Upgrading LG laptop

[korrupt]

Hello all,

I currently have an LG LS50a laptop, its nothing special but its still in good working order and i like the screen and keyboard etc... I want to upgrade it though cause its going a little bit slow... Its currently got a 80gb harddrive, 1.6ghz pentium M processor, 2x256 mb of sdram ddr2600 333mhz. Not sure what motherboard but i don't know if it has a video card. Its currently got vista ultimate installed on it so that might be making it a little slow as well. Do you think if I reformat it with XP wether it will run significantly faster? It hasn't got a lot of crap on it though...

One option is to upgrade the RAM, I think the Harddrive is stuffed as well cause when I'm watching movies it sorta skips every couple of seconds but the sound keeps going, so I'd have to replace that too. I can only find PC3200 VS 1GB DDR 400mhz though, is this suitable to go with the excisting mobo and cpu etc?

Other option is to replace the whole lot... cpu, mobo, hdd and RAM...

But... are all the motherboards set up the same, as in are the outputs all in the same place so that i could just swap them straight over. Also, my excisting laptop has inbuild wireless, is this on the motherboard? In which case i would need to get a motherboard with wireless... What about the video card? It says it currently has mobility radeon 9200... Is this a seperate card in which case i would need to upgrade that too or is it build in?

What sort of a cpu would i need? I want something with reasonable performance that doesn't drain the battery... Does it need to be laptop specific or could I just put a Core 2 duo in there for example?

As I said i need reasonable performance but nothing fancy as its mostly gonna be used for browsing the net and university work, nothing like games... Only other thing I might use is photoshop or that sort of thing, but nothing real intense...

Any replies would be really appreciated!!

Thanks,

Korrupt

 

[lamo]

this model of lg laptop has 855GM\PM chipset. it can hadle up to 320GB HDD and 2gb of RAM. videochip(mobility radeon 9700,sandwich type) can present or not, it depends on model of laptop. LCD screen, afaik, may be replaced to screen with higher resolution(SXGA+), you should check the cable for the presence of both LVDS channels, if so, then you can upgrade your XGA+ LCD-screen to SXGA+.

 

[korrupt]

Thanks very much for your reply.

What I am thinking is to just upgrade the ram, probably want to put 2gb in there, will that make a mayor difference to the performance or will it be bottlenecked at say 1gb?

What type of Ram can i put in there? Would pc3200 work ok? Or is that too fast?

Thanks again for your reply,

Korrupt

 

[lamo]

you can only try to change the module and see if the unit will start.

 

[korrupt]

There must be some way to find out what RAM it will take... I'm not going to buy it and then find out it wont work!!

Thanks for your reply,

Korrupt

 

[kimsland]

Memory: 1024MB (DDR 333MHz)
Maximum 2Gig

 

[korrupt]

Thank you.

Do you recon it'll improve the performance a lot of i upgrade to 2gb or will I still get a pretty good performance increase if i upgrade to 1gb?

Thanks again for your reply,

korrupt

 

[raybay]

I don't find the LG LS50a in my book. Is that the actual model number?
You should be able to use DDR PC3200 (400 MHz), but some of those LG boards are inflexible and will only allow PC2700 (333 MHz)... and sometimes you cannot tell, except by trying the PC3200 because ratings and memory folks are reluctant to post a higher memory if LG does not first do so.
Be aware that prices are shooting up rapidly for both types of laptop memory as neither is bing manufactured any longer.

 

[raybay]

Depends on what tasks you are asking of your LG.
Generally, more memory is always better, but you won't have serious failures with 1 GB unless you are into high level photo editing, images, video graphics with motion, or gaming. You will notice a difference if you watch DVD movies or related materials. You will find some software tasks run faster and better, with less corruption. Better file transfers, for instance. But you may find it difficult to detect the difference in most computer tasks.