Hi everyone!
It has been ages since I've been able to sit down and write my blog. part of it has been job related, part of it has been trying out new things that meant I wasn't at home all that much. In any event I am back with some new ideas and new things that I will be writing about.
Today I wanted to talk about laptops. We all have 'em and lug them around wherever we go. The biggest problem with laptops as far as I am concerned is the lack of easiness when it comes to upgrading them. Your options are truly limited and mostly you end up buying a new laptop. Nowadays tablets have come in to the picture and are getting popular but still most people still have laptops.
So what if you want a new laptop but can't afford it? What are your options? Well you could do several things to prolong the life of your laptop while you decide what you want to upgrade too. So what can you do?
For starters try looking up the specs of your motherboard figuring out what socket it has and exactly which processor you have and then, see if you can upgrade to a newer CPU. Granted your options might be limited but if it is an older laptop (like mine was,) you can luck out and find CPUs very cheap (like I did.) Next if your laptop is overheating, go ahead and open the cover above your CPU (Usually the one which has the fan vents on it, you can unscrew it and remove the cover.) Now clean up the fan and if you have it, go ahead and apply a new coating of thermal paste (I love Arctic Silver.)
Arctic Silver (
http://www.arcticsilver.com)
Prolonged use dries out the original paste so a new layer will help you reduce heat in your laptop.
Next, see which type of RAM your laptop has and how much you have. If you have 2GB of RAM, you can safely increase it to at least 4GB (you can go higher if your OS is 64-bit since Windows 64bit OS'es can recognize more than 4GB of RAM.) Finding out your Motherboard type and other specifications will tell you how much RAM can be installed in your system (I upgraded mine from 2GB to 4GB.) When in doubt you can always try contacting the company and asking them directly the maximum supported RAM your laptop can work with. Questions to ask that I can think off:
1. How much maximum memory can my laptop have?
2. What are the minimum and maximum speeds that the motherboard can recognize for the RAM?
3. What type of RAM does it need? (144-Pin SO-DIMM, 200 Pin, 200-Pin DDR2, 204-Pin DDR3?)
After you get all the details, shop around online and go with the brand you are most comfortable with (price and performance wise.) My favorite companies are G.Skill, Kingston, Corsair, Patriot, Crucial and GeIL.
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| Mushkin RAM |
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| Kingston HyperX |
Or if you don't want to call, remove the cover and note down everything the RAMs say and just search for the RAM and look up what type it is and what speed it is and just buy the exact same speed RAM and you will be safe.
The next best thing you can do is to buy a new hard-drive. You can buy a SSD to boost speeds but might have to buy a smaller capacity SSD depending on your budget. SSDs are more expensive than conventional Hard Drives but give you faster speeds with more dependability (no moving parts equals to easier upkeep and potentially longer life.) Also they require lower power than conventional drives and as a result, lower your internal temperature, which in turn boosts life throughout the system.
If however you want more for your money, consider a Solid State Hybrid Drive which combines features from both a SSD and a HDD. A good one to consider would be the Momentus XT from Seagate (
http://www.seagate.com.)
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| A 500GB model is selling for ~US$ 79.99 |
You can then backup all your data from the older drive to the newer drive (there are several guides to show you how to do it.) Alternatively you can do a fresh install of your OS to the newer drive so that everything is as fast as it can be (backup all your data, documents, pictures,music, video etc on to a external storage in that case.)
If you are feeling more adventurous and want to try something totally new, why not try installing a Linux based OS. They are free to download and install and are getting much more user friendly with every new iteration. They will give you the fastest speeds and are a lot more stable and resource friendly (the downside being that you would have to spend sometime learning how to operate it.)
There are several flavors of Linux you can try, however the most popular ones are:
Ubuntu is one the most popular and user-friendly flavors of linux out there today. It also has a lot of variants (Kubuntu, Lubuntu etc.) and is very easy to install.
Archlinux is another popular OS that you can try.
Linux Mint is very popular as a beginner OS that you can try. It is based on Ubuntu and Debian so you can take advantage of packages from both distros and as such have a large number softwares to choose from.
I personally use Ubuntu and Linux Mint in my computers (Mint on Laptop, Ubuntu on Desktop.) They are easy to install and are easier to install software on. Go ahead and give it a try if you want to, your computer will thank you.
Well that is all for this post. Hope you liked it.
Kiyoshi Out!
