tech/computer wizards

recently i bought a laptop from my sister gave her 80 quid for it becuase im nice, its a dell latitude d600 and isnt great tbh, it seems really slow and laggy so i deleted all usless crap on it and it made no real noticble diffrence :roll:

so im thinking about upgrading it, there is a video on youtube that showed me just how easy exhanging the cpu is, but i dont know what one to buy?


im not intrested in buying a diffrent computer would rather mess about with this one for a bit of fun, i dont want to spend over what i bought the laptop for making it better so there is a max 80 quid budget


also i want to play games on it so is it even possible to upgrade the graphics card/s :confused:


any help would be great :thumb:

Sounds like thats a really old laptop, unless google has misguided me. I wouldn't expect to be playing any 3D games made in the last 5 years or more on it. What version of windows is it running? how much RAM has it got? if its only got 256MB of memory for instance, then that will slow it down to a crawl as soon as you try and do anything. There will be a limit to how much you can upgrade the CPU, as the system will only accept a certain type, chances are you won't notice much if any difference from the fastest one you can put in there. A RAM upgrade and fresh install of windows (or some variety of linux if you feel like experimenting) is probably the best you can do for it.

Next page is from Dell support with specs:

http://support.dell.com/support/edoc...n/ug/specs.htm

You can upgrade the memory but I doubt you will still find either a compatible CPU or memory for it.
Graphics card should be onboard so no option on that...

We have eliminated our D630's more then 5 years ago so I don't think it's gonna give you much fun when playing games

gaming isnt a big want as i have a xbox would have been nice, but never mind


so is it not worth buying a better cpu ive seen them for 10 quid so thourght it would be worth a punt

its running windows xp right now

At least get vista lol

would the computer be able to support windows 7

Nothing wrong with XP, I still use it and Microsoft still makes updates for it, and its less demanding on hardware than later versions. You'll be lucky to notice any difference with a CPU change, as most software won't run any better, so its generally wasted money. Right click on the My Computer icon, choose properties, then see how much RAM it has, anything under 512mb isn't really going to be enough.

it says 512 mb of ram, what is ram anyway?

Random Access Memory, simply put where your computers CPU does all its workings out :)
Every bit of software like web browsers and even Windows itself uses up a portion of RAM to operate, so the more you have the better. Once the RAM starts getting filled up, when you have lots of software running, then Windows uses the hard drive as virtual RAM, which is much slower. You can tell when this is happening as the hard drive light will be flashing like mad and the computer slows down a lot.

If you press Ctrl Alt and Delete at the same time, then click on performance, you can see how much of the RAM is currently being used. Even when you've just booted up the laptop you'll find Windows has used up a big chunk of RAM, before you've even done anything.