rebuilding my laptop to a smaller body

emc1997

I'm starting college soon and I need a smaller, lighter computer with longer battery life as my current laptop (inspiron 7720) is too big to lug around. Is it possible to switch out the parts from my 17inch inspiron into a smaller body. maybe 14/15 inch?

other than the body I don't need any parts changed, I'm running an intel i7-3610qm with 8gb of ram so performance isn't an issue.

I bought this laptop with gaming and media in mind but as I'm starting college I could do with something more practical.

Also if possible how much would the process cost and how long would it take

Digital Solitude

Not possible, you'll need a new one if that's the only call.

Should be still worth money given its spec, to put towards a new one.

A newer Pentium or i3 will be plenty strong for college work

ED E

Sell that tank and buy a refurbished yoga or similar. Jobs oxo.

emc1997

any idea how much it's worth?

Digital Solitude

When did you buy it, for how much, what's the condition of it and hows the battery

DivingDuck

If it were me, I'd be inclined to hang onto your current one and pick up a Chromebook or something for bringing to school and taking notes. It's very easy to misplace or damage a machine that's constantly on the go, and it's a smaller loss if that happens to a Chromebook than your all-in-one machine. I think you'd also miss the computing power if you downgraded to something less crushing on battery.

Just something else to consider.

emc1997

bought summer of 2013 for 1300euro from the dell website, everything works like it did new. one large scratch on the removable cover is the only thing wrong with it

Digital Solitude

Probably worth 800-900 at a rough and probably **** guess.

As the other poster said, is it worth selling, a Chromebook is like €300 to carry you for a bit

the_syco

What course will you be doing? Keep the laptop till after month two of the course, in case you find you need it more then, than you think you don't need it now.

DivingDuck

Digital Solitude wrote: »

Probably worth 800-900 at a rough and probably **** guess.

As the other poster said, is it worth selling, a Chromebook is like €300 to carry you for a bit

Argos has this for €310 if you're interested. It has a five star rating on argos.co.uk (also 9.5/10 on here) and about eleven hours of battery.

Granted, it has sod all onboard storage, but an SD slot would make for easy transfer between it and your bigger PC. Might be worth considering, and you could be able to get it cheaper elsewhere.

emc1997

English and History in UL so I'm assuming it will involve a lot of typing, I'll see how I cope for a while and if need be I'll probably pick up something small and cheap for taking to school and taking notes while using the existing one for work at home, thanks for the help

ahnowbrowncow

This is a great, portable laptop for only €250 or so, quad core, 4GB RAM and a 500GB HDD. Much better than the one in the argos link, which is the lower spec one in the 9.5/10 link.

It's only an 11.6" screen though but that would suit if you where keeping your other laptop. If you were to sell it I doubt you'd get much more than €600 for it, depending on the graphics card and HDD.

DivingDuck

ahnowbrowncow wrote: »

This is a great, portable laptop for only €250 or so, quad core, 4GB RAM and a 500GB HDD. Much better than the one in the argos link, which is the lower spec one in the 9.5/10 link.

It's only an 11.6" screen though but that would suit if you where keeping your other laptop. If you were to sell it I doubt you'd get much more than €600 for it, depending on the graphics card and HDD.

The RAM is doubled on that, all right, but it has much lower battery life (only five hours), though, and has a HDD rather than an SSD. I would definitely be looking for an SSD with any portable these days.

ahnowbrowncow

DivingDuck wrote: »

The RAM is doubled on that, all right, but it has much lower battery life (only five hours), though, and has a HDD rather than an SSD. I would definitely be looking for an SSD with any portable these days.

It has double the ram, a 500GB HDD vs a 16GB SSD (HDD wins that hands down as 16GB is useless, they can buy a decent SSD and then use the 500GB as storage if they wanted) and a quad core Celeron N2930 vs a dual core Celeron N2840.

All for €50 less. It's a no-brainer really.

Plus the review you link states "We’d recommend the Chromebook 2 to anyone absolutely sure they can cope without programs like Skype, Microsoft Word, VLC media player and iTunes." Hardly a laptop I'd recommend for someone going to do English and History in college.

Digital Solitude

Any RAM over 4gb is useless for college work, though a 16 SSD is useless.

Celeron isn't a talking point either

*On more research of Chromebooks, 16gb with a Dual Core is plenty powerful

ahnowbrowncow

Digital Solitude wrote: »

Any RAM over 4gb is useless for college work, though a 16 SSD is useless.

Celeron isn't a talking point either

The one I linked has 4GB RAM vs the cromebook's 2GB, never said it needed more than 4GB. Plus I never said celeron was a talking point but the Celeron N2930 is a good bit better than the N2840.

Cromebooks don't have windows OS in case you didn't know .

Digital Solitude

ahnowbrowncow wrote: »

The one I linked has 4GB RAM vs the cromebook's 2GB, never said it needed more than 4GB. Plus I never said celeron was a talking point but the Celeron N2930 is a good bit better than the N2840.

ChromeOS to Windows though, its Apples to Oranges

DivingDuck

ahnowbrowncow wrote: »

It has double the ram, a 500GB HDD vs a 16GB SSD (HDD wins that hands down as 16GB is useless, they can buy a decent SSD and then use the 500GB as storage if they wanted) and a quad core Celeron N2930 vs a dual core Celeron N2840.

All for €50 less. It's a no-brainer really.

Plus the review you link states "We’d recommend the Chromebook 2 to anyone absolutely sure they can cope without programs like Skype, Microsoft Word, VLC media player and iTunes." Hardly a laptop I'd recommend for someone going to do English and History in college.

If it were to be their only machine, I would wholeheartedly agree. However, for note-taking, light web usage, and long battery life (which, per the OP, is part of the main reason for getting a different/additional machine), I think it's a good option.

You can save the files to your SD card when working on them in college (the Google Docs app now works offline, as I understand it, so it should be able to work with local files) and then just pop the card in your big machine once you get home for use with Word. I can't verify this personally, but it seems like it shouldn't present a problem.

It would certainly be what I would choose in this situation. YMMV.