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WHy cant you upgrade a laptop?

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chittnp

Member
Joined
Jul 7, 2002
Location
Sandy Creek NY
A friend of mine asked me a question and I couldn't think of a good answer for him, so I'll ask you all the same question.

why is it so difficult to upgrade laptops?

I realise you can upgrade the HD, RAM, and the optical drives, but why cant you do a processor upgrade? The only reason I could come up with is that because laptops have special, smaller processors, but this really doesnt answer the question. Any ideas?
 
Actually you can upgrade the processor, at least on some models, it's quite difficult to get a mobile processor though
 
his laptop is a dell inspiron 8000 with a pentium 3 700 in it, he would also like to upgrade his video card,an ATI Rage mobility 16 MB, any Ideas?
 
Forget it, you can not upgrade video card on a laptop, if you have mad hacking skills, you might be able to add some video memory
 
Normally the only thing you can upgrade on a notebook is the harddrive, ram and get a super battery or such. External harddrives probably would be cheaper and easyer to install and can have a 160 gig external hd and uh big notebook drives cost an arm and a leg. This should help a bit hopefully.
 
I think the only laptops with upgradeable video are the ones with the GF-Go or the Radeon. Your friend's has integrated video.

I don't think a laptop CPU is soldered, but I wouldn't know how to recognise it's heatsink. As I understand it, the whole CPU isn't much larger than the chip itself?

The funny thing about laptops is, I don't know what they need to go faster than 500Mhz for if they don't have video cards. 2D art? Loading word in 3 seconds instead of 4?
 
its actually easy to upgrade the cpu. pricewatch.com has them. As for the video its built onto the motherboard so i don't think you can add memory even if you had mad skills or if you could the gpu wouldn't use it....
 
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