Easy Upgrades on the 5100

I'm continually amazed at how easy the upgrades have been so far on the 5100 I bought a few months ago. So far I've upgraded the hard drive and installed XP, and just the other night I replaced the two 512mb ddr2 dimms with two 1gb faster ddr2 dimms. I put the original hdd back in to tinker with Vista again with the upgraded ram and had a small problem with bootup. The vista recovery kicked in and fixed the problem. Once in Vista, the 2gb made a noticeable difference in performance. It's now much quicker than before, although the high cpu usage is still there with the sidebar running.

Both upgrades were very simple. All you need is a small phillips head screwdriver and a few minutes to swap out the parts. Spend another couple hours installing and configuring your OS of choice on the hdd install, but the memory install was a piece of cake. If anyone is interested, I can type up a step by step guide for either upgrade, but if you've upgraded your desktop computer, you can easily do the same on this laptop.

I can appreciate the design of the 5100 after doing the upgrades. Acer made the memory dimms & hard drive very accessible by putting both on the bottom of the notebook. You don't need to do major surgery on the laptop as in some other models/brands. Anyway, I thought I'd share my upgrade experiences so far with the 5100 owners here on the forum. Next up...a processor upgrade to dual core!

 

Oh jeez, you got the 5100 w/ the single core...definitely upgrade if possible, especially with the new turions coming out.

Just be warned it will void ur warranty unlike the other upgrades.

 

Yeah, it's the MK-36 2.0Ghz Turion. At the time, it was the best bang for the buck under $600. But now the x2's are becoming more affordable in that price range. I've been using a dual core in my desktop comp for a while now and not having one in my notebook is annoying. Everything just runs smoother with two cores.

 

if you can afford it get the new X2...

AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-66 (2.3GHz) dual core

my TL-60 is also amazing! I can't image how fast that extra 600mhz would do!

 

Umm 2.3GHz - 2.0GHz = 0.3GHz = 300MHz

Seems someone was taking a nap during 2nd grade math

 

Maybe dual core = 2 x 300MHz ??

 

I'm no computer expert, but I did a lot of research on this when I bought my desktop.

At best, dual core gives you a 40% increase in efficiency -and that's if you're multi-tasking (for instance, running a virus scan while working on spread sheets). If you are using 1 program, it's not noticeable.

As I understand it, a 2.3 core duo is like a 3.1Ghz. processor -if you're lucky in the very best of circumstances...

The difference between my 2.6Ghz. old computer with a gig of ram and my new 2.4 core duo with a gig of ram is hardly noticeable -and the new computer has a higher bus speed too. Until software changes to really take advantage of dual-core processors, if you want to increase speed, increase ram.

BTW, my new (Vista home premium) Acer notebook is MUCH slower than either of my desktops. It has a 2.0 core so I guess that is not surprising, but it is also slower than my crappy old 1.7Ghz./ 512Ram HP notebook.

My conclusion here is that Vista is a resource hog.

 

That's nothing new.

 

Can you upgrade the 5101AWLMi to dual core or is the motherboard only capable of running with a single core processor?