crashdummy35

I am my father's son, in the sense that, I hate to just throw anything away.

My cousin recently decided to part with a laptop that he carried with him over the course of his 3 tours in Iraq. This is the lappy: AVERATEC 6200 Mobile Theatre.

Now this laptop is old. Really old. The battery is junk--only fires up with the cord in--and it gets super hot super fast. The DVD drive is dead also. I think it has 512 MB of RAM and an older AMD cpu.

My question is...weighing the costs to eventual performance, should I attempt to fix this up a bit?

I know zilch about lappies and how hard would it be to get some new RAM (1 to 2 GB) and a cpu maybe for this?

I have a younger niece that has a penchant for mangling my sister's lappy with total junk kiddie stuff...could this be her little lappy to abuse until she gets old enough to have a better one?

I know "Google is your friend" but, I was just wondering if anyone could point my in the general direction of where I could begin looking into the RAM and cpu..?

Thank you.

yomi

Not an expert on this but, I believe for the price to fix the old crappy laptop you can buy a new laptop with better specifications than the old one... So, in my opinion -- not worth fixing up

Drift0r

If it still runs fine, you can use it as a spare web browsing computer. Just clean the dust out of the fans and put on some new TIM. If any of the stuff is not functioning that is necessary to run the computer, it probably won't be worth it to fix. If you want to add more ram, it'll cost you a pretty penny as even DDR2 ram is getting expensive. Not too sure about laptop ram though.

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steeda50

I think its worth keeping to use. You can put 2gb of pc2700 ram in it. Newegg has g.skill pc2700 1gb for 32.00 I think? I wouldnt change the cpu.

Rewindlabs

I think it would be viable to give it to the niece...she sounds like my sister

I'd say you should keep it stock but open the laptop up and clean it out thoroughly...make sure all of the fans are working and replace the CPU/GPU TIM

Compressed air is going to be your friend through the entire process so have a compressor or can at the ready

If the laptop still fails to stay within acceptable temps you can always get a notebook cooler for it and your set

I also recommend that you put a friendly Linux OS on it and depending on this kid you could run one of the distro's that aims to look just like XP and that mimics quite a few of the features of XP...with Linux you would definitely have less worry about the system starting to eat up ram after so long and the possibility of viruses and any other bugs from childish net surfing...

Goodluck

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I want to cry out but I don’t scream and I don’t shout
And I feel so proud to be alive
And I feel so proud when the reckoning arrives

dudenell

seems like the next step up for a processor is the XP m 2500+
http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/...6_7227,00.html

but no idea if you would be able to even take out the processor

here is a link where someone tears it apart but from the pics I dont see a ram slot??

http://fatpenguinblog.com/scott-ripp...econstruction/

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crashdummy35

Yeah, all good points guys. Reps all around.

Really good points going both ways.

It works. Plugged in it works and surfs the net just fine. Decently anyway. It has a cooling pad too. A twin 120mm set up.

I think I'm going to at least try. Yeah. I'm going to at least try.

$120 bucks. That's all I'll spend on it. If the fixes come out to more, I'll scrap the project.

Thanks for the opinions.

crashdummy35

It's right above the cpu to the left on this one.

Thanks for the links bro.

Guess I'd better start Googling.

Drift0r

Here bottom right corner:

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crashdummy35

Yeah. I saw it there when I slapped some Freeze on the hs.

Followed the trail Dudenell started with the links and I've found the user's manual.

Time for some fun