the closest i'll get to a new laptop for under $150...

Have you ever been in the situation where you like your trusty old laptop, but it kinda stopped being trusty? I would imagine most laptops get replaced after a few years as new technology comes out and things start acting funny on the older ones. Anyways, my (sometimes) trusty laptop started acting up about 6 months ago, and I was reluctant to replace it, mostly because I didn't really feel like shelling out the $$ for a new one.

I'm not entirely sure what an average lifetime is for a laptop, but my thinkpad x61s was in the 5-year-old range when it started acting up. It took the better part of 10min to boot-up (it used to take 5-7min – vista was never all that fast...), 25min in, the computer will want to restart and install some updates, then the update would fail for some reason, and it would revert back. It also didn't help that I had the laptop plugged in all the time with the battery in, so the battery life went from 6hrs average down to roughly 40min. Not to mention 80gb isn't really that big for a laptop anymore. Yep...this badboy was due for an upgrade.

This crackpot scheme started two weeks ago when fry's had a sale on laptop hard drives – 500gb SATA (5400rpm) for $39, which i guess is a good price? I picked it up, thinking at the very least i could swap out the drive. A quick peek at ebay confirmed that windows 7 goes for a decent price, and I hear good things about it (compared to vista – many things are said about vista too, none of which are repeatable in polite conversation), so i picked that up as well. Since i was on an upgrade roll, I got my hands on a few gb's of memory and ebayed a new laptop battery to boot.

Now here's the tricky part, actually opening things up. Oddly enough, there were two 1gb memory sticks in the laptop. Only one can be removed, so i swapped that one out. The drive was easy to remove, and the windows installation went in without a hitch. Here's the aggravating part. I spent the better part of 3 hours doing the upgrading part. Parts swapped, new OS installed, no problem. Then windows updater kicked in. =( 36 hours of updates later, and the laptop was finally ready to use.

The rest of the hardware couldn't really be upgraded (read: i was either inept or too lazy to look into how to do it), so even though the upgrades went in, the windows baseline performance indicator was still at a pedestrian 3.1 out of 7.9 (btw who the heck makes a scale from 1-7.9??). I can say that it runs much faster and with the new OS/drive/memory/battery, it's functioning better than it ever would have when I first got it. Hopefully it doesn't crap out for another 5 years... **fingers crossed**