Upgrade an ancient laptop

[frankthetank195]

This laptop is worthless. The lan card broke, the battery's shot. Out of curiosity I opened it up, and now I'm detetmined to make a project out of it. However, I don't knoe all that much about laptop hardware. Are motherboards unique to each model? If so, how do I remove the cpu, or can I? If I buy a new gpu, will I need a different power solution?

It's a Dell Latitude D800: Intel Centrino cpu, some Nvidia gpu, maybe 1GB of RAM. I can give pictures but I'm on a phone right now.

 

[Vectronic]

This(Web) or this(PDF) will tell you how to take stuff apart.

Based on this (Spec PDF), I'd say that M765 is your maximum CPU upgrade (possibly M780).

2GB (2x1GB) PC2100 is your max RAM.

And I would give up now on upgrading anything else... and finding the CPU and RAM might be hard, check eBay maybe... you *might* find a boxed one, otherwise you almost certainly only going to get used parts.

Basically... set it up as an animated picture frame, and get a new laptop.

 

[frankthetank195]

Haha I have a new laptop and a personal gaming desktop (see signature), I just thought maybe I could revive an old one. So there is only one motherboard that fits? Nothing even remotely recent?

 

[dawp]

yup, laptops are proprietary and the boards change from model to model and even from one year to the next in the same family. you can not upgrade the way you can with a desktop.

best thing to do is just to recycle it. not worth the time, money or effort to fix.

 

[frankthetank195]

Alright, thanks guys

 

[Charlie98]

I upgrded my two Dell laptops (2005 and 2007 models) with some new RAM, a new HDD in the 2005, and used processor upgrades from eBay. It worked pretty well for the money and time I have in them. The smart move would have probably been to get a new laptop, but I don't use my laptop much anymore and not at all for business, so it was more of a project to keep them running as a last ditch backup computer as opposed to an actual everyday useable computer... it's still a single-core laptop.

If you are bored with nothing to do and don't mind the effort of trying to hunt down parts, sure...

 

[StrangerGuy]

Minor replacement parts like LAN card and battery can be gotten for cheap on Ebay or China trade sites etc provided they have the stock, but since it's already so old I won't even bother.