I realized that now is not the best time for me to buy a new laptop, so im doing small upgrades to the one I have. I orderd a RAM upgrade, Corsair 1GB stick, $19 after shipping. It will have 1280MB total, a nice improvement from 512MB. (256MB fixed, 256MB removeable)
I'm not sure if I want to put more money than that into a 2 1/2 year old laptop. The only other work that I am considering is a new battery ($110-$140) and replacing any missing case screws (3 that I know of)
The other issues it has that cannot be easily fixed include a missing "H" key and a few lines of dead pixels.
Dead pixels are a problem, but search ebay for parts. Lots of times keyboards and even screens turn up cheap from machines that are broken.
the pixels dont bother me, but i will search ebay for those parts
editwhen looking at a battery, dell showed a replacement keyboard for $50
I wouldnt mess with polishing a turd, you can get a nice new laptop with warranty for $300-500 on Newegg.
My current computer is built from spare parts, I have at most $200.00 into my setup... No internet any more but I gots me a compooter!
I think if you scout you'll find a parts laptop or keyboard for well under $50. If the motherboard goes in 'em, if they get dropped one too many times, or even if the battery fails, busted laptops tend to go cheap.
good advice tim, I found a new keyboard for $20 with shipping.
I'm finding plenty of batteries on ebay, but for those, I'm real iffy.
Have the battery rebuilt for $45 at batteriesplus
My current laptop is a Dell Latitude 610; 2.3 ghz processor, 250g HD, 2g ram, dual layer DVD-+RW, internal wireless, and bluetooth that I got new for $650. My wife's is a Dell Precision M60 (a professional engineering platform with a huge screen) that is the same specs as mine, but just a 120g HD. I built it from an empty shell adding the parts she wanted. Same cost.
Upgrading an old laptop is rarely cost-effective. For the money you'll spend getting an old laptop up to those specs, its almost always cheaper to buy new.
...my laptop cost $350 brand new as i recall... it was a last year black friday (day after thanksgiving) purchases by my wifes grandma...
1.7mhz celeron, 1 gig of ram, 80 gig hdd... the only down side is it came with Vista... it ran it marginally at best... roll it back to XP and it's a PERFECT laptop... does movies, MS office. and the rest of the important things for a laptop to run...
side note... if you buy a laptop... IMHO stay away from the shiney screen (makes it very hard to use in a car unless it's dark out) and more battery life would be nice :)...
the biggest problem i found when we planned to buy a laptop was value... an extra $100 goes a LONG way... another $100 goes even further (duh)... so it's hard to not justify buying something in the higher price range grr...
the specs on the sub $500s are marginally better than what I have now. I doubt that I'm going to spend more than $100 on parts. As for labor, I have some exsperience with computer internalls and if i get too deep, I have atleast 4 friends who are pros at this.
I just got a HP (after my Toshiba took a dive off my desk) for $800. It has 4GBs of RAM, ATI graphics, and 2.1GHz . They had one about the same specs with Intel graphics and a 17" screen for $700. They have great deals now.
