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Notebook Upgrades: Hacking your Dell/Compaq/Toshiba
David Steele writes "Ever wondered what you could do to prolong the life of your notebook? Or upgrade it to meet today's standards? Or maybe you want to turn your mid-range notebook into a high-end model? Hardware Analysis has an article up that takes a a closer look at the available options."
I've thought about upgrading my old laptop, but why? Personally I used to live out of a Compaq Armada (P133, etc)... then I got my first Palm Pilot. Ever since I believe I've actually lugged my old laptop out once or twice, and then only to offload pictures from my digital camera while on trips.
I can see where there would be definite needs for an honest-to-god laptop, but it really seems that the days of the old notebook have come and gone when you consider the sheer handyness of the alternatives like Palm and PocketPC.
'Life is like a spoonful of Drain-O, it feels good on the way down but leaves you feeling hollow inside'
Dunno about upgrading it (well, a tiBook with 1gig of RAM and OS X is pretty much as sweet a platform for my work as I'll ever need), but I've been designing a new cover for the screenlid that protects things a bit better.
...
I'm going to coat the entire outside surfaces of my tiBook with the same material that's used in industrial-strength warehouse floors - gripping material - basically, rubberized grit.
That way, it'll be a *lot* better protected than the existing metal exterior, which is sexy at first, but over time rapidly deteriorates as life goes by... if you're getting a tiBook, get used to having to keep it clean. It loves grime.
I'll probably customize the logo too, while I'm at it. As much as I love Apple, I hate being a walking billboard for them, so I'm going to cut a smaller logo template as part of my modification, and use the LCD-backlight shining through the Apple logo as a light source for my own design - maybe with coloring, too, we'll see how things progress.
If anyone's done anything like this already, followup with details. I'd love to know of others that are wililng to modify their tiBooks in kind
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
I have an old Pentium Pro 200mhz laptop, which is mostly a piece of crap (battery pops out, it overheats until it freezes, etc.) Is there any way I could use its display as a second monitor, short of running X on the laptop? I'd like to be able to just install a second video card on my home machine and hook the display up to that.
i'm still using my gateway 2000 handbook 486 as a server. with a sandisk flash IDE drive, the whole thing makes 0 noise and serves fantastically (web/dns/mail). the 0 noise makes my wife happy, the serving makes me happy. when i upgraded from 8 MB RAM to 20 MB, i could actually use PHP :)
The REAL sam_at_caveman_dot_org is user ID 13833.
About a year ago I "hot rodded" my 4 year old IBM Thinkpad which started out life as a P-133 w/16 MB RAM and 2 GB HD.
I was able to find info on IBM's web pages http://www-1.ibm.com/support/ to change the dip switches for the clock ratio and the CPU voltage. I bought a used AMD K6-233 CPU off of Ebay for $30, a 32 MB RAM upgrade from McGlen Micro http://www.mcglen.com/, and a 6 GB Fujitsu HD from a local store and upgraded it in an afternoon.
Because I was not willing to clip the pin on the CPU I am limited to 200 MHz as the dip switch settings did not support 3.5 clock multiplier, and the backplane is limited to 66 MHz. But the increase in raw CPU speed was 50%, and with the extra RAM (48 MB total) even WinDOZE 98 was able to perform acceptably well.
By adding the 6 GB HD I had room for both the WinDOZE and RH 6.1 (Cartman) and all the apps I wanted.
A full install of Office 2K and Star Office 5 allow me compatibility where ever I roam.
Now if I could just upgrade the 56K modem with "portable" DSL when I travel....
This is why we don't use PHP in a production environment...
BAD ERROR TRAPPING
and a language coded by little haxor wanna-be's with no real background in it, they did a decent job for a weekend hack but not a real language at all.
Somebody skipped the class on the OSI model.
Well, it's not so true anymore, but not that long ago, taking 1 pound off of a notebook meant a $1000 increase in price.
That indicates that lots of people consider weight to be a critical factor. After running around with a 7 pounder on my shoulder, I could certianly feel the difference with I switched to a 5.5# thinkpad. (And yes, I also have a heavy leather jacket and often have a backpack full of books. Maybe the real problem is the laptop bags.)
It was telling us what we already know : that with a laptop you can upgrade the RAM and the hard drive -- both of those operations take about 10 minutes.
To be fair, the part about upgrading the processor was *uber* cool -- I certainly thought that one wan't able to remove a mobile PIII from its mobo. But what I would like to see is a novel cooling method for a 1GHz PIII installed into a chassis originally not meant to take that much heat. (such as mine, A dell latitude L400, which IMHO is just slighly less sexy than the venerable TiBook.)
Another thing I'd be interested to see is how to play around with the mobo and its components; with integrated everything, laptop mobo's are the most expensive part of the machine next to the TFT -- and when one component breaks, the WHOLE THING has to be replaced.
I'd like to see if there are any solutions for this particular problem -- THAT would be laptop hacking.
I know I personally have a grave fear of hacking around in my laptops innards, partly because it is a relatively expensive device, but also because I know next to nothing about how it is put together, how the components interact and how the damn thing /works/ in general (wheras I will cheerfully crack open a PC and will feel confident about violating the warranty many times over in order to figure out how it works, how to fix things, etc.)
Does anybody else share this laptop apprehension? ; ) Has anybody out there conquered their laptop's guts and become confident/skilled in do-it-yourself repairs?
-q
True Story:
... It booted right up. No problems. Amazing.
