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Before You Upgrade That Laptop

People are still talking about the economy and how it's affecting the purchasing of new computer equipment. I love electronic gadgets like any other Internet geek but I've been paying closer attention to my spending habits since the beginning of 2009. I've kept telling myself I'm in the market for a new laptop computer but the reality is that my 2007 Dell laptop continues to work great, aside from one thing I felt could use an upgrade. The laptop battery.

By Michael Dorausch, D.C.

People are still talking about the economy and how it’s affecting the purchasing of new computer equipment. I love electronic gadgets like any other Internet geek but I’ve been paying closer attention to my spending habits since the beginning of 2009. I’ve kept telling myself I’m in the market for a new laptop computer but the reality is that my 2007 Dell laptop continues to work great, aside from one thing I felt could use an upgrade. The laptop battery.

I’ve talked about my Dell XPS in the past. Pretty sure I ordered it from Costco and I remember stripping out the operating system it came delivered with. I installed a version of linux called Ubuntu on it and dual booted both Windows XP and the Ubuntu operating system. This thing has worked great for quite some time. I’m actually surprised it’s still running considering how many times I’ve dropped in at conferences or in airports. A laptop covered with scratches, coffee stains and stickers wasn’t enough to get me purchasing a new one. Truth be told, I also don’t want to purchase a PC running Vista, I’d much rather prefer to wait until Windows 7.0 comes out. I’ll buy a new laptop at that time.

Dell XPS Jules Jordan Laptop
So aside from everything working great I’d noticed that my battery life just wasn’t cutting it anymore. What used to seem like five + hours of juice to run applications while on the road was more like two hours now. Making the investment to purchase a new battery seemed like the economically responsible thing to do. Bonus is that I now have two batteries for cases of long-distance travel (or conference centers with no power outlets).

Dell Long Life Laptop BatterySomething I like about older PC equipment is that you can always find related hardware online easily. For my laptop I purchased a new dell laptop battery from atbatt.com and I was surprised that I received it just shy of 24 hours later. That’s pretty awesome. Not much to say about new laptop batteries other than I removed it from the box, made sure it was the right fit, and charged it up. I don’t know if it’s the right thing to do but I like running my first few charges all the way down to see how long battery life actually is. I’m now set again for those long-distance flights from Los Angeles international Airport to Fort Lauderdale. Gotta have the full battery charge for those nonstop flights.

Okay, so I have purchased an almost laptop since I bought this one in 2007. I bought one of those 7 inch Eee PC netbooks because I thought they looked really cool (and would fit in my man purse). That’s been a great laptop for use in restaurants and such but I still prefer to use my XPS when the options are available.

If you’re in a similar situation with your laptop you may not need to go out and purchase a new one at this time. Besides batteries, consider upgrading things like the hard drive. Most laptops come with 5400 rpm drives but 7200 rpm drives are available (and they are not expensive). You may also want to consider external storage (which appears to be amazingly cheap right now). There’s always an option for upgrading memory, which has become more affordable over the years as well. I run two gigs of RAM on my laptop which is plenty for both operating systems I’m using. A laptop running 4 gigs of RAM and Windows 7.0 operating system would be sweet, but until they are on the market, I’m sticking with what I’ve got.

If you are up for it and know what you are doing. One of the best things I’ve found to do is backup your data, reformat your hard drive, and install your OS fresh (w/o the crap applets included when purchased new). Don’t do that though unless you have the experience to do so.

planetc1.com-news @ 1:47 pm | Article ID: 1235080090

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