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The Future of Laptop Upgrade Ability?
oki900 asks: "With laptops becoming more modular, and the use of mini PCI or PCI express cards for most of the components, are we going to start to see more third party upgrade options for laptops. I know that currently a lot of laptops use mini PCI or PCI express for LAN/WLAN cards and some even for the sound cards. It's also becoming more popular to use mini PCI express for the video cards. What will this mean for laptop consumers in the near future and how far will this trend go? Are we going to soon be able to easily upgrade the processors in the laptops as well?"
My laptops have failed around key components. And virtually all of them suffered one or more of:
Of the above, battery failure is easy... they usually are modular and easy to replace, though way pricier than necessary (IMO).
The monitor and adaptor problems are trickier. I think for there to be a future in upgradeable and modular laptops, these would have to be improved (snap in video screens, ruggedized connector ports?).
Laptops are highly specialized and customized marvels of engineering and required trick engineering just to get all of the pieces in the box (ever try disassembling one and getting it all back together?).
As components are increasingly tiny in size, and laptops do become more modular, they'll have to become less proprietary and more open architecture -- something I'm not sure manufacturers are wont to do. (I'm thinking laptop manufacturers are more interested in branding, and not pushing sale and profit out to component makers.)
Until laptops as an integrated unit can withstand the everyday rigors and liver longer, "upgrading" (other than memory and maybe disk) may be throwing good money after bad.
One piece at a time? Seriously, if you're replacing more than a few parts, buying a whole new laptop might be the best solution.
Other than minipci wireless cards, standardization has not occured in videocard form factors. nVidia introduced MXM for that very purpose but it hasn't been taken up too well by the industry. The MXM Upgrade weaves a depressing tale of the general concensus of laptop manufactureres. Although some are using it, most echo the sentiments of ASUS:
"An ASUS representative told us they are dropping the MXM concept, quoting additional costs, niche market and added height. Too bad!"
Don't expect a modular laptop any time soon. The main problem behind this is laptop manufacturers don't want a recreation of the IBM clone market with dozens of white box vendors driving prices down. They'd rather control the entire process so that process stay artificially high. Companies like Dell will sell you replacement components for a particular laptop so you can change LCD screens, video cards, etc that exist for that particular model but don't expect a general laptop-ATX standard layout any time soon.
In conclusion, hard drive and WLAN cards are about it for universal components. After that you buy model specific upgrades that cost more than buying the entire machine new with those parts. Maybe its time we start pushing the industry in this direction?
I doubt it.
Most laptops are seriously limited by form factor of the particular cards it's expected to accept in such a slot - in general, they are not full sized cards, but as small as they can make them, and potentially oddly shaped, if they are on an internal connector.
The other limitation that a card could throw way off kilter - particularly, a display card replacement - is the thermal budget. You're already seeing vendors selling laptops that *must* have power management to enable them to run within their thermal budget when the ambient temperature is higher than some minimum below which there is no throttling required (say 60 degrees Fahrenheit).
Putting in a very large, high thermal output graphics card, even if it would fit (see first paragraph) will at best blow your thermal budget; at worst, the heat pipes for the card, even if they happened to hput the hot spots in the same place, would be unlikely to be able to dissipate the load - either because they are undersize, or because they share their heat sinks with other components that are already pushing them at their effective limits.
So I seriously doubt you are going to have a lot of component upgradeable laptops available. There might be one or two niche vendors that over-engineer their thermal envelopes so they can handle upgrades, but... expect them to be much heavier in general, for the "generic" heat piping and sinking, and to potentially be noisier, if they also end up with higher air flow fans to cool above the expected default configuration load.
I don't think the "Road Warrior" market is big enough to support someone like a Dell or an Apple building and marketing one of these monsters.
-- Terry
The industry wouldn't let anyone make a purely modular laptop, people wouldn't have much reason to upgrade. I don't buy a laptop because I don't want a locked down pc. If you want portable, buy a shuttle and get a car adapter. Or a external power source.
