unCubeme

I am still rocking a Sony Vaio PCG-R505GL laptop that I picked up refurbished back in May of 2003. At the time this thing was awesome, it was one of the smallest affordable laptops of its time with a removeable docking station. Well after 4+ of usage and a bloated Windows XP operating system this laptop is starting to wear down. I have done my share of hardware upgrades and software switching to find the right balance that this machine can handle.

Tip 1: Max out the memory! This is the easiest tip and usually can be the cheapest upgrade since our laptops are now old. This machine came with 256mb ram, 128mb is built into the board and 1 slot to add in another chip. The documentation for this laptop says 384mb is max which is 256 + 128. I SAY BS! I looked up the intel chipset for my laptop and it said it could handle up to 1Gb. Huh? So I said screw it and popped in a 512mb chip, and what would you know, I’m running 640mb of ram! This significantly helped out since the Operating system wasn’t thrashing so much trying to switch memory from hard drive and back.

Tip 2: Upgrade the Hard drive. Most older laptops will be using 2.5″ pata/ide hard drives. Mine initially came with a 30Gb hd and I threw in an 80Gb a year or so ago. Now this won’t necessarily make your machine faster but if your old hd is full it can slow down the system, plus there is a lot more room for all those files you have collected over the years.

Tip 3: If you have not already done so upgrade your wireless card or upgrade to one. If you already have an internal wireless card its probably only rocking an 802.11b which is only 11mbps speed but all you have to do is find a mini-pci 802.11g wireless card that will be compatible with your laptop and now you are downloading at 54mbps which you can significantly notice if you heavily use your network. The other option is to use your PC Card slot, which is my case. At the time this laptop came out I decided to go for the one that had a faster processor instead of built in wireless because I planned on adding it myself. Well comes out to find that they never put the mini-pci slot on my laptop so I was screwed. Anyways go out and get yourself an 802.11b/g PC Card (PCMCIA) and you will be downloading at 54mbps as well. On another note, I searched high and low to get my hands on a Sony PCWA-C300S Wireless PC Card and it barely sticks out. This is very handy if you travel or move your laptop around a lot because nothing really sticks out.

Tip 4: Add Bluetooth. For all you bluetooth headset users, feel free to add bluetooth to your personal laptop to add more functionality. Now I could have always gone out and bought a usb bluetooth adapter but that thing would have stuck out at least an inch. Now there is two companies that worked out a solution to this problem. Mogo and Princeton. Same with the wireless card I don’t want anything sticking out of my laptop. So if your laptop doesn’t have an option to have an internal bluetooth module, I would suggest picking one of these up and now your laptop will have more functionality to talk with headsets, phones and more.

Tip 5: Use software that are not resource hogs. If you have read my previous blogs you might have noticed that I prefer Microsoft products. That becomes a problem when you have a limited resource machine. So instead of using Internet Explorer 7 and Windows Media Player 11 I have switched to FireFox and WInamp lite. I also try to monitor what processes start on windows startup and how much process they use. There are third party applications that will go through and help maximize your computer such as what I use called Advanced Windows Care. There is almost unlimited solutions to this problem such as switching to linux, switching to windows 2000 etc. but I wanted to keep the same useage that I have been getting out of this laptop.

Wow, hopefully you guys were able to read all this. I wish I could have gone a little further in to each tip more in depth and add more tips but time did not allow me. If I get some requests I might re-do this blog and do a full complete blog on each tip, this is the type of stuff I enjoy. I just bought a new laptop but doesn’t mean that this laptop will be shelved, now I can have a family room laptop just for searching the internet. Leave some feedback on what you guys think.