upgrading an old laptop

[ndeniche]

i have this really old laptop, a toshiba satellite M20, which has become obsolete over the years... it's got 223 ram, 30gig HDD, centrino... so i was thinking in upgrading the pc's motherboard, processor and ram... is that possible? and if it is, is it adviceable?

[jbennet]

motherboard : definately not
cpu: probably not
ram: alsmost certainly yes

some ram will make wonders. i had a similar machine (ibm thinkpad with a pentium 3 and 30gb hdd) and i upgraded it from 128mb to 512mb and it works very well for office tasks, internet etc...

[ndeniche]

yeah... that's the best solution, i guess... i'll check my ram's compatibility...

now, why is it not recommendable changing its motherboard?

[jbennet]

laptop ones are custom to that model - the only time you can ever replace a laptop motherboard is to swap it with one from an identical laptop e.g if it breaks (my motherboard broke in an ibm laptop so i ebayed an identical one with a broken screen and then salvaged the motherboard from it)

and as for cpu, the laptops are specifically desgned for the heat/airflow/power requirements of the cpu they ship with . laptops do not like change

[jwenting]

and most laptops have their CPUs soldered in place rather than using pop-in sockets in order to save space.
While you can desolder electronic components and solder in replacements that's extremely tricky when dealing with even simple SMD components like resistors, CPUs have so many contacts so close together it's almost impossible to do without the specialised dies and other equipment of the manufacturer service centers.

The best use for old laptops is as a small server. Buy a new laptop and stuff the old one under your bed or couch with maybe some external harddisks attached, running Linux or Solaris, and use them as a file server, mailserver, and/or other server.

[jbennet]

yeah thats what i did

i have an old compaq (pentium 3 downclocked to 633mhz with 128mb ram) - i hacked off the screen and remounted it inside one of those rack trays that are meant for server keyboards. Runs FreeBSD

[jermaghs07]

yeah... that's the best solution, i guess... i'll check my ram's compatibility...

now, why is it not recommendable changing its motherboard?

Even if you could upgrade the mobo, it takes a very experienced tech to put it all back together right.

plus laptop mobo's are EXPENSIVE!!!!!