Laptop upgrade question.

December 01, 2017, 11:46 PM

rkight3

OK, I have a pretty nice, 2 year old Toshiba 17" wide screen laptop.

It's an I5 6200u cpu at 2.4 GHz
1 tb hdd 5400 rpm
8 gig (2-4 gig) pc1333 ddr3 memory
it's a gaming laptop with 2 video cards. 1 for pc, one for gaming.

1) I want to replace the hdd with a 500gig SSD drive. I assume I'll have to also get the external sataIII cable to usb to put the old drive on? Or external 2.5 case, to use the 1 tb as backup drive after transfer. Is that it? put the new drive in , run their migrate program, done?

2) How do I find out how much memory I can install, and if I have to have matched sets. I would like at least 16 gig memory, 24 or 32 gig would be nice.

Toshiba satellite PSPT4U-05503U

December 02, 2017, 09:53 AM

snidera

1 You got the right idea. A cheap USB/SATA from Amazon is all you need. Marcium Reflect is free & can clone the HDD to the SSD. 11$ - it's cloned a couple for me

2 One of many ways to check out what you can use for memory: Crucial Memory Advisor

December 02, 2017, 09:58 AM

Skull Leader

Unless you're editing video or do a lot of large photo editing, I would save my money on adding memory. 8 gigs is plenty for gaming.

December 02, 2017, 10:11 AM

smschulz

quote:
1) I want to replace the hdd with a 500gig SSD drive. I assume I'll have to also get the external sataIII cable to usb to put the old drive on? Or external 2.5 case, to use the 1 tb as backup drive after transfer. Is that it? put the new drive in , run their migrate program, done?

Pretty much but if your system supports USB3 that would work better. You could mount them in desktop and run a migration from a boot disk but that might be too much work, it is what I would do but I am in the business and have plenty of hardware available. YMMV

2) How do I find out how much memory I can install, and if I have to have matched sets. I would like at least 16 gig memory, 24 or 32 gig would be nice.

Doubtful it will support more than 8gb, possible 16gb but know the SSD will make the most impact on your system. Just Google your computers model number's specifications and you should get the answer. 8 to 16 gb would have some but minimal impact.