Upgrade Dell Laptop

prowla

You can upgrade the CPU in those, also have up to 4 GB RAM, and maybe an SSD.
You can also replace the CD/DVD drive with a 2nd hard disk if you like.
But fundamentally it still is an aging budget model.

Gloomendoom

As Nifty said, a simple and free clean install of the OS would very likely give it a substantial kick up the bum, performance wise.

simon.griggs

Hi JB,


It sounds as if your Daughter's laptop has a 160GB Hard Drive in it, and if it is loaded up with Music and Photos, it will make the machine appear sluggish in operation. It is also possible that the drive has slowed down due to ageing, I had a few examples of that running Business Laptops of a similar vintage.


However, it is possible to improve things. 3GB of RAM should be enough for the sort of things your Daughter is doing, but a new hard drive would be one of your answers. If you buy a Hard Drive from the likes of Seagate or Western Digital, they both have software available to clone your old drive onto a new one. This process should take a couple of hours, but you need either a USB Caddy to take the new hard drive, plugged into the laptop or another machine that you can connect the old and the new drive to. Run the software and follow the prompts and you should be able to just replace the new hard drive into your laptop and have a load more free space to work with. You could as Prowla suggests get an SSD which will read and write data quicker, but you would need to install a second drive realistically not to run into the same problems you are having.


As for the battery, they usually die after a few years, but replacements are not expensive, go here for one example for less than a tenner, http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/New-5200mAh-Battery-for-Dell-Inspiron-1525-1526-1440-1545-1546-1750-GW240-X284G-/151696041213?pt=LH_DefaultDomain_3&hash=item2351c9e4fd


If you want any further assistance, please feel free to PM me or email [EMAIL="simon@griggs.co.uk"]simon@griggs.co.uk[/EMAIL]


Regards


Simon G

prowla

Actually, that's a point; these laptops do slow down when the battery is past its best.

(Hard disks don't slow down as they get older though...)

enfield_freddy

J_B wrote: »

Pretty well, yes - 115 of 148 used



No D partition


148 GB, see above

just a thought , go to disc management and check if there is in fact a hidden partition , that has not been assigned a drive letter , I appreciate it might only be small ,and used for recovery reasons , but I think the OP said they had a restore disc?

bsod

Turning into an oxbow lake of a thread - rmg1 hit the nail on the head 8 minutes after the question was posed.

Remove the battery, if there is no immediate change in the performance, just re-install before the lake hits the sea. The machine doesn't need upgrading, and the disk is nowhere near full.

If it needs to be used off the mains for long periods, download batteryinfoview to check the wear level and capacity of the battery, it gives far more useful detail than any Windows or Dell utility. A loose power connection can sometimes send the battery monitoring system doolally, ie never seemingly charging to 100% - if this is happening a few drain to 30% and charge to 100% cycles can sometimes kick it back into shape.

Batteries, hard disks, video cards, cmos batteries and every other part of a computer do not slow down with age, ever. Music and photo's do not slow a machine down, ever. These are both "someone told me's" that have been doing the rounds and causing unnecessary expenditure for the last 20 years.

If a battery or hard disk was so faulty that it caused a software slowdown, the machine would be unusable, totally unresponsive for long periods, (and in the case of a hard disk fault show other symptoms like bsod's), not just a little sluggish. Removing the battery cures one of those symptoms immediately, and chkdsk can identify (and sometimes alleviate) the other. Both of these causes are incredibly rare compared to software gremlins.

It doesn't need more ram/an ssd/new processor/a second drive/another utility or scanner. It doesn't need replacing

It does need the same thing that 99% of the worlds 3-5 year old machines need, a recovery disc or partition, and somewhere to backup to, (if you wish to save the data first that is).

Dells of that era in their original state usually came with a recovery partition (at least 9GB, and a 100MB or so diagnostic oem partition), as freddy pointed out, both should be visible in disk management if still there, but it shipped on 11/3/2010 with a

HARD DRIVE : 500GB SERIAL ATA (5400RPM)

installed.

along with mcafee, (replaced with something else?)

If the sluggishness feels like the whole machine, but is actually concentrated in one particular application, for example a web browser, then a browser re-install or reset browser settings/profile to defaults may cure it

Jivesinger

bsod wrote: »

Music and photo's do not slow a machine down, ever.

Maybe not an issue for the OP, but if you add music and photos to a disk until you've used up 99.99% of the disk space, I pretty much guarantee you that the machine will slow down.

grumpycrab

Oxbow lakes...is this a geography forum;)
Backup data (music, docs, pics). Email can be a pain. If DD2 accesses email via web-browser then not a problem; just check this first.

Go for a restore...if factory partition is present you'll soon find out...
http://www.dell.com/support/article/us/en/19/DSN_362066?c=us&s=gen&cs=4&l=en

prowla

bsod wrote: »

Batteries, hard disks, video cards, cmos batteries and every other part of a computer do not slow down with age, ever. Music and photo's do not slow a machine down, ever. These are both "someone told me's" that have been doing the rounds and causing unnecessary expenditure for the last 20 years.

These Dell computers do slow down when the batteries go; I have one of these (and have had a similar 1525 model), and they became unusable with the battery dead, and was fixed with a new battery.

Whilst is is true that CPU & RAM do not slow down, it may well be that the software's demands increase in line with evolving processor & memory speeds, therefore the system's perceived/relative performance may be less. In the case of these particular models it is possible to upgrade the CPU (I've done that), and more memory can/does improve performance.

Hard disks don't in themselves start to work slower (ie. they leave the factory running at 5400 rpm, and they run at 5400 rpm till the day they die), but the
filesystem on them can and will degrade as they fill up, with fragmentation, and errors. The above can usually be fixed with a disk check & defrag, or a reinstall can be done as a new-broom approach.

So the above should not be simply dismissed as urban myths.

prowla

Actually, another thought occurred to me - it's worth checking whether there are two virus checkers installed; I've seen situations where that has happened, and they work against each other.