upgrading a Dell Laptop

[jacwat]

Hi
I wonder if anyone can help. I have a Dell Inspiron 7500 with an Intel Pentium 3 processor, 601 MHZ. 128mb of RAM and Windows XP Professional. I bought this cheaply recently on EBAY just as a project to play around with. I have never worked on a laptop before so I am very new to this.
The laptop works well and is in good condition considering its age. It hasn’t been online for a few years and so has not been receiving Windows updates and looks really outdated. I haven’t tried getting it online yet. There is a faint wavery line running down the centre of the screen when it’s on and wonder if this is to do with the screen or the graphics? The screen is definitely not cracked.
I would like to know how I could improve it to the maximum possible. What processor if any, can I put in? How much memory can I go up to? Should I put in a new Windows XP if it will take it? What do I need to have a wireless connection to the desktop set up I have? Is there anything else I could do to make it good?
I would love to do this. Sorry for posing such amateur questions and thank you in advance to anyone who is willing to help me. (Simple terms please!)
Regards, Jackie

[mdmarmer]

I had thought about getting an old laptop to play with myself. Netbooks and laptops are so cheap nowadays it may not be worth it any more.

I would add memory if you can. This laptop has two slots and uses PC100 SDRAM SODIMMs. Probablty there are 2 64 MB RAM in there now. The max it can accept is 512 MB.

I would just leave everything else alone and install linux, preferably a lightweight linux such as Antix, Puppy or DSL (DamnSmallLinux).

Probably this laptop would accept a PCMCIA card for wireless -- I haven't checked.

Don't attempt to upgrade the processor.
An old laptop like this will run Linux much better than Windows, and the hard drive is probably small, so I advise installing Linux and not using Windows at all.

Mike

[snowpine]

Hi Jackie, welcome to the forums... but I am curious how your question relates to the Ubuntu operating system??

Here are the hardware requirements for Ubuntu, unfortunately I don't think your laptop is up to the challenge:

Ubuntu should run reasonably well on a computer with the following minimum hardware specification. However, features such as visual effects may not run smoothly. * 700 MHz x86 processor * 384 MB of system memory (RAM) * 8 GB of disk space * Graphics card capable of 1024x768 resolution * Sound card * A network or Internet connection

Puppy Linux is a very popular Linux distribution for older hardware. I would recommend Puppy over Windows XP personally.

I would not spend any more money upgrading/improving this particular laptop. It is not worth it.