Advice and Answers?

[texas]

I have a younger cousin who just graduated high school and, he is in a very disadvantaged financial situation, right now. So, I was going to upgrade an old laptop of mine and give it to him.

It's an HP Pavilion dv2000. So, it's pretty old. My knowledge of computers and electronics is kind of spotty.

What I figured I'd do is: buy a new battery for it, buy a new hardrive for it and, install a newer operating system.

I can get the battery and hardrive for under $100 dollars. But, then there's the cost of a new operating system. The local tech place won't even help me because, they want to sell me a new computer. But, I don't want to get to point of financial investment in these upgrades where, I could have just as readily purchased a new computer.

Suggestions? I'm trying to keep this as cheap as possible. But, I want the kid to have something half-way decent that'll work for him for the time being.

Because, the hardrive won't come with an OS installed, correct?

 

[PP Mguire]

Best way to upgrade a laptop is to install an SSD and upgrade the RAM. DV2000 doesn't really say much about it, as Googling it doesn't do much since there are submodels.

HDDs when bought new come clean and require a partition and format then an OS install. You'll be more successful buying Windows from a site like Newegg.com.

 

[yurayurayur]

Hi,
Upgrading hard drive and a new OS , as helpful as it can be, is the last thing I would do to be honest.
the first upgrade you should get everytime, no matter what, is a memory upgrade. check the motherboard manual to see what kind of memory it supports and the max amount. memory can be bought usually for less than $50 and improve performance by 50%.
regarding the OS, if you want windows 7 or 8 you need to make sure that the amount of hard drives, RAM and CPU clock speed is supported. since the laptop is older than windows 7, I would probably go with windows XP and it is still available for around $90 and you won't have compatibility problems running it

hope it helps.

 

[PP Mguire]

Hi,
Upgrading hard drive and a new OS , as helpful as it can be, is the last thing I would do to be honest.
the first upgrade you should get everytime, no matter what, is a memory upgrade. check the motherboard manual to see what kind of memory it supports and the max amount. memory can be bought usually for less than $50 and improve performance by 50%.
regarding the OS, if you want windows 7 or 8 you need to make sure that the amount of hard drives, RAM and CPU clock speed is supported. since the laptop is older than windows 7, I would probably go with windows XP and it is still available for around $90 and you won't have compatibility problems running it

hope it helps.

Windows 7 is better than XP in every way. I would not do that.

 

[yurayurayur]

Windows 7 is better than XP in every way. I would not do that.

Windows 7 is much better but also much higher requirements.
you need to have at least 1GHz processor,
1GB RAM AND 20GB free space. not to mention video card that supports DirectX 9.0 or above. I'm not sure 100% that the laptop presented can answer for all of this.

 

[PP Mguire]

They all are dual cores, it will support it. If a much lower specced Netbook can run Windows 7, a dual core laptop with enough RAM can.

 

[texas]

First off, thank you all for having taken the time to read and reply to my post. All of your responses are greatly appreciated.

Best way to upgrade a laptop is to install an SSD and upgrade the RAM.

Could you elaborate on what the advantage would be to installing an SSD? And, would you mind potentially directing me to a resource for how to do that or, do you have any specific suggestions regarding SSDs?

The ram had already been upgraded and, I have two gig of ram on this laptop. At the time, that was the highest upgrade option for ram for this particular pc.

I had repartitioned the current hardrive and installed Linux alongside WindowsXP (with help), which is what it came with. I'm afraid Windows 7 would run a little slow on this laptop but, I'm also concerned about XP being a little old. And, this young man will probably never have a need for Linux.

Again, thank you all. You're a great help.

 

[texas]

It's an HP dv2000t, if that is more clear. Are there SSDs which are compatible with this model such that I could just replace the existing hardrive with an SSD?

Thanks again.

 

[PP Mguire]

Optimized properly Windows 7 can be run on almost anything. The biggest deal here is just only having 2GB of RAM. Can't run too many background tasks. Windows 7 handles resources much better than XP, and is also a lot more secure. The biggest performance bottleneck with this device is the HDD though.

The HDD is the slowest piece of any computer. Let me demonstrate with a video I put on my article in the other sub-forum.
SSD vs. HDD Performance Comparison - YouTube

I hope that makes things a bit more clear. SSDs are exceptionally quicker than HDDs and make the overall general performance of any machine slow or fast regardless much better.

Any 2.5" SSD will fit in there. As for suggestions, that depends on if you want to spend the money on one. They are more expensive than a HDD but very worth it. It doesn't matter what SATA port is in the laptop, as either SATA2 or SATA3 SSDs will work, and either kind will give a huge boost in performance. With a budget in mind, I can make suggestions based on that.

 

[texas]

This is so incredibly helpful. Thank you, so much, for really going above and beyond. I appreciate all of your time in putting this response together.