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Very simple question about upgrading laptops

R

RockGuitarDude

Senior member
I know people will say that its over priced or whatnot but please answer my question.

I am planning on getting an Area-51 m5700 laptop from Alienware. I dont want to pay $380 for 2gigs of ram when I can get it from newegg for $200.

Would there be any issues with using this in an Alienware Pentium M system? : http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16820146440

Also, what are you allowed to do to your laptop without the warrantee being violated? Can I add another hard drive? You can get up to 2 on the site but I wont pay their price for the upgrade at the moment so I am only getting 1 x 80GB for now. Can I upgrade the memory? Can I upgrade the processor in a year?

Will these things void my warantee? If so what can I do to it that wouldnt?
 
Well I guess this answers part of my question!

Can I upgrade my hardware on my own?
Answer


Thank you for your inquiry.

Yes. Alienware® systems are very flexible and present you with many options to upgrade. However, take care when upgrading. It is likely a system will suffer problems if upgrades or changes are not done correctly, and this may affect your warranty. Please contact Technical Support if you require assistance when performing upgrades.

BUT! Will that ram work? I have never had a laptop before and I'm not sure if there are any additional concerns to take into account.
 
And, if your laptop supports a second harddrive, yu can add it. You may have to find/buy a caddy/tray somewhere. I add second drives by Firewire external when there is no internal slot. There are some IBMs and Gateways that have removable modules that can accommodate a second HDD or battery.
 
Originally posted by: corkyg
And, if your laptop supports a second harddrive, yu can add it. You may have to find/buy a caddy/tray somewhere. I add second drives by Firewire external when there is no internal slot. There are some IBMs and Gateways that have removable modules that can accommodate a second HDD or battery.
Click to expand...


FireWire is a far slower interface than SATA. You're looking at a max of 50 MB/s, as opposed to the 150MB/s of SATA. And on the average, it's maybe 1/4 as fast.

The laptop in question appears to support two hard drives. My advice would be to obtain a second caddy, put in a second drive, and leave the first one blank. Then, remove the second drive if you have to RMA the thing; they'll never know. Also, considering Alienware's policies, you're likely to not void the warranty unless you do something stupid.
 
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