Upgrading The Impossible
Yes, I am serious about this
Tuesday, March 14, 2006 by PoSmedley | Discussion: Personal Computing
My Brother-In-Law has asked me to see what I could do with his laptop. Let me rephrase that. he has asked me to see if I could do something other than throw it out. It's a Compaq presario 1245, about 7 years old. It has a 3GB 2.5" EIDE Internal hard drive and 32mb memory card. (I'll wait while you laugh.)
Okay...now I have found a 'refurbished' hard drive 20GB for under 40 ( I told him he wouldn't really need more than 20GB, and all the ones I found under 20 cost about as much), but know nothing about 'refurbished' drives. New ones for around 60. He will be running Win200, and not doing anything special, just surfing. He wants it for when he is out of town.
The memory is 32mb SyncDRAM. Now I have found memory from 17.99 for 128 to 39.99 for the same. Is there a difference between a memory card for a laptop and a notebook? As far as actaully 'fitting' it in the notebook?
Aside from the obvious...he needed me to put WIN2000 on it (it had 98 first version) so he could install an ethernet card and a wireless card. I told him there wasn't enough room with win200 to even add a virus program, let alone anything else. So he needs a bigger hard drive, and I told him upgrading the memory would be a good idea as well, though the memory upgrade max's out at 160mb.
Questions..
1. Is it worth the price of a 'new' hard drive (considering how old it is), or should I go with the refurbished?
2. Is it a SDRAM memory stick I want, and does it have to be 'notebook' specific?
3. Would an external harddrive or flashdrive (I don't know anything about flashdrives, so forgive me if that was stupid to ask) be a better option?
Basically, looking for the best way to do this for him.
Any help is apreciated. Thanks.
Po'
Okay...now I have found a 'refurbished' hard drive 20GB for under 40 ( I told him he wouldn't really need more than 20GB, and all the ones I found under 20 cost about as much), but know nothing about 'refurbished' drives. New ones for around 60. He will be running Win200, and not doing anything special, just surfing. He wants it for when he is out of town.
The memory is 32mb SyncDRAM. Now I have found memory from 17.99 for 128 to 39.99 for the same. Is there a difference between a memory card for a laptop and a notebook? As far as actaully 'fitting' it in the notebook?
Aside from the obvious...he needed me to put WIN2000 on it (it had 98 first version) so he could install an ethernet card and a wireless card. I told him there wasn't enough room with win200 to even add a virus program, let alone anything else. So he needs a bigger hard drive, and I told him upgrading the memory would be a good idea as well, though the memory upgrade max's out at 160mb.
Questions..
1. Is it worth the price of a 'new' hard drive (considering how old it is), or should I go with the refurbished?
2. Is it a SDRAM memory stick I want, and does it have to be 'notebook' specific?
3. Would an external harddrive or flashdrive (I don't know anything about flashdrives, so forgive me if that was stupid to ask) be a better option?
Basically, looking for the best way to do this for him.
Any help is apreciated. Thanks.
Po'
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Reply #21 Friday, March 17, 2006 8:29 PM
Suggest using NTFS if available, due to the cluster size being smaller, and therefore the operations on the disk will be more efficient.
Go with SP4 if you can, due to better USB 2.0 support, as well as just getting better support all around.
Note - assuming the hard drive is recognized as the full 40 GB, you should be good to go with Win200 Pro. If for some reason the drive is recognized as a smaller drive (lower than 10 GB), you can always use a partition utility to create multiple partitions which can be recognized. Then you can install the OS and programs on the first partition, and set up data partitions with the balance.
As Scorpio said, the 128 is your best bet, and is supported by the MoBo.
From the specs I saw on Compaq site, you can probably make a reasonably workable machine for fairly cheap.