I have a dell inspiron 8000 laptop that I want to resurrect. it has piii 650 processer, 20 g hard drive, me edition op sys, dvd drive, and I think it has 128k ram. it works ok but my wife has just bought a new one, so I want to make mine better. I definately want a bigger hard drive, wireless networking, more ram and new battery and I want to run xp. should I get a faster processor? if so what kind and how fast? I was planning on getting a 60g hard drive is that good?, how much ram should I get, am I forgetting anything. also any suggestions on where to buy parts would be great. thanks
I don't know if you'll be able to upgrade the CPU on that thing, as not all laptops, especially ones of that age, have a removable CPU---well easily removable (as in you'll need some mad soldering skills). I'd upgrade the 128MB of RAM to 256MB at the very least, and 512MB if the laptop supports it.
If you want XP (which won't run super fast on a 650MHz p3), BB's right, 512MB's or ram is what you'll want, 256 will bog you down once you have a few programs running as XP uses around 200MB's or ram anyway. You may want to beef up the hard drive too, I think you'll be able to get a decent 5400rpm drive with at least 40gigs pretty cheap these days. I've seen laptop motherboards for sale on Ebay which means that if you're good you may be able to tinker around and replace yours, otherwise I doubt you'll be exchanging any cpu's/video cards anytime soon. Keep in mind the p3 maxes out around the 1GHz marks so if you want to order a new p3 chip it won't yeild a tremendous speed boost.
