How To Find Out What Screwdriver Size I Need To Service Laptop

How to Tell If You Can Upgrade Your Laptop

Whether yous only bought a brand new notebook that came with a deadening-moving difficult bulldoze or your three-yr-old system is struggling to keep upwardly with today's apps, upgrading your laptop is great way to ameliorate its operation without spending a lot of coin. Unlike desktop towers, virtually all of which are user-serviceable, many laptops are sealed boxes that are difficult or impossible to tinker with. In some cases, even if you can get at the guts, you lot'll find the key components bulldoze-soldered to the motherboard.

Fortunately, yous don't need to fissure open up the chassis but to find out if y'all can supersede the RAM or hard drive. Hither's how to tell if you can upgrade your laptop and what components it needs.

What Laptop Components Tin You Upgrade?

In the best-case scenario, yous tin supercede both your RAM and storage drive. Upgrading from a mechanical hard drive to an SSD (solid state drive) volition accept an enormous touch on your operation, allowing y'all to boot, open applications and files, or switch tasks three to four times faster. Adding more than retentivity, peculiarly going from 2GB or 4GB to 8GB, tin can make multitasking or working on big media files easier.

Forget about swapping out the CPU, the graphics chip or display. And while information technology may be possible to supplant the Wi-Fi card on some systems, doing so is difficult and probably not worth the effort. If you actually desire improve wireless connectivity, consider a USB Wi-Fi dongle.

More than: Best SSDs You Tin Buy

Checking a Retentivity Finder

The best way to detect out whether your laptop is upgradeable and what parts you lot need to upgrade it is with a configurator tool such as Crucial Memory's Advisor Tool. To utilize it:

i. Navigate to http://www.crucial.com/usa/en/advisor (opens in new tab).
2. Select your laptop'southward manufacturer(ex: Lenovo).

iii. Cull the right production line(ex: ThinkPad T Series).

4. Pick the specific model of your laptop (ex: ThinkPad T450s).

5. Click "discover upgrade."

The Advisor will so tell y'all what blazon of RAM your system takes and what type of SSDs it tin can handle. If your laptop tin't have its memory or storage upgraded, the advisor will tell you so. Since this particular tool is from Crucial, information technology recommends Crucial's own products, simply as long as you take notation of the products' specs, you can purchase retention or storage from other vendors. Here's what to look for.

If your laptop has a hard drive correct at present and you're upgrading it to an SSD, it's near certain that you'll need a two.v-inch, 7mm SSD, the nigh common size. Notwithstanding, if your laptop came with an SSD and you want to replace it with a college-capacity one, you may need an mSATA or M.2 drive, both of which are chips that slide into a slot on the motherboard. M.2 SSDs come in different lengths (60mm and 80mm are nigh common), then be particularly careful nigh checking which one you demand.

When buying RAM, observe out if it's DDR2, DDR3 or DDR4 type, along with its voltage and speed. Most contempo-era laptops take DDR3 RAM that'southward PC3-12800 speed and either 1.v or i.35 volts. Looking through RAM listings, y'all may besides see specs that indicate whether information technology's ECC or non-ECC and buffered or unbuffered. Except for a few high-end workstations, well-nigh laptops use non-ECC, unbuffered retentivity.

In the upper left corner of the screen, the Advisor shows you just how much RAM your laptop can handle and how many DIMM slots information technology has. Some laptops have merely a single slot, which comes filled, so y'all may demand to completely replace your existing DIMM rather than just adding to it.

Reading the Service Manual

Knowing that your laptop is upgradeable in theory is ane thing, but performing surgery on the device is another. If there's one available, check the hardware maintenance manual (aka, service manual) to notice what you demand to do to access the components.

To locate the service manual, navigate to the support folio for your specific laptop model on the manufacturer'south website (e.g., lenovo.com, dell.com, hp.com). Look for downloadable manuals, and select the service or hardware guide, non the general instructions.

The maintenance manual should tell you how to open the laptop and replace these parts. In about cases, y'all tin can get to the laptop's innards by removing some screws and either opening an upgrade console or removing the unabridged bottom surface.

If the manual tells you lot that the retention or storage drive y'all want to remove are soldered onto the motherboard, you can't upgrade. Also, if y'all have to break through anything that is held together past mucilage or take to remove the entire motherboard, forget about adding RAM or an SSD.

Bottom Line

Once you know that your laptop is upgradeable and what components you lot need, y'all can shop effectually for the all-time RAM or SSD for the money. For RAM, whatever uniform DIMM from a reputable brand should exist good, just if yous take two DIMM slots, you'll get slightly improve performance by filling both with identical fries (e.grand., 2 x 4GB). For help choosing a solid country drive, cheque out our list of all-time SSDs or read the extensive reviews at our sister sites, Tom's Hardware and AnandTech.

Pb Image Credit: Kerdkanno/Shutterstock

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The official Geeks Geek, as his weekly column is titled, Avram Piltch has guided the editorial and production of Laptopmag.com since 2007. With his technical cognition and passion for testing, Avram programmed several of LAPTOP's real-world benchmarks, including the LAPTOP Battery Test. He holds a principal's degree in English from NYU.