Switching memory between laptops

[sniper991122]

I've got a significant amount of desktop experience, built my past 2 and have been swapping parts since I was in middle school.

Laptops however are foreign territory to me in regards to the hardware. I've got a gateway computer with vista on it and its painfully slow due to not having much memory. I've also got a broken HP laptop with XP on it (about a year and 3 months old). I'm planning on taking apart the broken one first to get a feel for taking apart a laptop and then this gateway and adding the memory from the HP to the gateway.

Is this possible? Like I said I'm unfamiliar with laptops so im not sure if memory would be proprietary in size or something that would make it not fit properly. This is also assuming that its the same type of memory...

 

[RedLancerOz]

first you'd have to find out if the memory is the same , if so its rather simple you only have to take one screw out on the bottom of the laptop an bam the ram is there an it pops out

do a quick run of cpu-z an see if its the same speed or comparable , most laptops from the factor come with both slots used up

 

[sniper991122]

edit - slot 1 is full, slot 2 is empty good news, now I just hope they are the same

I'll run cpu-z on this laptop but I can't do that on the other one since it is well.. broken I'll probably just take it apart to figure out the inside of the laptop and what not.

One other question, there are some things on the other laptops hard drive that I'm looking to get off there. Can I just take out the hard drive and temporarily 'sit' it in my desktop while I swap some files? I'm sure its obviously smaller and wont fit in the traditional drive bay but I'm hoping I can just rest it in there till I get what I need.

 

[Zero82z]

If the laptop HD you want to pull the files from is SATA, which it probably is, then you can do what you suggested. If for some reason it's an IDE drive you'll need an adapter, although I'm pretty sure most if not all HP notebooks made in the past 1.5-2 years or so use SATA drives.