#Tech upgrading a Dell laptop- options?

[desprateseagull]

Have a few years old Dell Inspiron 1545, with Windows 7 Home Premium (64 bit) pre loaded, 2 gHz Pentium processor, and oddly different make& capacity RAM cards- totalling 3gb, and a regular 250gb hard disc drive.

Mainly used at home, with WiFi to router getting 7-8 Mb/sec downloads..

Looking to speed up my general browsing, and multi tasking, so wondered if any lovely NSC nerds can suggest what needs to / can be boosted? Rather confused re DDR2 / ddr3, SODIMS SSD etc, seen mentioned on another forum!

Not quite got budget to buy a new 'puter, as yet..

 

[TomandJerry]

Try turning it on and off

 

[Randsta]

First check what the mother board is capable of...

 

[Randsta]

Get an SSD you will get better performance

 

[desprateseagull]

First check what the mother board is capable of...

OK, how do I do that?

And SSD- where does that fit- in the RAM slots, or replace hard drive?

 

[looney]

Have a few years old Dell Inspiron 1545, with Windows 7 Home Premium (64 bit) pre loaded, 2 gHz Pentium processor, and oddly different make& capacity RAM cards- totalling 3gb, and a regular 250gb hard disc drive.

Mainly used at home, with WiFi to router getting 7-8 Mb/sec downloads..

Looking to speed up my general browsing, and multi tasking, so wondered if any lovely NSC nerds can suggest what needs to / can be boosted? Rather confused re DDR2 / ddr3, SODIMS SSD etc, seen mentioned on another forum!

Not quite got budget to buy a new 'puter, as yet..

There are various ways that can speed up your puter. Remove all unnecessary crap running, as well as stuff you dont need. Do disk clean up, defragment, registry fix, flush DNS.

Back up your shit on an external hard drive then reformat?

 

[TotallyFreaked]

SSD hard drive will give you the largest performance upgrade for the price ( very cheap now, 128-256 gigs especially) However you would probably need to clone your existing hard drive onto your new SSD drive as it will replace your existing hard drive. Unfortunately a bit too techie to write on here and unless you know your way around computers probably not something you want to do yourself.

 

[juliant]

OK, how do I do that?

Have a look on here

http://uk.crucial.com/gbr/en

 

[StonehamPark]

Have a few years old Dell Inspiron 1545, with Windows 7 Home Premium (64 bit) pre loaded, 2 gHz Pentium processor, and oddly different make& capacity RAM cards- totalling 3gb, and a regular 250gb hard disc drive.

Mainly used at home, with WiFi to router getting 7-8 Mb/sec downloads..

Looking to speed up my general browsing, and multi tasking, so wondered if any lovely NSC nerds can suggest what needs to / can be boosted? Rather confused re DDR2 / ddr3, SODIMS SSD etc, seen mentioned on another forum!

Not quite got budget to buy a new 'puter, as yet..

SSD Hard Drive will greatly speed up things up.
Consider upgrading to 4/6/8gb RAM
Download CCleaner (free)

Processor may be a bit outdated but replacing this plus all of the above, you may as well just buy a new laptop.

Find a fairly priced, decent SSD.
RAM is pretty cheap.
CCleaner is free.
- See how you get on?

Note. You'll definitely need to do a bit of research in transferring important files from your current Hard Drive to the SSD including loading Windows onto the SSD.

 

[grawhite]

As said in other posts,

SSD will give the best performance boost, which will speed up the booting and turning off of the laptop along with the speed of opening applications.

Memory will also speed up multitasking, but to do this you need to now what the motherboard specs are, for example. You only have two memory slots in a laptop, so say you have 4gb ram ( 2 times 2gb sticks) DDR 2 1333 MHz, you will need to know whether the motherboard is able to take 8gb ram ( 2 times 4gb sticks) and whether the memory can have a higher speed say 1600 MHz. This will reduce applications from bottle necking so frequently.

