Upgrading The Impossible

Yes, I am serious about this

Published on March 14, 2006 By PoSmedley In Personal Computing

My Brother-In-Law has asked me to see what I could do with his laptop. Let me rephrase that. he has asked me to see if I could do something other than throw it out. It's a Compaq presario 1245, about 7 years old. It has a 3GB 2.5" EIDE Internal hard drive and 32mb memory card. (I'll wait while you laugh.)

Okay...now I have found a 'refurbished' hard drive 20GB for under 40 ( I told him he wouldn't really need more than 20GB, and all the ones I found under 20 cost about as much), but know nothing about 'refurbished' drives. New ones for around 60. He will be running Win200, and not doing anything special, just surfing. He wants it for when he is out of town.

The memory is 32mb SyncDRAM. Now I have found memory from 17.99 for 128 to 39.99 for the same. Is there a difference between a memory card for a laptop and a notebook? As far as actaully 'fitting' it in the notebook?

Aside from the obvious...he needed me to put WIN2000 on it (it had 98 first version) so he could install an ethernet card and a wireless card. I told him there wasn't enough room with win200 to even add a virus program, let alone anything else. So he needs a bigger hard drive, and I told him upgrading the memory would be a good idea as well, though the memory upgrade max's out at 160mb.

Questions..
1. Is it worth the price of a 'new' hard drive (considering how old it is), or should I go with the refurbished?
2. Is it a SDRAM memory stick I want, and does it have to be 'notebook' specific?
3. Would an external harddrive or flashdrive (I don't know anything about flashdrives, so forgive me if that was stupid to ask) be a better option?

Basically, looking for the best way to do this for him.

Any help is apreciated. Thanks.
Po'

Comments (Page 2)

PoSmedley

on Mar 17, 2006

Thank you, scorpio-logic. based on that, and after telling him what you said, he's going to have me install a 40gbHD that is new from Seagate and 128MB memory stick. And thanks for clearing up the memory thing. I wanted to be sure I would be trying to install the correct one so I didn't damage his notebook.

How do you run XP with only a 4GB HD. His is 3.2GB. I loaded WIN2000 on it, Office2000, and only had aprx. 500mb of space left. When I tried to do the MS update, I had to put in service pack3 so he could do updates at all. After that, there wasn't even room for a virus program and the Defragmentor said there wasn't enough space left to defragment.

My wife runs Win2000 at work on a 2GB HD and has all kinds of crap on her PC with no problems. I didn't forsee any when I put it on his notebook.

So, may I ask...when I install Win2000 on the new HD..
It's Win2000 PRO
WHich format...FAT32 or NTFS?
Should I install SP3 and SP4?
I know that IE will have to upgraded. I think it only has IE 5 on the disk.

Thanks again SL! I really needed that info!

PoSmedley

on Mar 17, 2006

Thank you, scorpio-logic. based on that, and after telling him what you said, he's going to have me install a 40GBHD that is new from Seagate and 128MB (it has 32MB intergrated and can only be upgraded to 160MB..only one available slot) memory stick. And thanks for clearing up the memory thing. I wanted to be sure I would be trying to install the correct one so I didn't damage his notebook.

How do you run XP with only a 4GB HD. His is 3.2GB. I loaded WIN2000 on it, Office2000, and only had aprx. 500mb of space left. When I tried to do the MS update, I had to put in service pack3 so he could do updates at all. After that, there wasn't even room for a virus program and the Defragmentor said there wasn't enough space left to defragment.

My wife runs Win2000 at work on a 2GB HD and has all kinds of crap on her PC with no problems. I didn't forsee any when I put it on his notebook.

So, may I ask...when I install Win2000 on the new HD..
It's Win2000 PRO
WHich format...FAT32 or NTFS?
Should I install SP3 and SP4?
I know that IE will have to upgraded. I think it only has IE 5 on the disk.

Thanks again SL! I really needed that info!

PoSmedley

on Mar 17, 2006

Thank you, scorpio-logic. based on that, and after telling him what you said, he's going to have me install a 40GBHD that is new from Seagate and 128MB (it has 32MB intergrated and can only be upgraded to 160MB..only one available slot) memory stick. And thanks for clearing up the memory thing. I wanted to be sure I would be trying to install the correct one so I didn't damage his notebook.

How do you run XP with only a 4GB HD. His is 3.2GB. I loaded WIN2000 on it, Office2000, and only had aprx. 500mb of space left. When I tried to do the MS update, I had to put in SP3 so he could do updates at all. After that, there wasn't even room for a virus program and the Defragmentor said there wasn't enough space left to defragment.

My wife runs Win2000 at work on a 2GB HD and has all kinds of crap on her PC with no problems. I didn't forsee any when I put it on his notebook.

So, may I ask...when I install Win2000 on the new HD..
It's Win2000 PRO
WHich format...FAT32 or NTFS?
Should I install SP3 and SP4?
I know that IE will have to upgraded. I think it only has IE 5 on the disk.

Thanks again SL! I really needed that info!

PoSmedley

on Mar 17, 2006

Thank you, scorpio-logic. based on that, and after telling him what you said, he's going to have me install a 40GBHD that is new from Seagate and 128MB (it has 32MB intergrated and can only be upgraded to 160MB..only one available slot) memory stick. And thanks for clearing up the memory thing. I wanted to be sure I would be trying to install the correct one so I didn't damage his notebook.

How do you run XP with only a 4GB HD. His is 3.2GB. I loaded WIN2000 on it, Office2000, and only had aprx. 500mb of space left. When I tried to do the MS update, I had to put in SP3 so he could do updates at all. After that, there wasn't even room for a virus program and the Defragmentor said there wasn't enough space left to defragment.

My wife runs Win2000 at work on a 2GB HD and has all kinds of crap on her PC with no problems. I didn't forsee any when I put it on his notebook.

So, may I ask...when I install Win2000 on the new HD..
It's Win2000 PRO
WHich format...FAT32 or NTFS?
Should I install SP3 and SP4?
I know that IE will have to upgraded. I think it only has IE 5 on the disk.

Thanks again SL! I really needed that info!

PoSmedley

on Mar 17, 2006

SON OF A NUTCRACKER!!!!!!
sorry about the multiple posts. I kept getting a timed out error.

Corky_O

on Mar 17, 2006

WHich format...FAT32 or NTFS?

Suggest using NTFS if available, due to the cluster size being smaller, and therefore the operations on the disk will be more efficient.

Should I install SP3 and SP4?

Go with SP4 if you can, due to better USB 2.0 support, as well as just getting better support all around.

Note - assuming the hard drive is recognized as the full 40 GB, you should be good to go with Win200 Pro. If for some reason the drive is recognized as a smaller drive (lower than 10 GB), you can always use a partition utility to create multiple partitions which can be recognized. Then you can install the OS and programs on the first partition, and set up data partitions with the balance.

As Scorpio said, the 128 is your best bet, and is supported by the MoBo.

From the specs I saw on Compaq site, you can probably make a reasonably workable machine for fairly cheap.

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