Upgrading old laptop - hard drive and wireless thingy...

As its gonna be a loooong while before i have money free for a new laptop, i need to upgrade a couple of bits on my trusty old (vintage of '05) acer.

I've done RAM previously, so know what i'm doing with that.

Hard drive is a the main issue....it has 2 x30gb at mo which are no where near sufficient. What do i need to know about swapping one or both.....somewhere up around 100gb will be sufficient. Have thought about an external, i have one for back up as it is, but wanna be able to move around the house without having to lug it around with the comp.

Other is it often drops its wireless connection, pretty sure its just not a very good card thingy in the comp as other computers used in household are fine, and its same story when at other locations. Again, what do i need to know?

 

2 HDD's in a laptop is not that common. I bet its one 60gb drive partitioned into 2 30gb partitions. It appears as 2 drive in my computer with differnet letters but they are both on the same drive.
Have a look in control panel under "Disk drives" to confirm if you have 1 or 2 drives.

 

Yep....only one listed - HTS421260H9AT00

 

And the other bit i need is a network adapter right? Currently is a 'Intel (R) PRO/wireless 2200BG'

 

Here is a list of compatible hard drives:

http://www.ebuyer.com/search?page=1&limit=10&store=33&cat=392&subcat=3262

Should be plug and play.

The wireless thing is a bit more tricky, so you'd be better off with a USB adapter, or ideally a PCMCIA card. If you want a PCMCIA one, I still have a couple. 10 for one posted. I might also have a USB one still, but would have to check.

 

What model of Acer laptop do you have? Upgrades are entirely dependant on the chipset in the motherboard. The processor makes a difference too. Pentium or Celeron? Or does it have a processor by AMD?

 

Its a travelmate 4070, has a pentium M....i know upgrades wont make it as good as a fancy new one, i just want to improve it a bit

 

THe hard drive is completely independent of the chipset, it's the type of drive that is important. He has a 2.5" x 9.5mm IDE hard drive, so any capacity 2.5" x 9.5mm IDE HDD will fit.

The wireless is generally built in to these, so that's a non-starter, hence using USB or PCMCIA is the simplest route.

 

whats the PCI card do then? same shape as this one - http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=110629454578&ssPageName=STRK:MEWAX:IT

 

yeah, thats whats in there john, had a look yest...two wire connection as you said

 

cool, cheers john (and everyone)

 

Correct, badly written by me. I did mean upgrades other than the hard drive. Manufacturers BIOS settings can also hinder things too.

I have experience with that Wireless card in older laptops and never had a problem. I have had machines where they had a poor processor (Celeron), were low on memory, hard drive full to bursting, spyware etc, that they struggled to run anything including operating the Wireless card software. After a reinstallation of Windows and upgraded where appropriate they were fine.

The maximum RAM you can have in this is 2GB and in theory you could upgrade the processor to a faster Pentium M (cheap secondhand). If you already have the maximum memory the processor upgrade is not worth doing. The Pentium M is fairly competent anyway.

 

Before i remove and replace the current HD, there's a couple of bits of software/drivers that i could do with saving on the external HD (such as for an ancient digital camera where i cant find it again online)....how do i go about doing that?

 

ok, got the network adapter and plugged it in, but upon turning the computer on its as though its not there.

have double checked it was in correctly and it appears to be....the only perhaps thing i can think of is the two little wires going to it. on the old one the white wire went to 'MAIN' and black to 'AUX'....on the new one they're only marked as 'J2' and 'J3', so i attached the wires so they were the same way round (i.e. white wire to left, black to right). could it be this? can i swap them safely?

 

nope, its as though its not plugged in.....have checked its all in correctly and it appears to be

 

you using windows to control wifi or the intel app? intel prog probably better.
i have some of those intel plug in wifi cards if you need one