Upgrading laptop

frankie2shoes

Its time to upgrade my trusty hp dv2500.
Is it worth my while fitting a new hard drive and upgrading the ram on this machine or am I better off just forking out for a new laptop.
Am quite happy with the performance, it does all i need it to do, but the hard drive is full (160gb), and I have a copy of windows 7 which is supposed to be the dogs.
150 yoyos should get me a new 500gb harddive and bring my ram up to 4gb.
has anybody had success with laptop hard drive upgrades?
Have had a look and it looks pretty straight forward. but is it?
All comments greatly appreciated

deceit

frankie2shoes wrote: »

Its time to upgrade my trusty hp dv2500.
Is it worth my while fitting a new hard drive and upgrading the ram on this machine or am I better off just forking out for a new laptop.
Am quite happy with the performance, it does all i need it to do, but the hard drive is full (160gb), and I have a copy of windows 7 which is supposed to be the dogs.
150 yoyos should get me a new 500gb harddive and bring my ram up to 4gb.
has anybody had success with laptop hard drive upgrades?
Have had a look and it looks pretty straight forward. but is it?
All comments greatly appreciated

Its really easy to swap out harddrives, usually theres a caddy with 1 screw to get it out. If your happy with the performance then your best best is the 500gb drive and 4gb ram. Could sell your old ram and drive to help fund it also . Win 7 is like a slimmed down version of vista with all the problems gone so basically what vista should have been from the beginning.

frankie2shoes

thanks deceit.
Am fairly confident it will work out fine, but as I use this machine daily, am filled with trepidation. don't wanna f**k with success!!

Zapho

Ah yeah, go for it, I say! Pointless buying a new machine when the old one does the trick.
€150 for upgrades is cheap and you'll definately notice the difference.

My Dell inspiron 6400 is nearly 4 years old now and I wouldn't change it for the world. Its running Win 7 like a dream and I stuck a 250gb HDD into it about a year and a half ago now.

I actually didn't bother upgrading its 2GB ram yet and I probably won't. It barely uses 77% of that when at its busiest!

frankie2shoes

did you encounter any issues with the new drive during installation?
anything I should look out for?

Zapho

frankie2shoes wrote: »

did you encounter any issues with the new drive during installation?
anything I should look out for?

Nope, no issues at all. Just swapped out the old one, popped in the new one.

I would always go with a fresh install on the new drive though (which you're planning to do anyway). I've never 100% successfully transferred a windows partition from one drive to another without something causing problems.

deceit

Zapho wrote: »

Nope, no issues at all. Just swapped out the old one, popped in the new one.

I would always go with a fresh install on the new drive though (which you're planning to do anyway). I've never 100% successfully transferred a windows partition from one drive to another without something causing problems.

If you use the likes of acronis true image these are usually done without problems .

frankie2shoes

thanks for your help.
am gonna buy my new harddrive today from memory c in clondalkin. 81 euro delivered ......:)

deceit

If you have any trouble, i'm in clondalkin, you could drop over too me and could show you how to do it, just make sure to get which drive type yours is, i'm guessing its sata as in this pdf it states that what all dv2500 use. This might come in handy http://h10032.www1.hp.com/ctg/Manual/c01295820.pdf

frankie2shoes

thanks a lot Deceit, but I'm based in Kilkenny. Dhl delivered my hard drive on friday. Not sure whether to bother with a ram upgrade, apparently windows 7 will work fine with 2 meg ram. gonna swap 'em over during the week. will let ya'll know how I get on...............