If i want to manually upgrade components on my laptop?...?

Question

Is it easy to do myself, and does it work immediately or do i need to download something for it to work?

Im talking about RAM, Processor, Graphics card etc etc?

Answer 1

Is your old laptop hard drive running out of space? You probably know that you can upgrade your desktop computer's hard drive. But you may not know that you can upgrade the hard drive on your laptop. Here, we'll show you how to double or even triple the hard drive space on your laptop.



What you need

Let's run through how to upgrade a ThinkPad with a 30GB hard drive. In this case, we'll change it to a 100GB drive.

Before you begin

Before you start the data transfer, you must clean up your old drive. Delete any unwanted files and uninstall programs you don't use. You don't want to waste time transferring data you don't need. You'll also want to defragment your disk drive.



Transfer the data

Now I'll run through the upgrade on my ThinkPad. You may have slightly different experiences if you have a different laptop or use different connectors and software, but this will give you the general idea.



Take the new drive and mount it carefully in the case. Be very careful with hard drives. They can't take any banging around or squeezing. There's delicate machinery in there.



Make sure your laptop is off. Attach the USB cable and attach the drive to the laptop. Put in the EZ Gig disk-cloning software and boot directly from the CD. Once it boots, choose Automatic so that the software will set up the way the data will be copied. It will ask you to specify which drive is new and which drive is old. Make sure you choose correctly, then tell it to begin.



One thing to note here is the way partitions are laid out. With my ThinkPad, I had to go in and set the IBM Update partition manually. The EZ Gig software enlarges all partitions proportionally. The IBM system didn't like that, so I had to make adjustments.



Once it's grinding through the data transfer, go take a break; it may take an hour or so, depending on how much data you're copying.



Swap the hard drives

When it's done, turn off the laptop. Unplug it and remove the battery to make certain you don't fry any components, or worse, electrocute yourself. Then look in your user manual for how to remove the hard drive. Open up the laptop and carefully take out the old drive.



Once you get the old hard drive out of the laptop, look to see if there's a hard drive cradle. Remove the cradle from the old drive and attach it to the new drive.



Then take the new drive out of the case and put it in the laptop. Close up the laptop, reinsert the battery and the power cord, and restart the machine. If it doesn't work, you'll want to put the old drive back in and troubleshoot the new drive.

Answer 2

It depends on the laptop. Some companies this is very easy, and some it is next to impossible. Ram is almost always super easy, just a matter of opening one or two screws on an access panel on the bottom of the modem. Graphics cards are most of the time integrated into the motherboard so this is usually impossible unless you order the part directly from whoever made our lappy. Processor is almost as hard as the graphics card depending again on the model but it usually involves tearing the whole laptop apart. However some laptops (such as my alienware) have a seperate access panel on the back that allows for upgrading the graphics card and its almost as easy as installing RAM. I wouldn't reccomend tearing apart your laptop unless you are very methodical and carefull and can remember where to put all of the screws back into (there are many, many tiny screws you need to go through to replace a motherboard)

Answer 3

Its not easy

I know of too many guys who took apart laptops and then could not put them back together gain

That said

Usually Ram , CPU & Drive are easy to replace on modern laptops (one or two screws / clips and you have access to them then its just pull out old one plug in new one . ) Graphics cards are a completely different ball game recommend making sure the Graphics card is not intigrated on the mainbord before you think about replacement.



Also Laptop components are ususally well designed for heat & power management - Make sure your new components can fit the bill on these parameters



Also buy spares which match the socketing design on the laptop (for RAM & graphich card) standard off the shelf may not do as the mfg is a weasel and will sell you custom socketed chips at 4 times the market value for normal ones.

Answer 4

There are only two components that the computer user can upgrade in a laptop. That being Ram and Hard drive. The other components are a part of the motherboard .

Answer 5

Ram is easy to do , just make sure you get the righ type. Graphics card will be hard to do if not impossible on most laptops, and ur processes I would not touch at all.

Answer 6

the worst thing about laptops is that most all of the components are hardwired in. about the only thing you can upgrade are the Hard drives and the memory. the video and processors are solder in...

Answer 7

the laptop CPU costs more by itself, than buying a new laptop in total

Answer 8

there are sites that tell you step by step how to do that for your model , yes you can , but always first read the instructions, so you don't ruin your baby, annoyances.org ,is one...