Pushing a laptop to the limit?

[Maltbyite]

Hey all

I was wondering if I could use your words of wisdom to get more from my Toshiba Satellite P30-141 laptop. At the minute it is as stock (well, virtually added another 512mb of RAM) and I've already done the usual stuff like latest drivers, defrag, anti virus/spyware and registry cleaning.

I was looking for a way to boost performance without compromising stability (at least for 18 months) and mobility, possibly a small overclock but I don't know how to; had a browse through the bios and it seems locked. I use it mainly for work (MS Office, statsistics packages) and stragegy games (AOE3, C&C3 & Football/Worldwide-Soccer Manager 2007).

Any ideas?

 

[apt403]

You're pretty much out of luck. Laptops arent made to be oc'ed. They have to be thin, and to do that certain sacrifices have to be made. One of 'em is cooling.

The best (and only) ways I can think of for getting more performance are: 1) HDD upgrade. Most laptops come with 5400rpm drives, a 7200rpm drive should give shave a couple seconds off your load time when gaming and saving/loading big files. 2) More ram. Ram is cheap now-a-days. You can get 2gb for about $70. 3) Build something like this and oc the gfx card.

 

[Maltbyite]

Yea I've had a looksie at doing what you've suggested and I've got a few problems. I'm a student so as you can imagine, mobility and cheapness are quite important to me. If thinks go as planned I might be able to afford 1 or 2. It'll either be 2 sticks of this (already got 2x512MB which I could sell for about £20 each) or a Hitachi 7K100 and a Apricorn EZ Upgrade Kit. Which would be best the new hard drive or the added RAM?

Thanks

 

[apt403]

Probably the ram. Like I said before, the faster HDD will improve load/save times, but that's about it. It sounds like to me that what you're doing is taking full advantage of 1gb of ram. With 2gb general system responsiveness should increase and frame rates should improve.

 

[donald7777]

Most laptops (TOSHIBA) are not designed to be run for more than 5 hours a day. Upgrading that hd and ram are about the most you can push a laptop. Heat is a major issue because people want portability, not laptops that are 5 inches thick. My advice is leave it stock clocked, as the users before said. laptops=portability-power
desktop=power-portability