Okay, so my grandmother *may* be capable of getting a laptop from her work. I'd use it for web surfing, Trillian Messenger and Microsoft Office. What I'm wondering is, is there a decent <$100 mobo/RAM/CPU upgrade I could give it to make it work alright? It's almost guaranteed that anything I'd get from them would be ****, so I want to be able to make it not-unbearably-slow. My aunt has a Pentium III laptop that I just want to kill. Since I won't be using it for anything intense, and since I have a whole other build to think about (that isn't a laptop, so I won't be able to take the boat out and use it), I can't afford much.

If not, I can always just beef up its RAM, but the thing is is that if they're getting rid of it, it's likely a Pentium II machine with more RAM than the mobo can handle, which would likely be around 256MB.

Anyway, since I'm trying to make a habit out of going to bed earlier (so I can get up earlier and not waste the day), au revoir until tomorrow.

Heya Rodents,

Laptops, unlike desktops, are not very configurable at all. You're pretty much stuck with what you get except memory upgrade and hard drive upgrade. But even for those, a lot of laptops require a big time tear down to upgrade those components.

So unfortunately, at best you might get to add more memory and/or a larger hard drive. But other than that, that'll be it. Unless it happens to be a custom built laptop. Which are uncommon. And even then, to find components to upgrade will be hard.

Most laptops come standard with a 5400rpm, if you really wanna squeeze a little more out of it upgrade the RAM and add a 7200rpm drive that may affect battery life though

I have a P3M laptop that I've had for years and it's fantastic, I upgraded the ram and HD, fair enough I can't run almost any games but it will run office, firefox, thunderird, visual studio comfortably which is what I need.

Short of upgrading the RAM though you could make more of a difference with software, turn off unused services, turn off XP 'eye candy', keep up on the defrag/malware checks and it should be fine.