Restore the madness of youth's lechery
I think that becoming more modular than now is probably not feasible. You have so tight constraints on heat dissipation, for instance, that adding a higher-performance graphics card, or higher clocked cpu could well end up killing your laptop. And with everybody wanting the smallest, lightest package possible within their other design constraints, I don't really see manufacturers adding "spare" capacity in any but the largest, heaviest desktop replacement machines.
You do have quite a bit of upgradeability with PC cards, USB2 and upcoming high-performance connectors. These connectors are easy to design for, in the sense that the manufacturer knows the highest allowable poser draw, heat dissipation and so on. I don't think you'll ever see real modularity beyond that.
Instead, there's been a pretty steady trend the past few years that the highest possible performance is no longer as important. It used to be you needed to upgrade your machine with every new high-impact game, or every new version of your word processing app. Purely anectotally, this does not seem to be the case anymore; a three year old machine is still perfectly able to run just about everything you want to throw at it. And for laptops, the upgrade cycle is definitively dampened by other constraints; the newest version of my (soon) two year old machine has an 1.3Ghz cpu rather than mine 1.1Ghz, and the integrated graphics are presumably a bit faster.
So, my feeling on this is that instead of becoming a lot modular, it's becoming steadily less important to be upgradeable in the first place. There's little point in being able to upgrade the CPU if the original one is still well in the game after three or four years, when you'd be thinking about replacing the machine anyhow.
Those who want to have all the latest and greatest are most likely to use a desktop in any case, since the absolute performance of a fast tower machine is going to kill any laptop, and at a lower cost. That's where upgradeability makes sense.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
Hinges. There really isn't much you can do about this, but 20 years in we should be able to make a laptop hinge that isn't structurally supported by the plastic casing.
Batteries. Yes, batteries were mentioned above, but they deserve repeating. It would be roughly $400 to replace the battery in my old IBM laptop, a laptop which resells on craigslist for about 100. If laptops are to survive, replacing the powersource (which will die in about 3 years) needs to become a heck of a lot cheaper. Can we just stick some NiMH AA cells in a wrapper? That's all that a lot of phone batteries are.
Fans. The cooling systems in laptops are all custom and fidgety, and when a fan goes you're basically guaranteed to cook the CPU if you don't scramble your eggs first. These should be easy to standardize on, and put in accessible locations.
Disk Drives. For some reason, those little plastic latches that hold disk drives in are just a wee bit too little for their own good. It also seems like a modular connector on the back should be relatively easy to agree upon, and a profile size and arrangement shouldn't be too hard either.
The ______ Agenda
The new MacBooks do exactly that: http://youtube.com/watch?v=8c6ckjy-gdY (excuse YouTube, a friend sent it to me).
... which is fine, but please don't pretend that a Shuttle mini-PC plus a monitor plus an external power source is as portable as a laptop.
+++ATH0
Intel is introducing the Verified By Intel initiative. In essence, (3) ODMs (Asus, Compal, and Quanta) are now making interchangeable parts for a VBI laptop.
With cross-brand interchangeability (take an Asus screen and put it on a Quanta chassis with a Compal battery, for example) I expect upgradeability to become more prevalent.
Oh, and you can strip this thing completely in less than 15 minutes. Not available from our "friends" at Dell.
Leonid S. Knyshov
Find me on Quora
Try replacing the mini-pci wireless card on your laptop with another brand. 10 to 1 says your laptop won't boot unless your manufacturer also offers that exact card (same PCI-ID) with your same laptop model (or one sharing a bios).
The slot-ness is for the vendor, not for you. They typically lock down what cards you can put in there, and unless you're willing to hack your bios's list of ids...
Alas, most of the consumer goodie purchasing world is not like us.
It makes engineering sense and seems simple to spend a few extra pennies or dollars to make devices accessible for repair like the toasters and radios of the past. Upgrading iPod batteries without worrying about cracking the case or replacing a dim laptop screen would be great.
Most of the world lacks the talent and desire for this kind of work. And paying someone with the talent is cost prohibitive.
So I don't see it happening in the consumer market.
My roomie just picked up another $35 DVD player, and says if it has a problem, she'll just toss it out. It's better than buying the $75 major brand player.
