What parts can you upgrade on a laptop

As well as being much faster, SSDs are lighter, use less power giving longer battery life and usually stay cooler than hard drives. In laptops, they're physically around the same size, so they can slot in as a direct replacement. They're also a little more durable, so any jolts or bumps to your laptop are less likely to damage them than a hard drive. A GB SSD sits in the sweet spot for a price-capacity trade-off if you stick mostly to productivity software and don't need media storage, though SSDs of up to GB could be affordable, depending on your needs.

SSDs of up to 2TB or more are available, but the rapidly escalating cost of the higher capacity drives tends to be prohibitive for general use. Unless you save everything to the cloud, avoid GB drives. After accounting for your laptop's operating system, default programs, drivers and other background software, you'll have very little free space for personal use.

Batteries wear out. Replacing yours with a fresh one can give you much longer between charges, even though it will probably be the same model battery as your old one. But it won't boost performance, unless you regularly find your laptop in power-saving mode. Unfortunately, many modern laptops aren't designed for this; you need to force or cut open the casing and some batteries are not user-replaceable at all.

They may be hidden behind other parts or even glued in place. In that case it's time for a professional or a whole new laptop. Make sure the battery you're thinking of buying matches your computer product model exactly. Batteries are often designed to fit into a specific laptop — avoid getting one that doesn't fit. Check whether your laptop's RAM and storage can be upgraded and if it's worthwhile before forking out for a new battery.

If they can't, consider how long you think you can keep using your laptop before it needs replacing. Extra-long boot-ups, endless timeouts, slow saves and lengthy program launches mean your laptop has lost its vim and vigour. And the older it is, the slower it gets.

But just because your faithful old computer is constantly driving in the slow lane doesn't necessarily mean it's time for the off ramp to the e-waste bin. If not, you may find an unofficial guide for opening up your laptop and installing components written by another user. Some upgrades will be much more difficult than others. Do your research ahead of time to see if this is even possible. Even if it is possible later, you may want to seek out a laptop with your desired amount of RAM or a good solid-state drive and buy that instead, as it will save you a headache later.

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Some laptop and portable computer manufacturers allow their customers to upgrade their processor speeds. However, the amount of money spent on a faster processor usually results in a small increase in performance and may not be worth the upgrade.

This upgrade often requires the laptop computer or portable computer manufacturer or authorized repair shop to perform the upgrade and is not something an end-user can do. If you are curious about the availability of upgrading your laptop or portable computer processor and the cost involved, you must contact the laptop manufacturer for additional information. Some high-performance laptop and portable computer manufacturers offer models that enable users to upgrade the laptop's video card or graphics accelerator.

Unless you're one of the lucky few who have one of these laptops or portable computers, you can't upgrade your video card. If you are unsure, contact the laptop manufacturer for additional information. Instead of replacing the laptop video card you may also consider an eGPU , if your laptop supports the necessary connections. Most manufacturers allow a hard drive to be replaced by a larger hard drive or even a traditional hard drive to an SSD hard drive.

For laptops that allow the user to easily replace the hard drive, there is usually a compartment that allows access to the hard drive. Alternatively, you can consider an external hard drive solution that utilize connectivity technology such as USB or FireWire.

Although these solutions take up additional space and may be a bit slower, they are fairly inexpensive and might be your only option.