

A big advantage of such a solution is that I can still store large amount of data on 500G hdd and take an advantage of SSD’s speed and install OS on it. Or event 2 OSes. If I had just SSD – where would I put all my data?

A certain drawback is that I have to perform OS installation from USB stick. I’ve done this for Linux already some time ago and for Windows XP as well. I hope Windows 7 won’t be a problem.

Getting things done

A short recap – instead of buying a new notebook for 2000$ and being quite happy I will spend something like 350$ to make my current model as good as the new one would be, and still be happy within my 13.3” Asus. All I got to to is buy mentioned caddy on ebay.com (they are unavailable in Poland for reasonable prices), grab a nice SSD and 8GBs of RAM and put all that into my current laptop.

Stay tuned, I’ll keep you posted with the results!

PS. If anyone wants to buy such a caddy too – let me know, we can combine the purchase.