I think laptops can be desktop replacements for the casual computer user, so I'm certainly glad to see a basic upgrade path. Laptop HDDs, memory, processors, PCI cards, video cards, etc. are all becoming more and more common.
If nothing else, I'm sure in the corporate world this will help out a great deal. We have a shit-ton of P3 laptops in our corporation with 256 megs of memory. Getting them to run XP is a pain, though it can be done. It is just very slow.
The ability to upgrade the memory continued to give this laptops a use.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Stupid, too. A car adapter just means a standard 12 VDC male connector. You don't need a car to use one, just a battery and the device you want to run and the female adapter side, from capacitor hut, 5 bucks. Or for that matter just a universal tunable DC power supply that you plug into the wall. For the occassional thunderstorm here when the grid power goes iffy in a jiffy, I just keep a charged battery under the desk and plug my laptop in and turn the desktop off. I can run all day long and most of the night heavy use easy, done it several times now. It's even better than running through a UPS, no annoying beep beep beep from it, and a huge physical airgap from the grid/mains power means no random spikes or surges *at all* to test the UPS circuitry.
Besides that though, aren't you being a wee bit hypocritical? I sincerely doubt that in your lifestyle arrangement you don't benefit from numerous other people driving, I really *doubt* you live walden pond downtown someplace, surely you aren't insisting that the way you live doesn't revolve around burning petroleum products do you? Unless your local deli has a food replicator that runs off smog perhaps. Where does your electricity come from? How about your water supply, and heating and cooling? Do you grow your own natural fiber cotton plant in a pot out on the 2 foot by 2 foot "patio" off your townhouse and weave all your own clothes from it? How about all that dew or redbull or stronger stuff you gargle down, is that all coming from your own brewery and coffee and sugar plantations you keep growing under the bed with piped in sunlight?
Really, you need to get over the "progressive" and "lookit me, I am GREEN" "purer than thou" rhetoric, urbanites use just as much energy overall as suburbanites or rural people (probably more if you were to take total energy useage per square mile divided by human inhabitants to get an average),and taken as an aggregate total. I'd bet modern big cities are worse energy hogs for what they do than the fattest SUV out there. Your plugged in constantly termite borg culture leaves massive advertising lights on all night long,so bright they are visible from space, for no good reason (like anyone doesn't know already what major industries corporate logos look like, like we need the constant energy hog reminders), office lights burning, humongous air conditioning and heating power demands because the inhabitants just can't seem to exist outside a narrow ten degree margin of temperature from 65 to 75F or they get woozy and the feinting vapors or something, huge smoking busses running late at night with 5 people at most in them,and 4 of them are burglars and muggers and rapists working the evening shift, lonely trains sucking down vast amounts of most likely coal derived electricity in stations carpeted with diseased AIDS and hepatitis infested chewing gum and spit and snot, crusted with fast food wrappers. And for night time exciting cultural background ambience you have the soothing serenade of overlapping sirens that never end and "neighborliness" means never making eye contact with strangers as you do the sidewalk power dodge step through piles of designer dog poo and the averted glances from the half dead street people sprawled about that you just...ignore as epsilons.
And those are just the *better points* I noticed last time I visited a celebrated "major" US urban "capital".
Thinking about it, you are right, we should secede again, I would love to turn the taps off of our water and issue you a new contract proposal, 10$ a gallon for imported piped in water...just for a start, just a tiny start to make you REALLY pay what stuff is worth. You urbanites want globalisation and free trade and make all your money working in those climate controlled offices and coffee houses shuffling electrons around, great! No problem! go ahead and be another nation, or we will, either way. Let's see you actually pay "free market" prices for your piped in reality. You want electricty from our coal? No problems! 100$ a KwH, how i
The problem with upgrading laptops it the motherboard as many things are intergrated onto it, you can upgrade to a certain extent with hard drives, more ram, no procesor, wifi card but graphics is harder. And motherboards are the most common laptop killer, seeing as they often cost more to buy to repair one that to buy an entire new laptop.
This has already been done. Everyone remembers the ECS Desknote. A laptop that was 'barebones' and you had to add a processor, memory and hard drive.
