Refurbishing an old laptop for little cost

Lennys_Shinpad

Hello all,

I am currently trying to refurbish an old laptop I have. I want to do this for as little as possible because new laptops are so cheap nowadays. The laptop is a Compaq Armada, which has a 500MHz processor and 128MB RAM and runs on Windows XP. So far I have bought a 512MB RAM stick for £12 and am hoping that will speed it up considerably. Does anybody have any other suggestions of how to speed it up (preferably without having to spend any money)?

Also, the laptop has a constant buzzing noise, which I am guessing is something to do with the fan. I am thinking of opening the laptop up and cleaning all the parts with dry air. Does this sound like a good idea? Are there any other suggestions of how to tackle this buzzing problem (new fan?)?

Thanks,

Lenny.

Dime_Bar

If you are happy about opening the laptop a clean would not go a miss, but take some antistatic precautions please.

As for other things to do, do you have an xp disk ( home or pro depending on what licence?) if so I would recommend a fresh install.

if you do these things and dont try and do too much it will run just fine.

tom9980

You need to think about the following

Who will be using the laptop?
What will they use it for?
Will the laptop require any special software?

Personally i would ditch XP unless you need it for certain software and install Linux which is free to download, install open offfice for documents and firefox as a browser it will work much better and faster than using XP. But it all depends on what you use it for.

As for the strange noise its either the fan or electrical its not that easy to open laptops very tricky sometimes depending on the make/model.

isofa

For a small modest outlay a larger HD will make a definite improvement, as will a fresh clean install of XP.

Try www.scan.co.uk for HDs - an 80Gb can be can for £32 and a 120Gb for £38!

Direct link to laptop HDs at Scan.

However the biggest speed issue is that it's only 500Mhz - so you'll be fairly limited on the improvements you can really make.

Lennys_Shinpad

tom9980 wrote: »

You need to think about the following

Who will be using the laptop?
What will they use it for?
Will the laptop require any special software?

I am refurbishing the laptop for my girlfriend to use so that I can use the new one (I am very selfish).

It will only need Office, Firefox and and operating system - no special software whatsoever.

I have a copy of windows XP which I could install but I thought Windows 2000 would use less of my (limited) processing power. Is this right?

jaydeeuk1

Norra lorra difference between 2k and XP really in terms of resources. You could use windows 98 SE, just make sure you have a good firewall and virus checker, install the unofficial service pack and only use firefox and you should be fine. Will run a lot quicker than XP or 2k too.

chunter

I would go with XP, with SP2 for 2 reasons
1) Because Win2000 has no firewall, you'll need ZoneAlarm or similiar which can be a bit of a donkey starting.
2) Wireless works on XP SP2 with no additional software. Again cuts down on 3rd party wireless software in the background.

Also, i would agree with a new hard disk if it's the orginal disk that's still installed.
A 500 MHz P3 machine would make it about 6-8 year old with the odd dodgy sector and therefore may slow down your read/write times.

Lennys_Shinpad

Thanks for all the replies. Think I'll do the following (for now):

- Upgrade the RAM
- Clean the insides (taking static precautions)
- Install to Windows XP
- Defragment the Hard Drive

If it runs a lot better I'll leave it there. If not I'll buy a new hard drive (cheers for the link to Scan BTW).

Cheers,

Lenny.

tom9980

Lennys_Shinpad wrote: »

I am refurbishing the laptop for my girlfriend to use so that I can use the new one (I am very selfish).

It will only need Office, Firefox and and operating system - no special software whatsoever.

I have a copy of windows XP which I could install but I thought Windows 2000 would use less of my (limited) processing power. Is this right?

Yup it will use less but if you want a futher boost use linux, Ubuntu 8.04 is pretty good and will run at that spec much better than 2000 or XP. Open office will let her use documents and MS formats and firefox of course.

http://www.openoffice.org/
http://www.ubuntu.com/

Lennys_Shinpad

tom9980 wrote: »

Yup it will use less but if you want a futher boost use linux, Ubuntu 8.04 is pretty good and will run at that spec much better than 2000 or XP. Open office will let her use documents and MS formats and firefox of course.

I had thought about installing Ubuntu but the system requirements state that I would need a 700MHz processor:

http://www.easy-ubuntu-linux.com/ubuntu-system-requirements.html

I have a copy of Ubuntu, which I could install. Alternatively, I could install Xubuntu, which requires 500MHz.

I didn't know that Open Office let's you use MS formats. I think this will be the way to go.

Thanks,

Lenny.

[Deleted User]

Use Fedora version 8, it's minimum requirement is a 400mhz processor.

I've just had Fedora 9 dropped on my desk for a project I've got to work on*sigh*