can a dell laptops graphics card be upgraded?

[apac]

A friend of mine down the hall has an inspiron 5100 and is really unhappy with the performance in games. It's 2.4ghz, 512 RAM, but the real kicker is a 32mb radeon 7500. When I checked Dell's site, the only available options for this laptop are a 32 and 64 mb 7500, suprising since it's not a lightweight and both nvidia and ATI released 2 new generations of mobile cards (radeon 9000/gf4 & radeon 9600/gf FX).

Is there any way for him to upgrade the graphics card, or have dell upgrade it?

 

[RollWave]

no

 

[JustAnAverageGuy]

no

 

[poppyq]

Heavier doesn't mean better 😉 If your friend wanted a laptop to play games on he/she should have went for the inspiron 600m or latitidue d600 that come with the radeon 9000. We played BF1942 on those all the time, keep in mind it was unplayable with 128MB of ram but as you went up from there it was fine.

 

[dexvx]

The thing that irritates me the most is people who make uninformed and uneducated responses. If you dont know what you're talking about please do not bother to post a false response.


The Inspiron 5100 is very similar to the Inspiron 5150 in internal design. If you go poke around the Dell forums, unofficially you can upgrade it to a Radeon 9000 64MB (one user has already done this).


http://forums.us.dell.com/supportforums/board/message?board.id=insp_upgrade&message.id=29022

 

[apac]

thanks dexvx, I noticed that the 5150 was another sibling of the 5100 series and was able to use a better graphics card so I figured looking into it might be worth a shot.

 

[poppyq]

Originally posted by: dexvx
The thing that irritates me the most is people who make uninformed and uneducated responses. If you dont know what you're talking about please do not bother to post a false response.


The Inspiron 5100 is very similar to the Inspiron 5150 in internal design. If you go poke around the Dell forums, unofficially you can upgrade it to a Radeon 9000 64MB (one user has already done this).


http://forums.us.dell.com/supportforums/board/message?board.id=insp_upgrade&message.id=29022

And when you do that you void your warranty on the entire system. Have fun.

 

[dexvx]

Originally posted by: poppyq

Originally posted by: dexvx
The thing that irritates me the most is people who make uninformed and uneducated responses. If you dont know what you're talking about please do not bother to post a false response.


The Inspiron 5100 is very similar to the Inspiron 5150 in internal design. If you go poke around the Dell forums, unofficially you can upgrade it to a Radeon 9000 64MB (one user has already done this).


http://forums.us.dell.com/supportforums/board/message?board.id=insp_upgrade&message.id=29022

And when you do that you void your warranty on the entire system. Have fun.

Sigh... another bit of misinformation.

According to Dell and the support team on the forums... If you do undergo such an operation, you void the warranty on the video component. The warranty covers everything the original system had. Any new components will not be covered. And if you do botch up and somehow ruin the laptop during the upgrade, Dell will not warranty it.

 

[poppyq]

I made my statement incorrectly... it will void the warranty if the damage is caused by the addon, AND they will not support the system any longer as it is no longer in its default state.

 

[vegetation]

Be careful with graphic card upgrades in laptops. Make sure you read the dell forums with great detail and be sure there are no nasty surprises ahead of you. Especially note your LCD screen manufacturer as some are flat out incompatible with certain graphic cards. You can kill your system if something botches up. And if you're the type who has never opened a desktop case then forget about trying to poke around a laptop.