Oh wait. No, nobody remembers them. They were WAY WAY too expensive and with the limitations on upgrades that a desktop also has, it was pointless. Face it, by the time you are ready to upgrade the CPU on your desktop, you also need to upgrade the motherboard. And the memory. And some of the time, even the video card was due.
I found some Desknotes being dumped on Geeks.com, but sadly, you can't buy the necessary processors anywhere except EBay or some horribly overpriced stores online. See, it maxes out at an Athlon XP 1800 or Duron 1300.
So in the end, the answer is that 'it's too expensive and pointless to upgrade a laptop'. With the exception of the currently upgradeable bits, of course... But then, those are the bits that people normally upgrade in desktops, too. (Except video.)
"If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
You could build your own 'laptop' using off the shelf components. I'm currently doing just that; I call it my Frankenputer (after Dr. Frankenstein's creation). It fits into a briefcase and is seriously ugly. It's about four times as thick as any decent modern laptop and is really heavy. Half the weight is the battery but the battery lasts for an honest five hours.
Lots of people build computers to use in their cars and lots of people build computers that fit in things like whisky bottles. My ugly 'laptop' is no different in that respect. www.mini-box.com sells the power supplies that you need to make it run off 12 volts. To conserve current, I'm using a flash card in place of a hard drive. The box runs Damn Small Linux.
So, you could have most of what you want; but you might not like it.
http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/mobile/display/200603 27232038.html
The (by now quite ancient) Inspiron 8000 and related series are very easy to upgrade. I had an 8000 for about 4 years, during which time I replaced the keyboard, CPU (upgrade), LCD panel (upgrade), display (twice, hinges broke), fixed optical drive (CD/DVD->DVD+-RW), hard drive (twice, once due to failure and once for upgrade). Last year I got the shell+mobo of an 8200. I reused the hard drive, optical drive, and display from my 8000, got a keyboard, processor, memory, and the cheapest graphics card I could find (I don't do games beyond minesweeper and use a very minimalist KDE theme with no visual effects). Works quite nicely, and I have a nice machine for the money that I can fix and upgrade.
Have any of you guys heard of MXM? http://www.nvidia.com/page/mxm.html
Crap, why just hardware? Take it to another level and think BIOS as well.
I have a not-so-budget Averatec that was my first notebook ever. The multi-drive went bad and needed to be replaced just to reload the f**king OS. I even talked to Phoenix BIOS support if they have an upgrade available, and they told me that the manufacturer controls the BIOS selection and upgradeabilty. Not only that, just try to buy a replacement drive!
IF I could have booted from a USB drive to do a reload, I would have NEVER sent it in for warranty service and be without my machine for 4 weeks. Good show Averatec and all you crippled notebook pushers, you lose money on warranty service of any kind.
Good luck finding One (1) laptop with the ability to boot from a USB device. I know I have spent hours in stores restarting most of the major's and some of the minor notebook brands to look in the BIOS for that ability... no luck so far.
I have yet to see this subject even mentioned at some of the notebook review sites, and I believe that a lot of us here would gravitate to the maker that includes this as a feature!
God: When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.
At the rate of changes in socket, bus, and chipsets I think "the upgradable computer" is dead. I would rather have a cheap motherboard with good, for a change, graphics chips built in. Give me a motherboard with an nForce4 chipset, 7.1 sound, 2 7900 graphics chips, and at least on nic. Put it on a mini-atx format. Charge me 70% of buying the components seperately and I'll be happy.
Having to work for a living is the root of all evil.
"Try replacing the mini-pci wireless card on your laptop with another brand. 10 to 1 says your laptop won't boot unless your manufacturer also offers that exact card (same PCI-ID) with your same laptop model (or one sharing a bios)."
I've never really found that to be the case, at least with the castlenet and wistron-nweb cards I've worked with.
Maybe I got lucky, but I was able to pull an Intel "Centrino" Mini PCI wireless out of my Toshiba M200 and replace it with a Dell Truemobile 1300 Mini PCI wireless unit I got on eBay. It worked out great once I got the laptop back together again- installed the new drivers and off I went.
At the time Intel's wireless solution would not play nice with stuff I wanted to do (not sure if that is still the case). NDIS problems made it incompatible with NetStumbler and it was also impossible to switch to "promiscuous mode" for wireless packet sniffing.
