Laptop question

[mummytothree]

So we have an "older" laptop (it's a Compaq and we bought it in early 2006) at the time we bought it is was a spur of the moment purchase and "the right price". Well about 15 months after we bought it the screen went kaput and we just left it. It was going to be like $200 bucks to fix it and honestly we got a much better/bigger laptop (160 GH HD and 3GB of RAM) for like $350.

Well last week after doing some searching on eBay we found a screen for the old laptop for $60 bucks brand new still in the HP packaging...well we couldn't pass it up so we ordered it and DH replaced it and it's working GREAT!!

Now the only problem is this "old laptop" only has a 60GB HD and only 512MB of RAM. Now I know we can upgrade the RAM (at least I think we can we've done it many time on my desktop) but what I'm wondering is there any way to upgrade the actual HD? Like for my desktop we just installed an additional 320GB internal HD....can you do that with laptops or do you have to buy a whole new HD or am i stuck getting an external HD (I'd prefer an internal since I have a grabby one year old and another grabby one on the way :D)??

Thanks ladies!!

[Joan]

Yeah, I've had the HD replaced on my old PowerBook a couple times (did you know dropping your laptop is apparently bad? :D). I think most laptops you can replace the HD in relatively easily. There may be limits on how big you can go depending on what's available that's compatible and what it will accomodate, but you should be able to bump your storage space up a fair bit I'd expect.

[mummytothree]

Thank Joan so it would be a replacement, right? There is not "extra slots" in laptops to add additional HD space? Does that question even make sense!?!?!? :D

[Joan]

Yeah, I would think you're looking at strictly replacement. Not a lotta space in those things, so there's generally not extra slots, so to speak. Mine is a Mac, but I think all this applies to PC laptops too.

[Nettio]

No there's no extra slots, you'd have to replace the drive completely. I did it in my old laptop when my HD started dying and it was pretty easy. Depending on the age of the laptop, you may or may not be able to replace the RAM. It's possible 512 was the max at the time.

[mummytothree]

Thanks Joan and Lynnette!! Lynnette I did look up the specs and it says it has 2 slots with a memorey max of 2048MB.....so i'm assuming that means I could get and install two 1GB RAM cards!!!

[Nettio]

Yep that should work!