Really old laptop- mod or get rid of it?

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higney85

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Mar 10, 2004
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My dad has an old sony pcg 505FX and this thing is SLOW.. its got a 266mhz pentium, 64mb ram, onboard video, and a 4GB HD. It is the one with a 12" screen and no CD or floppy built in. My dad has a couple desktops and a server to use at the house but he is a pilot and travels extensively and only uses his laptop for checking stocks, e-mails, surfing the web, and word processing. He has run out of room on his HD and complains that his computer is really slow. He does not want to buy a new laptop yet, but would like a performance boost. He can max his ram out at 96mb for about $40 and I imagine I can find a HD for $100 (maybe a 5400rpm 10-20GB) For $150 is it worth it or should he give up now? Also would a 5400rpm benefit him over a 4200? He loves the laptop because it never gets hot, weighs a pound, and has good battery life.
 
I'm surprised he's hung onto it as long as he has. I doubt that he will notice that much of a change between a 4500 and 5400 hard drive. The memory is what's really holding him back.

Being a pilot, I'm surprised he hasn't jumped on the wireless bandwagon. Just about every airport has wireless access these days, and in my opinion, it's worth upgrading for.

Slimness and long battery life can be had for under 1200 bucks, if you catch a sale, and he would probably be more happy with a brand new computer than stuck with the old slow one.

That being said, if he has a cdrom attachment, try throwing linux or win 2000 on there and see how it works. You might get a performance boost that way.
 
He should look into an iBook. They are easy to use, kinda fast, and wireless. Plus 6hrs on battery is pretty sweet.

OSX is a great OS compaired to the early Mac OS's which sucked.
 
Odds are it uses the smallest 2.5 drive out, I don't remember the exact sizes, but seems like there were 7.5mm, 12.5mm and 17mm 2.5 drives, being a small and light, the 7.5 is probably the drive that fits that system, 12.5 is the most common tho.

If it works for what he needs, yea, I'd throw some memory at it, a bigger drive... but first, ever run spybot or adaware on it? odds are they will find some problems and clear them out. Good for a speedup on most systems.
 
Originally posted by higney85
My dad has an old sony pcg 505FX and this thing is SLOW.. its got a 266mhz pentium, 64mb ram, onboard video, and a 4GB HD. It is the one with a 12" screen and no CD or floppy built in. My dad has a couple desktops and a server to use at the house but he is a pilot and travels extensively and only uses his laptop for checking stocks, e-mails, surfing the web, and word processing. He has run out of room on his HD and complains that his computer is really slow. He does not want to buy a new laptop yet, but would like a performance boost. He can max his ram out at 96mb for about $40 and I imagine I can find a HD for $100 (maybe a 5400rpm 10-20GB) For $150 is it worth it or should he give up now? Also would a 5400rpm benefit him over a 4200? He loves the laptop because it never gets hot, weighs a pound, and has good battery life.
Click to expand...

Well for those purposes - it should be fine - esepecially with upgraded ram. Are you sure it can only handle 96MB? I've never seen a computer with a 96MB RAM limit. I'd also reccomend a resh install of windows 98SE - that should speed things up a bunch. Also if you're looking for a hard drive - I have a 40GB 4200RPM 9.5mm that I'd let you have for less than $100.
 
I left out a few details in my original post.. He has a wireless PCMCIA card that works well for him. He has a attachable CD and floppy drive. I have already put win2000 on it. As far as ram he has 64mb right now. From all I have found there is 32mb non-removeable and 2 slots for a max of 32 each. The sony uses SDRAM but I cannot find specs. I have just found a few sites with "upgrade kits" that use 2 32mb sticks in addition to the nonremovable for 96mb total. I have only seem a max limit of 96mb. I have a a couple 40GB 4200's at my disposal- I am just wondering if 5400 would help more. It uses the standard notebook HD's...
 
where could I find ram for this thing? I have only been able to find upgrade kits. I imagine these use PC100 sdram sodimms?
 
i had a 266 dell i used for 3 years, i was thinking about takin out the cpu and puttin in a 466 (higest that i could get) and maxin out the ram.
but why put good $ into something thats not worth it.

If ya wana mod it i would say just make it look cool, paint it, do other things to it.

save your $
 
I'll buy it... how much do you want, shipped? I see $150, what does that include? Brick and battery?

Any dead pixels? How's the battery?

I'd love to have it.
 
Originally posted by higney85
My dad has an old sony pcg 505FX and this thing is SLOW.. its got a 266mhz pentium, 64mb ram, onboard video, and a 4GB HD. It is the one with a 12" screen and no CD or floppy built in. My dad has a couple desktops and a server to use at the house but he is a pilot and travels extensively and only uses his laptop for checking stocks, e-mails, surfing the web, and word processing. He has run out of room on his HD and complains that his computer is really slow. He does not want to buy a new laptop yet, but would like a performance boost. He can max his ram out at 96mb for about $40 and I imagine I can find a HD for $100 (maybe a 5400rpm 10-20GB) For $150 is it worth it or should he give up now? Also would a 5400rpm benefit him over a 4200? He loves the laptop because it never gets hot, weighs a pound, and has good battery life.
Click to expand...

By him a new one, and put Linux on it for yourself...
 
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