Modding a Laptop's innards beyond just a Hard Disk or Memory upgrade

Do you know anybody who did this? Replace the keyboard, CPU, or replace a damaged USB or other Port? Or is this a lost art to the modern masses? I suppose most just buy a new laptop. I have no story to tell myself in this realm though. :o)

Capt'n Midnight

Mass market laptops have CPU's soldered to the motherboard, some ever have the RAM soldered too. And no access panels, you have to strip the whole thing down to get inside. Non-removable batteries are a thing now too. The worst ones are like tablets with "no user serviceable parts". So most people just buy new ones. You can get USB docking stations so you have network card, monitor sound and USB ports with one connector so less need to mod.

One quick mod is replacing the DVD with a bay for a hard drive so you can boot from an SSD and have TB's of storage on spinning rust.

Back in the days of netbooks if you had a soldering iron it's possible to add new USB devices (3G or GPS or touchscreen) to spare USB lines (PCIe connector) or add an eSATA port. Changing the WiFI card was common, but nowadays they nearly all have 2.4GHZ, 5GHz and Bluetooth so not much to do.

With a lot of care it's even possible to add a full blown graphics card to certain laptops via PCIe adaptors, not for the faint hearted. If you just want external monitors there's plenty of USB 3.0 / Thunderbird external video adapters.

https://hackaday.com/ - have a look there , adding screens looks cool.

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118008921#Comment_118008921

With a lot of care it's even possible to add a full blown graphics card to certain laptops via PCIe adaptors, not for the faint hearted. If you just want external monitors there's plenty of USB 3.0 / Thunderbird external video adapters

That's not difficult to do if there is a spare pci connection but it's a horribly ugly solution as you'd have an ungainly pci connector ribbon cable hanging out the side of a laptop like some laptop procreation member

Presume that you mean thunderbolt there which is available on modern mid to higher-end Intel-based laptops (800/900 euro plus and not on AMD)

A graphics card can be connected using thunderbolt but the housing cases with power supply for the graphics cards are expensive and even before the cost of the graphics card itself. and you don't get 100% of the GPU card power this way

Basically OP no option to upgrade CPU - even if you had a laptop old enough (over 10 years ago) that had this option it wouldn't be worth doing as you could only do that with an equally ancient CPU that would make no difference

modern thin and light laptops and ultrabooks don't even have upgradable ram in most cases as it's soldered on for space-saving purposes

usually only the hard drive, which is going to be in ssd format these days can be swapped

replacing broken usb ports woud be a tricky enough soldering job - probably would have to bring to a repair centre and if the laptop is ancient not going to be worth the cost

the one thing that might be worth a try is if there is only an old spinning HDD in the laptop - swap that for a sata 3 2.5 inch drive which can be bought for 20 euro or not much more for a 128gb size - would dramatically speed up the OS boot time and general operation.

Flinty997

I often used to take apart my old laptops, to upgrade the CPU or fix a failing GPU.

These days I try to buy one that has some upgradable parts. But manyy have none.

Gary kk

Should move to a frame work one next time

^^yes, they do exist. Don't think DELL or Lenovo are exactly rabid to promote this concept though whatever about any green virtue signaling they carry on with

L1011

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118008921#Comment_118008921

I've replaced wifi cards in recent laptops that already had 2.4/5/Bluetooth for performance reasons - often there's quite a cheap chip in a cheap laptop that struggles with MIMO.

On business grade laptops, you can still usually replace the input boards, power connector (my own one has it on an internal pigtail, no PCB close to the socket - very good design for once), screen, keyboard if damaged but consumer kit is approaching unibody.

Flinty997

Gaming laptops tend to still have lot of replaceable parts.

K.O.Kiki

https://www.boards.ie/discussion/comment/118015100#Comment_118015100

Replaceable but not upgradable.

If you want a long-term platform for upgrades, desktop is the only way to go.

Flinty997

Well I could add more RAM, More Storage, a better WIFI card.