Best option would probably be just get a new laptop.

(Edit)

Dell are not well known for letting ppl upgrade their products, by using different size hardware.

 

[Shropshire Seagull]

I recently upgraded an old Tosh laptop to SSD - clone of HDD boots in 30 seconds, was 1min 10secs by HDD
Also extends battery life a little and is quicker at coming out of sleep mode.
However, I took this option for a very specific reason in that I had installed software running under XP that I would have to pay to re-reg if I installed onto a new machine or upgraded O/S

64bit Win 7 could benefit from more than 3Gb RAM - in simple terms, all 32bit Apps running on your 64bit O/S can still only share the first 4Gb of RAM so going higher than this will only benefit where apps installed are 64bit [still a bit few and far between]. So I would look to upgrade to 4Gb RAM but I don't think you'll get much / any benefit going any higher.

Do you have your original Win 7 install disks and license number? If yes, one of the best ways of getting a speed kick is to start again. Format the disk and reinstall windows from scratch and the applications you need. See www.ninite.com for a smart way to install all the latest freebies ...

If you have the budget, buy a new SSD disk drive and re-install o/s onto that, use EASUS or similar to partition it and make the D: drive your data drive. Cost of SSD will depend on what size you require but SATA 3's are getting very affordable now.

Could get into a deep convo about backing up data files. I'll make the assumption that anyone with half a brain has invested £50-70 in an external 1-2Tb USB drive and regularly copies all data files [docs / photos/ music / vids / etc.] from a laptop onto this. And don't keep this external drive in the house either, leave it at a relatives / work / neighbour because if your whole house burns down [it happens], it's gone up in smoke too, which makes it a pointless backup. With the partition and all data files on D: - copy ALL of D: to the external drive ....

If you like and are comfortable tinkering with laptops, the extra RAM and SSD will set you back anywhere between £60-90 and will consume a good few hours of your time - with this investment you're a third of the way to a new laptop with full battery capacity / warranty / new technology [e.g. i3 processor is ideal entry level], probably at least 4Gb RAM, many now come with 8Gb.

Options - always options .....

 

[beorhthelm]

another advocate of SSD here, though im not sure how you clone existing one with a laptop (USB to SSD SATA adapter for a few £?). though still fairly expensive for 250GB if thats all in use.

if you stick with existing, defrag will always help. reinstall helps more if the software, time and inclination are available.

more memory will help too, especially at multitasking. Crucial do a really good memory checker, put the model in and it'll tell you what you need and they are pretty competitive prices.

(theres also a secret with windows memory, force it to use the memory not page file by setting page file to 0MB and ignore the warnings. you dont need a page file if you have 8GB or so of mostly unused memory. only exception I've ever found is Photoshop moans if not there, so if running that set to 2MB or what ever the smallest amount it'll let you).

 

[Joey Jo Jo Jr. Shabadoo]

Prices are dropping on SSD so one of them would certainly help. Also look at getting some replacement memory, your current 3gb setup will be causing issues. Crucial have a tool that will let you find the right RAM for your system and getting a properly matched pair will improve performance. Also it's always possible depending on where your router is but using an ethernet cable to connect will improve things a bit too.

 

[Triggaaar]

SSD Hard Drive will greatly speed up things up.

An SSD is excellent to speed up boot times, and moving files. It shouldn't speed up browsing should it?

Consider upgrading to 4/6/8gb RAM

Agreed.

Download CCleaner (free)

This! The laptop is probably slow because of all the junk it's running.

https://www.piriform.com/ccleaner/download

Processor may be a bit outdated but replacing this plus all of the above, you may as well just buy a new laptop.

You shouldn't need much processing power for surfing. Then it depends what he's trying to multitask.

 

[Randsta]

An SSD is excellent to speed up boot times, and moving files. It shouldn't speed up browsing should it?
Agreed.

It will a little as pages store cached data on the HD and so should speed it up a little in theory