Solved! Toshiba Laptop Upgrade Advice

[DougT]

Hey everyone.... My sister's birthday is coming up and she really needs an upgrade to her currently 2+ year old laptop...

The specs are as follows:

Toshiba Satellite A135-S7404

Vista Home Basic 32bit
Intel Celeron M Proccessor 530
1.73 GHz , 1MB L2, 533MHz FSB
Mobile Intel 943GML Express Chipset
512MB DDR2 SDRAM (Currently 1x512mb but a total of 2 slots)
80GB 5400 Sata HDD
DVD Supermulti

Complete Specs

and etc...

She mainly uses this laptop for games (Sims and other rather lite games), music, movies, internet, and MS Office. Over the years tho the performance is horrible. Taking minutes!!! to open the browser. Mostly because of the slow HDD and 512MB of RAM for Vista (which seems really low nowadays). I think just some new parts would help her out alot.

My current thoughts are to upgrade her to a faster HDD (SSD?) to help program load times, increase the ram, and maybe convert her to Windows 7 (32 bit or 64 bit). Any advice would be appreciated.

Budget is around $300-$400



A couple questions I do have are:

It says the max memory supported is 2048MB, is this only because of the 32bit Vista, couldn't I do 2x2048MB=4GB?

If I do get 4GB of ram obviously I will need W7 64bit. Will this processor be able to use a 64bit version of W7?

 

[Maziar]

Hello
If i were you i would buy a new laptop instead because first of all the CPU is slow and you can't do anything about it also Intel 943M supports max 2GB of RAMs:
http/www.intel.com/Products/Notebook/Chipsets/943GML/943GML-overview.htm
So mostly the only thing you can upgrade is HDD and getting 2GB RAM and IMO its not worth it

 

[RetiredChief]

MY Recommendation - $ 450 Which you can later up Ram to 4 Gigs, if desired. THE SU2300 is a dual core and MUCH better than the Atom Procs.
http/www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16834115734
A suitable 15.6" laptop is between 500 - 600 bucks.


OR for DOOR #2, Upgrade
(1) Ditch Vista Home basic. If you have a UNUSED copy of Win XP, use that. A copy of Win 7 upgrade/oem is just over $100. You could do a fresh re-install of Vista basic, but is not my recommendation.

(2) Increase ram to 2 gigs, will probably give system a 20% improvement in preformance - Approx $50. Caution on compatability, make sure it is compatable as laptops are more fussy than desktops. As Maziar said - 2 gigs is your max.

(3) SSD BIG boost in boot time and Program loads. BUT only go this route if you plan on moving the SSD to a New laptop down stream. Verify current HDD is SATA or PATA. Since that laptop is limited to one HDD you should get a min 80 gig, preferablily a 120 gig SSD (APPROX $250 -> $320). IF PATA interface - Forget as most new laptops use SATA. A new HDD running at 7200 RPMs will provide a small performance increase.

For a laptop, even with 4 gigs Ram, I still prefer 32 Bit operating system, bearing in mind that only 3.5 Gigs will be available for operating system/programs.