A friend of mine had his thinkpad propped up on the one far end of a long board sitting on top of a big box in my basement. He walked away for a second, and one of my cats decided to play "seesaw". He jumped on the other end of the board, and the Laptop went a'flyin through the air. While airborne, it hit a cup full of water, which landed on the concrete floor just before the laptop smashed into it. We all gasped. Surely, that thing was never going to work again.
My friend went over and picked it up. He toweled it down to get the water off, and noticed that there wasn't really any exterior damage. the laptop had just about closed before it hit the ground, and there were no nicks or scrapes. He then held his breath, opened it up, and hit the power button.
BEEP!
From that moment forward, that laptop has been referred to as "The Tank".
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Your honor is perfectly understandishable.
Forget CD-ROM booting.
For my old Vaio PCG-505F, I've always booted off the net (I used Redhat). I never bought the CDROM drive.
You just need a system with the redhat CD's copied to a directory. Then just put in the pcmcia boot disk and a cheap pcmcia ethernet card and point it to a machine, access is easiest through ftp or http. It's way cheaper than buying the CDROM and faster too.
After owning this sony laptop, I've always liked it. However, the sony proprietary EVERYTHING is a real pain. Special sony memory. Special sony battery. The battery died after quite a short time and I never bought another one because of the sticker shock. I like the special sony charger - It's well designed to wrap the cord around itself. But it too has special connectors and voltages. Sigh.
By the way, if you're into Windoze, you might want to check out CD Space, which lets you encode all your CD's as image files and mount them on "virtual" cd drives. Even games like red alert 2 or diablo 2.
Delete Windows, install *Linux or *BSD.
I've got a '486DX4-75 (NEC Versa 2000C); my wife has a P-120 (NEC Versa 4080H). The two of them handle primary and secondary DNS for several domains (yes, we have other secondaries that are geographically and topologically distant), as well as WWW and SMTP for those domains.
Both are a minimum of 5 years old now. Both were bought secondhand. When my Windows-using friends say things like "Well, I've got this old machine that's only a PentiumII-300," I just laugh.
Just today I went browsing for any info I could dig up on notebook upgrade options. This always happens. I get an idea and see it on Slashdot the same day. Freaky.
Anyways, I've got a P2-266 laptop that I really wish I could upgrade the CPU on, however all I've seen are P2-300 replacements. It's really a shame because it has everything else I could possibly want--DVD, 14.1" TFT, everything's Linux friendly, etc.. Anyone have info on any sort of hacks to install a mobile P3 or other chip?
I love my Thinkpad. P-150, MMX, 64MB/2.1 GB, 56K and 100-BT. 800x600x16 screen, which made it IMPOSSIBLE to read the article without sidescrolling. -You- may have a 19" monitor, but I don't (not on my porch, anyway):
;)
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I like it for doing design and programming, because I don't need a hella-fast machine for that, and it keeps me honest
I'm using xfce with RH6.2, and it's completely fantastic. I get 160K/s steady on a DSL link, and for the most part it's as fast as my K62/475 Win98 box at work...but anything to do with graphics is crap. Scrolling, drawing windows is slooow. Xmms-P150 uses less cpu than Winamp-K62/475, but when I scroll a window, even one line, it sounds like a frog sat on the record needle.
I kinda want either a G4 titanium, or a Sony picturebook (the Transmeta sub-notebook), btu the first one is real pricey and the second has a slow hard drive...anyone usign these?
...Time is the best teacher, unfortunately it kills all of its students.
You really think that when Dell comes to take a look at your computer they are going to say, "Oh, you upgraded your Video Card, we're not going to fix your motherboard problem."
Naw, Dell talks a lot of trash about voiding the warranty but when it comes down to it, the service repairmen don't care what you've done to it... They get paid to replace the part and move on to the next job. We frequently have Dell technicians fix the Latitude notebooks we have, and even when they notice something fishy they seem to just laugh it off.
On a related note, when putting a laptop back together never listen to your coworkers tell you that you can't put a GIG of memory inside the notebook. Sometimes having those SIMMs floating around in the case is not good for the life of the equipment.
Under Asus Notebook Upgrading you'll find a close inspection of an Asus Notebook. How to reach the inner parts, how to upgrade them, etc. Perhaps Tom's hardware has some other notebook articles like this.
Bye egghat
-- "As a human being I claim the right to be widely inconsistent", John Peel
"In Germany," he said, "they don't just ask you to power on your laptop or wave a magic wand over it. They take it to a scale and compare it against known weights for every laptop model." Sounds impressive, but I wonder how upgrading a laptop would affect its weight, and thus, international security restrictions.
Have fun: Join D.N.A. (National Dyslexics Association)
I upgraded the batterys for my laptop. A pair of the original batterys lasted 40min-1h each depending on usage and weighed about a kilo each.
Since I allways carryed the laptop in its padded suitcase I bought three 6 volt 10 amp-hour lead-acid batterys for USD45 which fitted in a long thin compartment in the carry case.
The original batterys were 12V 3AH though they were somewhat below rated capacity after a years use.
The mains PSU is 20Volts, the laptop works fine with 11-20 volts in. The new batterys last about 7 hours. I wired the
batterys in series to give nominally 18volts so I can charge them with the original PSU.
I'm a bit of an electronics whizz but it wasn't too hard. Connections are insulated so nothing can short out and the batterys are fused for safety.
Some foam rubber keeps the batterys from bouncing around.
Added about 4 kilos to the total weight.