Buy New, or Upgrade?

Which way do you go?

This week I had a client (whom I'll call "Joe") who has a diagnostic device that requires a serial port on a computer to plug into. For a long time he had been using a Compaq laptop, circa 2004, which had, as many laptops of the day, a serial port.

Well, Joe's laptop has definitely seen better days. The battery was toast and the hard drive was just about shot, but salvageable. It could use more ram too at only 768 megs. Adequate, but not great.

At this point, Joe is asking what it costs to replace all this stuff and I do a quick check and it would normally be well over 3 or 4 hundred dollars with labour and taxes. He figures he could put that money into a new machine instead of fixing up the old one. But a new one could be $600 and up after all is said and done. Then a person would need to purchase some sort of adaptor to turn USB into a Serial port. Unfortunately, there are potential issues with these adaptors and not ALL serial port devices will work through them. There was a chance Joe could spend several hundred dollars getting a new maching, only to find out later his usb/serial device works but it sometimes is flaky or inaccurate, or slow, or stops responding.

To upgrade, a new 160 gig drive to replace the 40 gig is about 80 bucks or so. As for a new battery, I called one place and they wanted $178!!!! I was a bit shocked. I called another place and was able to get one sent to me for about $80. Pretty good deal compared to the first quote, that's for sure. To max out the ram on that laptop would be about 130 bucks and bring it up to two gigs of ram. Great for Windows XP.

Since Joe didn't have much money we decided to upgrade, but not everything; just the hard drive and battery. These are the two most critical things. The ram can wait. So we ghosted over his old drive to a new one and replaced the battery, and now it runs like it was new. Joe is happy.

If Joe is happy, I'M happy.

Upgrading Your Laptop

Most people think laptops are better because they are smaller and take up less space. This is certainly a selling feature of a laptop but there are limitations to laptops of which you should be aware.

Firstly, laptops are meant to be portable, not durable. Meaning, of course, they cannot take much in the way of punishment. If you drop it, there's a good chance it's toast.

Secondly, laptops are not very upgradeable. About the only things you can upgrade in a laptop is the hard drive and the RAM. You will not be upgrading the CPU or the video card.

In my line of work where I repair a lot of computers, a laptop really does me no good. I can't hook up someone else's drive to my laptop, I can not test their RAM or back up their data. But for someone who is on the go all the time and they need their computer, a laptop is awesome!

If you are going to attempt to upgrade either the RAM or the hard drive in your laptop, always remember to remove all sources of power so you don't accidently short anything out. Remove the battery and unplug the laptop before upgrading anything. It doesn't take much to render a stick of RAM inoperable with a static charge. Try to be standing on cement floor or wear a wrist strap and have it attached to ground.