Momma's old laptop part 2

 The new RAM arrived.  Time to remove the RAM access screws.

 New RAM sticks

 Pull out the side latch thingies.

 New RAM installed

 The second RAM slot is on the opposite side and has it's own access.

 New stick popped in.

This should double the amount of RAM.  before it was 2 sticks of 512MB.  Now it's two sticks of 1GB.  This is a 32 bit computer so that means single-core and Windows XP or older.  The hardware only supports up to 2 GBs of RAM and Windows XP only supports up to 3GB total.


After this swap I couldn't get it to boot past the BIOS.  It would sometimes get to the Windows loading screen but then it would freeze.  First course of action is to re-install the original RAM sticks and see if it returns to previous operational parameters.  If all is well then the next step is to pull it apart again and run one of the new sticks at a time to see if maybe I got a bad one.  If it still does the thing I need to double check the new heat-sink to verify that it is fully contacting the CPU for proper heat dispersion.

 -The next day-

The heatsink is functioning properly.  After doing a RAM shuffle I discovered what I believe to be the only three possibilities:  Either it only supports 1.5GBs of RAM or one of the new RAM sticks is bad, or not supported by the hardware.  One RAM stick gave me failure to boot in one slot and blue-screen-of-death in another.  With it removed the other new stick functioned properly with no issues.  So I was unsuccessful at doubling the RAM, however I did increase it by 1.5.  Maybe I'll try this other 1GB in MY old IBM Thinkpad...


The new battery arrived today too!  Laptop batteries go bad.  Here is a brief article about it: LINKY


They are also relatively cheap!  About 15 bucks from Ebay with free-shipping got me a new battery.

So basically, use the battery.  Don't let it die completely and don't leave it plugged in all the time.  Also it is a good idea to get some sort of lap pad to help dissipate the heat it produces because heat is bad for batteries.

 The Palm rest piece was cracked all the way through here at the mouse-buttons.  I figured that I could fix it.

 Busted out my trusty E-6000 glue and disassembled the palm rest once more.  I've used E-6000 for a lot of repairs.  I've glued side mirror glass back on with excellent results.  I also glued the bottom of a plastic bin back together and I still use it to tote full water bottles to the shooting range.  Now to use it on a laptop!

 It might not look that great, but it'll hold.

  

 There were A LOT of programs installed on this laptop.  The list of startup programs was horrendous.  I went through and removed junk and disabled useless startup programs.  Boot time is now much faster.

 

The screen-shot above and below are of a program my good buddy pointed me to called "Speccy."  And here is a mini-review of it along with the end of this laptop refurb.  It's a super hand little program that consolidates all your info into the following screen and sub-menus.  Its pretty nifty if you need model numbers or specific data on your system.  You can get this information through other programs but for them it's more of an afterthought and with Speccy it's the main purpose.  It has one flaw I've noticed since downloading it yesterday and trying it out:  The RAM data displayed in the summary is misleading.  Above it shows 1GB of installed RAM and at that time it was correct.  Below it shows 2GB.  This is after fiddling with the RAM sticks and figuring out what worked.  I only had 1.5GB of RAM installed but for some reason it showed 2GB here.  On the side menu under the RAM section it showed the correct data, but here it was incorrect.  not sure whats up with that, but it's the only thing I've noticed about it so far that I would call a negative.

And that's my cheap refurbish on an old laptop that's still kickin'!

The End.