What upgrade for asus G1s and how?

Hi all,

This site was really useful for me, but at this point i need clear answers on my questions.
I know there are several other threads dealing with this, but the market changes fast and new products come. Plus: finding what you need isnt that easy...

Anyway:
I have my laptop for half a year, so it isnt passed warranty yet. Though I would like to upgrade some things. As i understood of other threads, a newer harddrive (in stead of this 160GB 5400 RPM) and 3GB of RAM (in stead of 2GB) would be the best possible upgrades for performance. Is this correct?

If yes, which of both is giving best boost for performance? It's not that i have too much money so I would like to keep expenses under 150€ (bout 200$?)

In other words: what upgrade would you recommend, for this price, and fully fitting for asus G1s-A1? Am i able to do this myself without very difficult problems? WILL THIS OR WILL IT NOT, SPOIL MY WARRANTY?

Thank you all for reading this, and any help is welcome

Simon

 

Well if you have a crappy cpu you could upgrade it for a little more than that. And more ram, with lower timings (CL4) would probably give the best performance. You should also get a 7200rpm harddrive. I do not believe it voids your warranty unless you screw your laptop up lol.

 

In order to give good advice I need more information.
Are you running Vista or XP?
What do you want to be faster? What applications are important for you?
Do you do a lot of multitasking? Do you fill up your 2GB ever?
Do you play games? if so which ones?

 

Thx for quick responses

At the moment, I'am running vista 32bit home edition, but thinking of dual boot with xp for games, if i can find out how, and do it myself.

Going to college next year, so i need a stable system and yeah office 2007crap. Most of the time i spend gaming or internetting...
games (most) enemy territory -2003 :0, and testing some great looking games with high grafix too, but not as much...

 

What brand and modelname harddrive do you have now? (you can find this somewhere in your device manager)

Do you ever max out your memory at the moment? (you can check this by opening a bunch of applications that you use and press ctrl-alt-del, see how much memory you use.)

Going by the information sofar I'm expecting a harddrive upgrade to be most interesting. You're propably best of if you go for a a Hitachi 7K200 200GB if you value speed above anything. Or you could go with the 320GB WD Scorpio if you want the best mix between size and speed. You can find the speed differences here:
http://www.storagereview.com/Hitachi250WD320.sr?page=0,2

 

My current one is hitachi HTS542516K9SA00 (is what device manager says

I do max out my RAM yes, I think its mostly when gaming, and maybe doing something else: i cant game while performing a scan for exemple, neither scanning and doing photoshop. Task manager Ram detecter (dat met de balkjes, zal je wel beter verstaan) goes up and again down in no time. My grafix card uses quite alot of ram i think (8600GT 256MB DDR3)

-maybe we could share emailadresses?-

Simon from Belgium

 

It will not void your warranty. The HD,RAM, wireless mini-card, optical drive are CRU/CSR parts. Due to the ease of the replacability.

CRU (Customer replacable unit)
CSR (Customer self repair)

As a matter of fact they wont even be able to tell if you changed it or not.

 

Thx for that response man, so you know 100% sure? As long as you replace old parts in case of giving it in for repairs its ok?

 

99% sure. They wont void your warranty for undoing 2 screws.

Yes, your notebooks limited warranty only covers the standard factory parts that came with it. They will not touch it if they see an aftermarket part.

 

Ok then going to 3 or 4GB would certainly be interesting.

You could consider going to Vista 64 and get 4GB.

If you'd want the fastest harddrive get a Hitachi 7K200 200GB, or even better: wait a few weeks until the new models 7K320 and WD Black Scorpio become available.

PS. your graphics card is not using your RAM, it has dedicated RAM.

-email address sent-

 

Thx for email,

7K32O: is that 320GB 7200 RPM? That would be awesome I can wait another 2 months, but I dont know how much more
The extra RAM, would do more or less the same for performance as new HDD? Because Ram ofcourse is cheaper...

Is it easy to install both parts?
What i was wondering: if i put in a new HDD, and save old files to external HDD or something. Should I do something else to get the laptop to work? Maybe install O/S again with cd, but anything else? -how does the O/S on a blank HDD goes anyway?-

I dont know much bout installing hardwarestuff, the only thig i ever did was replaceing videocard and screw desktop open to blow dust out

Thanks

 

Yes both Hitachi and Western digital will release a 320GB 7200rpm disk soonish.
http://www.wdc.com/en/products/products.asp?driveid=482

Impossible to say. The improvement will be different. The harddrive will make your boot times faster and loading of games will go much quicker. And your laptop will feel faster.

The memory will make multitasking smoother, and your laptop will be faster and more responsive under heavy loads.

So I guess the harddrive will offer improvement independent of the workload. The memory will be more beneficial under heavy loads.

Yes you'd have to replace the harddrive (easy) and then boot from a bootable CD/DVD.

You can either use your recovery disks, a Windows Vista disk or a program like Acronis True Image. There should be a guide somewhere about how to do this, I don't know where.

Inserting the memory is also easy.

 

Wow, the WD HDD looks really nce, hope it won't cost that much :s
I probably won't be able to get both upgrades with 150€ I guess

 

Well as soon as the first benchmarks appear you can estimate how much it's worth to you.

The fastest harddrive at the moment (hitachi 7k200 200GB) costs about 100 euro.
http://tweakers.net/pricewatch/160183/hitachi-travelstar-7k200-hts722020k9sa00.html

When you buy a new harddrive you can sell your old harddrive, maybe you'd still get 50-70 euros in Belgium... i don't know. It will enough to buy the RAM.

 

100€? damn! I asked my reseller of this laptop and he said it would cost me for that exact HDD 145€ omg... I guess I'll need to look somewhere else to buy stuff
It's correct that I could sell the old HDD, but I think I'd rather keep it as external. You got an idea how much a case for this would cost me?

 

10-15 euros.
http://azerty.nl/8-183-30666/storejet-2-5-sata.html