Upgrading my laptop

Round 3 - I want to break free!

http://myplc.com/sony/
Well, I'm going to upgrade my laptop a bit. Last... May(?) I put in a second stick of RAM taking it up to 384 MB. The second thing I did hardware wise was last August, when I swaped out the original DVD-ROM for a DVD/CD-RW (Didn't spring for the DVD burner, that's gonna wait until I get around to building a new desktop). Now I'm replacing the original 800 MHz Duron with a lower powered (25 W) 1 GHz Athlon. I'm also adding a wireless card to it, and hopefully I win the auction on Ebay for a second, larger battery. I'll have to see how much longer it runs on batteries afterwards. Right now, I can get about 45 mins, thanks to Sony's decision to use a CPU that doesn't support PowerNow! (AMD's power management software). Hopefully, after this is all done, I can run off of batteries for an extended period of time and use wireless networks here on campus. Sometime, I might get around to upgrading the hard drive to something bigger than the 10gig one I have now, but that's gonna wait.

In case anyone's interested:
PCG-FX210 out of the box:
AMD 800MHz Duron
128 MB RAM
10 GB HDD
1700 mAh battery

After my upgrades:
AMD 1.0GHz Athlon
384 MB RAM
10 GB HDD
4300 mAh battery (total)
802.11b Wireless

If everything works like I think, I'll break free of the wires

I’ve got to break free
I want to break free yeah

I want I want I want I want to break free....


Oh, if anyone else out there has an FX/FXA laptop, the link is to a excellent site I've found about upgrading these machines.
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Reply #1 Top
Good luck with it. As for the battery, check out the external batteries. You can often buy one of the 5 hour external battery packs for the same or less than a lower capacity internal. I bought mine at Best Buy and it has served me quite well. Relatively small and light, easily fits into the laptop case.