ok, let me start by saying i know next to nothing about computers (well i know the same as most 16 year olds), so try and keep the lingo simple.
my mum said she'd buy me a laptop for my birthday, but when we realised how expensive they were we decided against it. then i remembered i already had one! (not sure how i forgot) it's an XP Dell inspiron 1000, which is still pretty quick, but as its probably gonna be my main computer i wouldn't mind souping it up a bit.
my question is, to get all the right hardware (better RAM, bigger hard drive, thingy to connect to wireless etc.) would i be paying less than if i wanted to buy a new laptop with similar stuff?
that depends on whether you put it in yourself, or make dell do it.
one thing you might want to check, is that you can actually upgrade the RAM in it... my inspiron for example only has one slot, so if i want more, i'll have to buy the biggest stick possible. on top of that, some of them have a 1gb-per-stick limit, so if your laptop does both, you might be boned.
Wireless is definately something that u must get. RAM, depends - if ur on less than 1gb, then you should go for 1gb or maybe even 2gb. Hard Drive, think ... i mean, if ur running out of space, then buy a HDD. No need for it if u got alot of space and well ... u know. But, changing for another HDD would boost the perfomance. If u got "too much money" then u can go with mainstream SSD drive - that might be overkill for it tho.
Updating ur current system will be definately cheapier. RAM's dont cost anything these days, specially older ones.
for RAM, do i need to buy a stick, or is there a way of putting it inside the laptop? i dont really have room for a table in my room so will probably just be on my bed, meaning it's likely to snap off pretty quick. also, something i've always wondered, is "memory" the same as RAM? like in the ads when they say like 3GB of memory i'm thinking "thats barely enough for a couple of albums!", but then they say like 250GB hard drive.
you can quite easily check whether your laptop has extra RAM slot or what sort of ram can it take with some googling, if your laptop is quite ancient than probably the RAM you need will be out of production. (if your laptop does not have wifi than I bet it is pretty ancient!)
I think it's more worthy to just buy a new one, you will be surprised how much extra you can get with the amount of money you paid for your old one. There are things that upgrading your old laptop just wouldn't provide like faster CPU cycles, HDMI support, firewire, bigger and better screen, a new OS, few years of warranty and whatnot.
Laptops were not built to last, it degrades over time and isn't really worth upgrading.
A random tip: As HDD works, moving your laptop (or kind of holding it on ur knees) will kill the HDD. The needle stratches the disc.
Anyways, about the RAM - U need the specific type of ram, not everything fits in. Also, ram and memory are kind of the same thing. If some site says it has 250gb of memory then theyr not quite sure what theyr talkin about or u can just compare it, no laptop on earth has 100gb+ of ram (yet..). HDD is mostly called as "HDD", "Hard Drive", "HDD capacity" and similar to that. It also depends, like JJ72 said - u might want to go for a new laptop. But it truly depends on ur budget. Know how much is it? (Assuming u dont know, since its a birthday present and a suprise, no?).
Hmm, i dont think u can get a laptop in that price that would have "noticable" perfomance speeds. Mostly alot of those netbooks go in that class. But i dont know, hmm ...
32 bit means that it cannot recognise more than 4GB of memory (note... this does not mean your hard drive, it means RAM, Graphics, etc.)
64 bit can recognise alot more than that, but if you are upgrading a laptop, it may not be 64bit compatible, so if your not planning to use more than 3GB ram, i'd stick to 32bit, just incase there is a compatibility issue
£300 will upgrade your current laptop a bit - but it'll still have a dog-slow CPU / GPU and more memory / HDD wont solve that, plus you'll pay more for legacy components (DDR1 RAM, IDE HDD's).
£300 will get you a new laptop... but I wouldn't. £400 is where the good stuff starts. I know it sounds painful, but the £300 laptops (not netbooks) are dog-slow and have terrible build quality.
£400 gets you something built well and you can even have an i3 in that sort of price range.
Would you want it for games or general internet stuff?
Netbooks are great... for surfing the internet on. Mine is cheap, built well and does everything I need for small, portable PC. But it will never have enough power to be a main PC.
RAM comes in a stick like this:
Which goes inside the PC. Don't get it confused with a memory stick / pen drive / USB flash drive etc like this:
RAM = Random Access Memory. Any programs your running are held in the RAM so they can be accessed quickly when more data is needed, along with Windows etc. You need at least 1GB for 7, and for doing anything more than basic surfing you want 2GB minimum.
More memory lets you have more programs open at once, and generally makes the PC run quicker as the PC puts more stuff in the RAM for quick access.
If you don't have enough RAM the data is pushed to the (much slower) hard drive into the page file. Thus on a slow PC you might notice it "paging" a lot and the HDD going crazy as it just doesn't have enough RAM.
The hard drive is where the files are actually stored - more HDD space is better from a storage point of view, but having a bigger HDD doesn't automatically mean more speed - you can get fast or slow HDD's, but laptop specs rarely go that far into detail to worry about it.
In short... 64-bit is better, if you have a 64-bit compatible CPU.
There are less drivers for 64-bit *however* i've been running 64-bit Vista since 2007 and am now on 64-bit 7 and the only thing i've had problems with was a USB LAN adaptor.
64-bit is a little quicker when using 64-bit apps (example - Office 2010, Photoshop CS4 / CS5), and also lets you use more than 4GB of RAM, but does use a little more resources (not a massive issue).
