AboutMike Expertise Areas of expertise: PC Hardware, Peripherals, Barcode Scanners, Printers, and Applications, Basic Networking, Microsoft Applications. I am good at researching issues and have a lot of contacts. So if I can't directly answer a question I can likely find the answer.
Areas I won't be much help in: Apple Computers, Linux, older Networking topologies like Token Ring.
Experience I'm currently an IT Support Technician for a contract circuit
board manufacturer in Oregon, USA. I've been working on PCs from a hobby standpoint for better than 25 years. I've been doing it professionally for 3 years.
Expert: Mike Date: 6/26/2008 Subject: Updating my laptop
Question I have a Toshiba Satellite A105-S4114 Model PSAA8U-0MD02K with XP media edition. I got it two years ago and it's still doing great. However, Im going off too college this fall and I was thinking I'd like to update it. What kinds of updates can I get for a reasonable cost?
Answer Unfortunately you really can't do much to upgrade laptops. The only thing you can do is add more memory and a larger hard drive. In a desktop you'd also be able to get a better video card but laptops have their video built in.
The good news is that laptop is already pretty decent so you honestly shouldn't need to do anything to upgrade it. According to the specifications I found online it already has 2GB memory, which is plenty, and a 120GB hard drive, which is also plenty.
If you still have the XP media center disks it came with I'd save any files, documents, etc. that you want to keep onto a cd and reformat it. Just to get a clean and newly installed operating system on it.
If you don't have the disks though you're basically stuck because you can't buy XP Media Center in stores, it only comes pre-installed.
Other than that, just make sure you have all of the latest updates from Microsoft and make sure you do a Disk Cleanup and Defrag the drive.
If you're planning on using it for school you can feel pretty safe that it should handle what you need just fine already.