Urge to post... fading... fading... RISING!... fading... fading... gone.
When the speed of manufacturing improvements is such that the motherboard isn't out of date by the time a new GPU or CPU comes out that improves performance while maintaining the same heat signature... that's when upgrades in laptops and other small form factor PCs will happen standard.
Until then it will be up to 3rd party niche companies to provide upgrade paths to people who just need a little more performance out of their 2 year old laptop, if the OEMs will allow it.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
With computers are dropping in price so quickly, computer companies like the idea of an all-in-one computer kit that they sell you, and after a few years, you buy a whole new kit. They don't want to sell you a $500 computer that you upgrade in perpetuity. They want you to buy a $500 computer every year or two.
With laptops, this is almost a give in. Dell and Apple and all the rest don't want you to upgrade your video card or networking cards, or find ways of upgrading the CPU or ram, etc, they want you to buy a whole new computer in a year or two.
Sure, mini-PCI might sound like computer makers are giving you the flexibility of choice of components and upgrade paths, but lets be realistic here. You can't go to Best Buy and find a mini-PCI video card, and you won't be able to. Laptop makers came up with the mini-PCI standard to make components cheaper for your laptop (so they can earn more profit by reducing costs, but keeping the price tag the same). If every notebook maker had a proprietary interface for video cards and networking then nVidia would charge $1000 per unit for a mobile video card because they would have to make dozens of different versions of the same cards to fit in different laptops. Instead, nVidia makes ONE cheap video card that can be used in all laptops.
Don't fool yourself into thinking that laptop makers are starting to offer you modular components that have upgrade paths. They do so simply because it is cheaper for them to make one box and offer 6 versions of the same product, by adding faster CPU's, bigger hard drives, more ram, etc. It is cheaper for them to give their assembly lines easy access to these modular components to "customize" a computer per order.
Once you buy that laptop, know that notebook hard drives are typically 200%+ more expensive then an equivalent sized desktop hard drive, simply because there isn't the quantity of sales in notebook hard drives as there are in desktop hard drives. Same with upgrading notebook RAM and optical drives, etc. Sure you can upgrade your laptop, but it will cost you. The bottom line is there is no market for upgrade notebook parts. People "i.e. the business community" don't buy laptops for upgradeability. They buy them, use them for a year or two, and then buy a whole new kit.
In the end, don't think that there will ever be a laptop solution that will give you 5 - 6 years of upgrade paths allowing you to upgrade CPU's and video cards, etc. There are a few "desktop replacement" notebook boxes that allow you to use desktop components in a "mobile" case, but these tend to be monstrosities that have 1 hour battery life, run hot, and weigh 12 pounds.
In the end, if you want upgrade potential, invest in a desktop, but if you want mobility in a small form factor, you have to bite the bullet and realize you can't make an investment that will last more then a few years before you have to replace the whole unit. The laptop market does not want you to hang on to your laptop for 5 years and upgrade individual components, it will ruin their market and profits.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
Also, let alone the Intel Pro-Set wireless line. Some may work more strongly than others, but they've never prevented my varied-vendor systems from POSTing.
For what it's worth, Dell doesn't build or engineer any of their own notebooks- they (like most other companies) farm out the design and build contracts to manufacturers like Compal, Quanta, etc.
The 5150, in fact, is well known for having a manufacturer's defect which Dell refuses to acknowledge, so the fact that yours is working is a good thing! They are relatively easy to disassemble, but that has nothing to do with Dell.
So one Inspiron model you buy might be from one Taiwanese manufacturer, but the next model in the line might be from a different manufacturer altogether, and might be vastly different internally.
My favorite notebooks were always the IBM Thinkpads, back when they were still IBM and not Lenovo. Lenovo has been taking a lot of the same steps as other large OEM companies, and outsourcing the laptop builds. It's disappointing, as I really do miss the quality of a good thinkpad. I'm sure someone can tell me their horror stories about a particular TP issue, but when you have a couple thousand of them they are remarkably well performing systems...
