Toshiba equium laptop upgrade?

bryanb

I have an Equium with 60G hard drive and 1G RAM. I want to install 500G HD and 4G RAM. Is this a possibility? Might the extra capacity cause overheating? Anything else? Is it worth doing on a 4 year old laptop? Thanks for any advice.

alanwjones

Go to the crucial site and download the scanner which will show what the maximum ram your system will take, http://www.crucial.com/uk/systemscanner/?click=true, would an external 2.5" harddrive do the job rather than upgrading what's in the laptop now?

bryanb

Thanks Alan, found that it will support 4G RAM.
Not sure though whether an ext drive will do it. I'm using a VHS to DVD programme. it would not write direct to D drive, I had to go to C and write from there to D.
Presumably it wouldn't write direct to an E drive either.

John_Gray

Why do you think that you need 4 GB of RAM for (presumably) XP? Even if you could fit it, don't forget that 32-bit operating systems can only make use of about 3 GB of RAM.

As to fitting a 500 GB hard disk internally instead of a 60 GB one, I also think you are being a bit optimistic... You'd have to completely reinstall Windows and all the programs you've installed, and possibly telephone Microsoft to get Windows reactivated.

bryanb

Thanks John, wasn't aware that XP could only support 3GB RAM. I'll reconsider, it has 2 of 512 MB at the moment, maybe swap one for 2GB to give 2.5GB
I knew a re-instal of Windows would be needed, but thought a recovery disc would handle it. Would you suggest perhaps 250GB hard disc?

closed

whats wrong with the 1GB you have already?

victor2

closed wrote: »

whats wrong with the 1GB you have already?

My thoughts also. 1 Gb of memory is usually plenty for XP. Maybe XP just needs reinstalling and/or cleaning up.
If your application will only write files to drive C:, maybe that needs upgrading as well - or replacing. Presumably you've got equipment hooked into the laptop providing video input from VHS tapes and writing to a DVD image. Wouldn't mind betting there's some freeware out there that will do the job and let you choose where it outputs to.
I'd consider an external drive and just reserve the C: drive for XP.

Hammyman

Regarding the hard drive. If yours is a model with an IDE drive, you're not going to have much luck finding a 500GB 2.5" IDE drive.

bryanb

Thanks all, I'll reconsider in the light of your posts.

stilltheone

bryanb wrote: »

Thanks all, I'll reconsider in the light of your posts.

What is the full model number of your machine? e.g. PS********

I'll let you know what you can best expect.

An upgrade may still be worthwhile. For instance a larger hard drive and a clean install without the usual extra software bundled with the Toshiba.

AHAR

This command line tool will allow you to create a junction point on your c: drive which appears as a directory on that drive but actually points to a different location of your choice e.g. a folder on your d: drive. That should hopefully sort your VHS to DVD program problem.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/sysinternals/bb896768.aspx

Your hard drive will need to be in NTFS format for that to work.