Upgrading an Old Dell Inspiron Laptop

[Ziggy]

Some ago, I bought a Dell Inspiron laptop in the Philippines for 32,000 pesos. It always ran kind of slow but lately it was hardly working at all.
 

Although my wife wanted to buy a new laptop for me, I decided to upgrade my Dell from 4 GB RAM to 32 GB RAM.

In the past, I was always fearful of opening up a laptop, even though I’ve always been handy with upgrading my desktop computers, with no fear of upgrading RAM and/or Processors.

Upgrading the laptop was much easier than I had ever thought it to be. Now I have a very fast running laptop for fraction of the cost of buying a new one.

I must admit that I actually needed to watch a few YouTubes to really learn what I was doing. 

[BrettGC]

3 hours ago, Major Tom said:

Some ago, I bought a Dell Inspiron laptop in the Philippines for 32,000 pesos. It always ran kind of slow but lately it was hardly working at all.
 

Although my wife wanted to buy a new laptop for me, I decided to upgrade my Dell from 4 GB RAM to 32 GB RAM.

In the past, I was always fearful of opening up a laptop, even though I’ve always been handy with upgrading my desktop computers, with no fear of upgrading RAM and/or Processors.

Upgrading the laptop was much easier than I had ever thought it to be. Now I have a very fast running laptop for fraction of the cost of buying a new one.

I must admit that I actually needed to watch a few YouTubes to really learn what I was doing. 

In the past I've built most of my desktop gaming computers myself without any issues as well as basic repairs at the hardware level.  I have some issues with my Acer Predator gaming laptop right now, and like you I'm reluctant to play inside.  I might give it a shot as well.  

 

[Jollygoodfellow]

5 hours ago, Major Tom said:

In the past, I was always fearful of opening up a laptop, even though I’ve always been handy with upgrading my desktop computers, with no fear of upgrading RAM and/or Processors.

You could also install ccleaner and run it every few days to clear out the junk on your computer. I have used the free version for many years.

https://www.ccleaner.com/

[baronapart]

5 hours ago, BrettGC said:

In the past I've built most of my desktop gaming computers myself without any issues as well as basic repairs at the hardware level.  I have some issues with my Acer Predator gaming laptop right now, and like you I'm reluctant to play inside.  I might give it a shot as well.  

 

I'm a little bit of a tech nut and build my own computers. If it's a Predator Helios it should have access doors for ram and hard drive access. I have a HP Gaming laptop and it does not have access doors. I recently upgraded the RAM to 64GB and the Nvme to 2TB. It required the careful removal of the bottom cover. I have a plastic tool to do that or you can use a credit card or a guitar pick in a pinch. I use ThinkPads for my day to day computing and they are built to take apart...but not so easy as the old days. My current dandy is a HP Dev One built for Linux and it was pretty easy to upgrade.

As a general rule upgrading RAM is the best thing to help overall performance. That and upgrading to an SSD if you still have a spinning rust hard drive. Thank goodness they have mostly stopped selling laptops and computers with spinning hard drives.

[Ziggy]

5 hours ago, Jollygoodfellow said:

You could also install ccleaner and run it every few days to clear out the junk on your computer. I have used the free version for many years.

https://www.ccleaner.com/

Thanks for the link but I had already did a reset, which deleted all of my programs and files—there was nothing (no junk or anything else) left to clean. Even with a fresh install of windows, it was still running slower than the slowest turtle. I even ran my Avast software and Malwarebytes but there was no malware found. With RAM becoming so cheap, I went with the upgrade.

[Ziggy]

2 hours ago, baronapart said:

As a general rule upgrading RAM is the best thing to help overall performance. That and upgrading to an SSD if you still have a spinning rust hard drive. Thank goodness they have mostly stopped selling laptops and computers with spinning hard drives.

I have a dual drive system on my dell desktop. The desktop has a 256 GB SSD and a 1 TB hard drive. I use the SSD for my all of my daily used programs, and I only use the hard drive for programs that I hardly ever use, such as GIMP.

I have a ton of stuff on my SSD and I still have over 170 GB of free space on it.

What really amazes me is how computer companies are still shipping pc’s with just 4 GB of RAM.

Edited January 22, 2023 by Major Tom

[Possum]

It can be difficult to upgrade older computers as there is a planned obsolescence built in. It is a way to force folks to buy a new one. I have a 5 year old Lenovo laptop and was looking into upgrading to Windows 11 but found out it was not supported. Not much you can do. Ran onto the same thing with Apple years ago You either buy their latest product or get shut out of updates and open yourself to nefarious folks.. That is the problem with monopolies.

[Ziggy]

23 minutes ago, Greglm said:

It can be difficult to upgrade older computers as there is a planned obsolescence built in. It is a way to force folks to buy a new one. I have a 5 year old Lenovo laptop and was looking into upgrading to Windows 11 but found out it was not supported. Not much you can do. Ran onto the same thing with Apple years ago You either buy their latest product or get shut out of updates and open yourself to nefarious folks.. That is the problem with monopolies.

I’m not a Linux user, but are Linux operating systems less limiting in how you can upgrade to the latest versions?

Just thinking out loud, but is Linux a genuine, open-source operating system or is it run by monopoly?

[BrettGC]

4 hours ago, Major Tom said:

I’m not a Linux user, but are Linux operating systems less limiting in how you can upgrade to the latest versions?

Just thinking out loud, but is Linux a genuine, open-source operating system or is it run by monopoly?

It's true open-source and you can run the latest version of Linux on a 90's vintage pentium if you choose to but that's limited to which free GUI you want to use, if any.  At it's core it's pure command line (they call it "shell"), but you can get various free GUI's which make it "Windows"-like.  Gnome is probably the most popular but there's a bunch of them.  

[BrettGC]

8 hours ago, baronapart said:

I'm a little bit of a tech nut and build my own computers. If it's a Predator Helios it should have access doors for ram and hard drive access. I have a HP Gaming laptop and it does not have access doors. I recently upgraded the RAM to 64GB and the Nvme to 2TB. It required the careful removal of the bottom cover. I have a plastic tool to do that or you can use a credit card or a guitar pick in a pinch. I use ThinkPads for my day to day computing and they are built to take apart...but not so easy as the old days. My current dandy is a HP Dev One built for Linux and it was pretty easy to upgrade.

As a general rule upgrading RAM is the best thing to help overall performance. That and upgrading to an SSD if you still have a spinning rust hard drive. Thank goodness they have mostly stopped selling laptops and computers with spinning hard drives.

It is the Helios.  The issue I'm having is that after 10-15 minutes of using any application that requires the use of the video card the system goes to "the blue screen of death" then reboots.  The temp isn't going up to any great degree and sits on 70-80C depending on the game I'm playing.  Fan intakes are fine, I clean them regularly.