Speeding up an HP pavilion DM4 1173cl with new RAM and HD

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doubleaux

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I have had an HP pavilion dm4 1173cl for about 4 years now, it's been a great bulletproof laptop, but now it is really slowing down to the point where it is unusable. I already bought a new laptop to replace it, but I thought it might be worth $200 to buy a new hard drive and an 8gb ram upgrade to bring it back to life. On NewEgg I'm looking at 8gb DDR3 RAM (PC 12800) for $100 (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA5751VB2283&cm_re=ddr3_8gb_laptop_ram-_-9SIA5751VB2283-_-Product)

and a HGST Traveler 1TB 7200 rpm 32mb cache hard drive for $80
(http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA54G1R09153&cm_re=1tb_laptop_hard_drive-_-22-145-881-_-Product)

The current ram is 4gb DDR3, and hard drive is 500GB SATA II.

I was hoping to do a full system image onto the new drive without cleaning out any files or reinstalling the OS; if I'm going to have to do that to get my speed back it's not really worth saving the laptop. I want to keep it usable exactly the way it is since i'ts got all my schoolwork from the past 4 years on it with all the programs I've used in various engineering classes. I've backed up all the data on external drives, so I'm not worried about losing it, I just don't want to bog down my new computer with all the old stuff that I might only use say once a year. The current 500GB hard drive has about 400GB on it; will doing a system image of this size just make the new hard drive as slow as the old one?

Thank you in advance!
 
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I have one of these and I love it. I hope to get many more years out of it. I added another 4 gigs of ram to it a while ago, and I recently backed everything up to an external hard drive, went through and wrote down all of my usernames/passwords, and did a factory reset. It's working good as new. The only thing was I had to reinstall my programs. Not a real big deal, and a lot less expensive than a new machine.
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popatim

popatim

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I wouldnt waste $200.
The ram would only be used by programs that needed that much but odds are, with 4gb currently installed, favorable that you have 32 bit windows which can only address 4gb ram. you would need a full reinstall of everything to move to 64bit windows.

The harddrive may speed things up a little as your current drive is nearly full and the 1TB would only be about half full and still somewhat fast. Mechanical dries slow down as they get full since they fill from the faster outter tracks of the platter inwards to the slower/inner tracks.
 
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doubleaux

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Thank you! I should have mentioned I have 64 bit windows; I've heard from a few people that the RAM probably won't make a very noticeable difference. I should have confirmed this earlier, but I actually have 160GB left of the original hard drive, do you think the new hard drive is still worth a shot?

A couple more questions
1) Is the windows system image tool good enough to pull off that 400gb clone? and if I use a system image in general, will the computer be the EXACT same as with old hard drive or will I lose small things like settings of certain programs? For instance, in Itunes, would it get rid of the modified track runtimes for several hundred songs that I've edited...this has been a minor, but very frustrating issue moving my music to the new computer. I say this because if I am going to lose much with the system image, I'll just do a factory reset instead of buying the hard drive to make it usable again.

2) Do you think this new hard drive would get it back to out-of-the-box type speeds? Would doing a complete factory reset even accomplish that?

3) Any other ideas on how to speed the laptop back up?
 
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kenneth557

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I have one of these and I love it. I hope to get many more years out of it. I added another 4 gigs of ram to it a while ago, and I recently backed everything up to an external hard drive, went through and wrote down all of my usernames/passwords, and did a factory reset. It's working good as new. The only thing was I had to reinstall my programs. Not a real big deal, and a lot less expensive than a new machine.
 
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