Need laptop help

[Cmptr-Gy-Dv]

Ok I just bought a laptop from my brother,
For $200
A dell inspiron 5000, with a PIII 500 cpu
And 64 megs of ram, (that’s right 64 megs) well unless it’s shared
With video card, I have not looked yet,

I have never worked on a laptop before so be gentle,

First I need a new hard drive, this thing only has a 6 gig drive (from what I can tell)

I was looking at drives on newegg, just a 40 gig,
First are all laptop drives universal, I notice on the dell website it says it’s a ata 100
But all the drives on newegg say ata 6 which I understand to be ata 100 supported,
Is that right?

I’m not sure if this copy of XP is legal, I’m downloading updates right now,
So I will soon find out, he did not get a disk with it,

So I’m going to load the image on my home server, and transfer it to new drive,
So I also need more memory, at least 512,

So here is the links, will this stuff work,

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820159403

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822149039


i'm also looking at dell to see if faster CPU is possable

[Steve R Jones]

The hard drive should fine and so will the ram. (probably on the ram - you need to see what's currently installed.)

I wouldn't spend any more time or money on the cpu....You can get brand new notebooks with much better specs for $399.....

[Cmptr-Gy-Dv]

Ya I have no real need for a laptop,

so I think i'll stick with upgrading drive and ram,

I still don't know if this copy of XP is legal, it's still doing some updates,

but it did download and install SP2 so it must be good,

i'm hoping going from 64 to 512 megs of ram will help,

it took 6 hours to install the updates,

[Cmptr-Gy-Dv]

ok can I put 133 ram in here,

it uses 100, but it will only go up to 512megs,
there is two slots, so I can only put 256 in each slot,

problem is newegg only has 512 in pc100,

so I will have to get the 133,

I know desktops are back words compatible,
are laptops the same,

so 133 will work,

[Cmptr-Gy-Dv]

well I got the new drive and ram today,
the ram don't work, I got PC100 but it will not run,

the new faster drive made things a little faster,

I also come up with a good idea,
this thing only has 64 megs of ram, so it was using a lot of page file,

the drive was running all the time,
so being the smart guy that I am, I put my 1gig USB jump drive in,
and moved the page file to the USB drive, boy did that help things out,

I will need to send the 512 of ram back, and see if I can find some that will work,


the problem is I made an image of the drive on home server,
to transfer over to new drive, but the restore CD needs at least 512 of
memory to run, so I had to reinstall a fresh copy of XP, using my only
copy of XP, I was hoping to use the copy that was already installed,

so I could keep this copy for another computer, or sell it with a computer,
but now I had to use it,