Upgrading a Toshiba Satellite 1900-102

Hi everyone!

A friend of mine got one of this in the beggining of the year. the main specs are:

Intel Pentium 4 1,7GHz
Intel i845
ATI MOBILITY Radeon 16MB DDR SDRAM
Toshiba 30GB 2,5" ATA-100
256MB PC-133 SDRAM
14",1 XGA (1024x768)
PCMCIA 2x Type II 1xType III
Crystal CS4299-A
Combo (DVD/CD-RW)

He'd like to know what can be upgraded (mainly cpu, memory, graphics adapter, disk) and to which extent (for example, can he replace his ATI Radeon with a GeForce4™ 460 Go?)

thnx in advance.

1.7 ghz isnt enough? i think he should upgrade ram before CPU, get him a larger amount of ram in 1 stick

Welcome to the forums, but your friend's upgrading options are going to be very limited.

He's going to be stuck with the ATI graphics for as long as he has the Satellite. Notebook makers intergrate the graphics chipsets onto the motherboard, and there is no way they can be replaced. Ditto for the Crystal audio chipset, the display and the PCMIA peripheral ports.

That leaves the processor, hard drive and memory. Memory is the easiest, but since this is a SDRAM system he can only add capacity. If he does decide to bump up to 512, tell him to expect to pay about twice the price of desktop memory. Most notebooks use a smaller DIMM and memory makers charge a lot more.

Changing the harddrive isn't a good idea at this time. Fujitsu has a 60GB 2.5" drive in production, but that's as big as they get. And like the smaller SDRAM modules, expect to pay a lot more per gig than you would for a desktop drive.

Swapping out the proc is the one thing that could be relatively simple. Maybe. The two things to worry about are heat and the battery life. Dropping in a 2.8GHz P4 could destroy the rest of his computer with the extra heat. He would have to pick his upgrade very carefully and I doubt if he'd see a difference in application performance.

But he would see a big change in the battery life. If you swap out a P4M with Speed Step for a desktop P4, you can start measuring your battery life with a stopwatch. I exaggerate only slightly.

If someone gave me a blank check to buy a laptop, the only thing I'd change from what your friend has is maybe going up to a fifteen inch screen. But I'd only do that if I didn't have to lug it around a lot. For a true portable laptop, he has a really nice rig. I recommend you tell him to enjoy it. This is one case where the grass isn't greener on the other side.


BHD