Dell Studio 1737 upgrade

[michael1234252]

Hi I'm wanting to upgrade an old Dell Studio 1737 that I inherited from my grandfather. Now I want to replace the main battery cause the original stock one is to week to last no more than one hour on a full charge. I also want to upgrade the ram and HDD to higher capacity. I want the ram to be about 16gb(2 ram slots) and at least 500gb for the HDD also there is an unused slot for an additional HDD drive. My biggest question is what's the best/cheapest place to get the parts? Also will it support more ram and a larger capacity HDD drive? 

[Electronics Wizardy]

This is probably 8gb max due to the age of it.

 

Get a ssd, its so much faster.

 

And really that system is very old, it will be slow no matter what you do.

[michael1234252]

Electronics Wizardy, True. But I want to try to make it a little better so that I can use it with my 3d printer. Also it's running windows 10. But I haven't used it in over a year so it's not running the current up-to-date version of Win. 10.

[Crunchy Dragon]

7 minutes ago, michael1234252 said:

Electronics Wizardy, True. But I want to try to make it a little better so that I can use it with my 3d printer. Also it's running windows 10. But I haven't used it in over a year so it's not running the current up-to-date version of Win. 10.

If it's that old, I wouldn't run anything higher than Windows 7 on it if you want it to run fast.

 

I would recommend throwing in an SSD, downgrading to Windows 7, and then increasing RAM to 8Gb. Also go through your startup processes in msconfig and kill anything that isn't absolutely necessary.

 

Amazon and Newegg are pretty good for computer parts, as well as Micro Center or Fry's if you live near one. Best Buy will do in a pinch, but they don't sell too much in the ways of components.

[michael1234252]

3 minutes ago, Crunchy Dragon said:

Amazon and Newegg are pretty good for computer parts, as well as Micro Center or Fry's if you live near one. Best Buy will do in a pinch, but they don't sell too much in the ways of components.

Well the closest Fry's is about 3 hours away in Indy. But I'll look on Amazon and Newegg. Also I kinda wish Compusa was still around. My mom used to work at the local Compusa back in the day before they went out of business.

[Guest]

@michael1234252 as @Crunchy Dragon mentioned, I would definitely go with windows 7 with a 500GB SSD and 8GB of ram since the machines age can be a dependent factor in terms of what upgrades are possible with your machine. Windows 7 is a very compatible OS that is very light on the systems resources, its very compatible in terms of game driver support as well. If you can, look on Ebay or craigslist, or if you have a local facebook page where you can buy, sell and trade stuff, thats where to look for parts. You could even look at Newegg as well for PC parts.

 

EDIT: I'd check to see what upgrades you can do with your laptop, then decide what upgrades you want to do with your laptop Make sure everything is compatible before you make a purchase.