EOM
Mac Intel laptops can boot from USB
You just need to:
(1) Have a bootable USB drive plugged in
(2) Hold down the option key while powering on
The drive will show up as one of the allowed boot devices in the boot picker.
-- Terry
Was this laptop a Compaq? I've found that many of their Presario models would have problems due to the power receptical coming loose from the motherboard. The only thing holding them in place are the solder connections. At first the machine will only charge up if the some tension is placed on the power cord so that the connector is pushed against the broken contacts on the motherboard. Eventually, it won't work at all. This was fixed with a threaded DC jack from Radio Shack. Solder it to the motherboard, add some epoxy to keep it in place, bolt the motherboard to the case, attach the bolt w/ lock washer to the threaded part of the jack sticking through the case, and tighten until it is secure. No more power adapter worries.
the good ground has been paved over by suicidal maniacs
I have nothing against the idea of laptops being easily *repairable*. I, too, wish that laptops were more modular. I don't, however, wish that laptops could be upgraded. In fact, I often wish that desktops couldn't be upgraded. It makes being a software developer an absolute nightmare.
The problem with upgrading desktops these days is that giant companies like Best Buy, Wal-Mart, and CompUSA like to sell this sexy idea to the public that anyone who can use a screwdriver can upgrade their computer. Open up a package containing a brand new hard drive, or a brand new video card, and there's very little inside it to educate the consumer about the possible consequences. Video cards come with fans and heatsinks, and to the average consumer this is all the cooling that requires consideration. The recommended power supply wattage information is in the fine print, and is presented as a general minimum "guideline" that many people feel free to ignore (or don't know how to interpret in the first place). All they know is that Device A fits in Slot B and therefore it should work.
Trying to find specific information on current draw for a particular device can be maddening. Newegg offers many so-called "notebook" hard drives for sale and yet fails to list any information on how much power the hard drive needs at startup, at idle, when seeking, and so forth. Computer manufacturers are no better; I spent the better part of an afternoon trying to discover what size power supply had shipped with a particular Compaq desktop, in order to help advise a forum participant about the possibility of an upgrade. Without this information easily available and on the packaging, consumers are making terrible decisions. Their computers limp along at best and are prone to failure.
The creators of games and software are the ones who suffer for this, because when their software fails to run on somebody's machine the user does not stop to consider that the new video card they installed a week ago requires more power than the system can give. All they know is that this new game they spent $60 on doesn't work. Trying to tell them it's probably their computer elicits screams of protest and the familiar mantras of "I know it's not heat" and "This is a top of the line computer and your software should work" and often "This problem only happens in your game so it can't be my computer". As a result, companies who do nothing but produce software that should function on any properly-assembled machine now have to spend money and time offering technical support for *hardware issues* that are not their fault, or else they risk losing customers.
All this because any person can walk down to the store and ignorantly put any sort of component into their desktop system. Sure, people should be smarter and they should educate themselves about computers. Sure, a professional can and will create wonderful computer systems that are far superior to what the big companies can make. Sure, in an ideal world we'd have all sorts of dazzling options for computer upgrades, free market, invisible hand, bla bla bla. That's idealism, not reality. The reality is that the majority of computers I have to troubleshoot on a daily basis (for reasons that are not malware) are either built from scratch or have been upgraded by the owner.
What about the discouraged user who has upgraded their computer to the point of instability? Who do they call for help? The manufacturer of their video card? The manufacturer of the chipset the video card uses? The motherboard manufacturer? The manufacturer of the motherboard chipset that doesn't work with their particular video card? The creator of the software that doesn't work?
They'll call the creator of the software that doesn't work, because that's where they see the failure. Then they'll get angry at what they perceive is the software company not taking responsibility for bugs in their software, because the company will tell them it's their computer. They'll patently refuse to pay a profe
Try replacing the mini-pci wireless card on your laptop with another brand. 10 to 1 says your laptop won't boot unless your manufacturer also offers that exact card (same PCI-ID) with your same laptop model (or one sharing a bios).
It depends on the manufacturer. It's a prime example of DRM that is here, today, and a royal pain. IBM and HP lock down their laptops like this. Dell does NOT. See here for more info...
http://ward.vandewege.net/blog/