Good day, friends. Recently, many questions have accumulated about old PCs and laptops. They simply cannot cope with their work in modern realities. New versions of programs, constant updates of the operating system and heavy modern sites require significantly more resources. And if a simple laptop with 2 GB of RAM was enough for everyday tasks for several years, now such characteristics are not enough even just to check mail and sit on VKontakte.
What to do if you don’t have money for a new laptop, but you still want to use it? It’s best to use it with pleasure and not suffer for half an hour until another tab opens in the browser. The question is, of course, rhetorical, but in most cases it is possible to significantly speed up the work of your old laptop.
How to overclock an old laptop
All computers and laptops, including, consist of various components. The main advantage of laptops, of course, is their compactness. And compactness can only be achieved by maximally combining all components and placing them as close as possible. As a result, we have the fact that most of the laptop is extremely difficult to repair or replace. However, in most laptop models, you can still easily replace the RAM and disk. In the most successful layout options, there are even special technological windows. For clarity, I will attach a couple of photos.
As you can see from the photos above, the most easily replaceable components in a laptop are the hard drive, RAM, and battery. This is more than enough for the simplest overclocking of a laptop. In some cases, there are even free slots for an additional memory bar.
Laptop manufacturers have made access to these laptop elements for a reason. They are the ones that bear the main load of the system and you need to pay attention to them first. If we have an old hard drive in our experimental laptop, it is advisable to upgrade it to a more modern and capacious one. And it is even better to use a faster SSD drive. It is also advisable to increase the RAM to the maximum possible volume. It is also worth paying attention to the speed of the RAM and use the maximum possible for this laptop model.
Unfortunately, laptop batteries do not last long. In the best cases, a laptop battery retains its original characteristics for about three years. And then the battery begins to degrade. If battery life is an important factor for you, then you should replace it with a new one. You can read about how to extend the life of a laptop battery in a separate article.
Let’s summarize our research and answer the question. How to speed up an old laptop?
- Replacing an old disk with a new one. The maximum available in size and speed. At the moment, these are SSD disks.
- Adding/replacing operational plan bars with the most accessible ones in terms of speed and volume.
- Replacing the battery with a new one.
Completing all these points will give a new life to the old laptop. And its owners will be able to use it and enjoy it. These actions can be done independently. They do not require any great skills or special tools.
Cooling system
Well, since we have disassembled the laptop, it is worth taking a closer look at its cooling system. This is also an important element in modern devices. All electronic components must have a good flow of fresh air for high-quality cooling.
The cooling system basically pushes air through the insides of the laptop. By creating a constant air flow, the laptop fans literally suck in cool air and push hot air out. In ideal conditions, this should work. But nothing is ideal. Dust, fine dirt, hair, and pet hair that hang out in the air also end up inside our laptop and its components.
Dirt inside a laptop is certainly not pretty, but it also reduces the performance of the cooling system and contributes to an increase in temperature inside the case of our laptop. In practice, it has been noted that dirt and dust inside the laptop case leads to such phenomena as throttling of the processor and its graphics subsystem. Thus, its performance is significantly reduced. And the entire cooling system has to work at maximum speed to achieve its efficiency. Well, as a consequence of all this, we hear constant noise and hum of the fan.
What to do? If you have noticed that your laptop has started to constantly make noise and hum even when idle and under minimal load. First of all, you need to check the entire cooling system and get rid of all the dust inside the laptop case. In the simplest cases, we will need a simple: a vacuum cleaner and a brush. You can also use all available tools. For professional cleaning, there are special compressed air cylinders for blowing out equipment. Anyone can do a simple laptop cleaning, this does not require any material investment and everything can be done with available tools. In particularly advanced cases, it is better to contact professionals.
In addition to removing dust, it is advisable to replace the thermal paste and/or thermal pads every six months. Since their thermal conductivity deteriorates over time, and in particularly advanced cases, dried thermal paste can lead to severe overheating. It will be difficult to do this without special skills. If you doubt your capabilities, it is better to contact specialists to carry out this procedure.
You can also read my old article on this topic about cleaning and disassembling laptops. All these procedures are described in more detail there, so I will not repeat myself. But as a small life hack, I can advise that if you have difficulties with disassembling some specific laptop, you can always watch how it is done on YouTube. Just type in the search there “Disassembly ?what is your laptop model?“. This will help to significantly reduce your time. And you can also look at another of my old articles about overheating laptops:
Conclusions
So, we are close to forming our plan of work on overclocking the laptop. We have already collected the first three points and are adding there regular cleaning of the cooling system and replacement of thermal paste.
- Replacing an old disk with a new one. The maximum available in size and speed. At the moment, these are SSD disks.
- Adding/replacing operational plan bars with the most accessible ones in terms of speed and volume.
- Replacing the battery with a new one.
- Cleaning the cooling system and replacing thermal paste.
- Configure the OS, disable unnecessary services and programs
All these procedures will help to extend the life of any, even the oldest laptop. This is, of course, if all other components are in good working order and functioning. Otherwise, they need to be replaced. And the last, fifth point I added is setting up the operating system, disabling unnecessary services, removing unused programs. But here everything is individual and depends on the OS and your needs. You can write a lot about the last point, and even I have already written, for example, such an article:
How to clean your computer from junk and speed it up to the maximum
There is also a whole section on the site dedicated to this:
DIY Computer Repair
There you can find every little thing in more detail.
Where to buy new spare parts for a laptop?
Where can you buy new parts to revive your laptop? Of course, everything depends on your free time and money. You can simply trust a good workshop so that they carry out all the necessary procedures, select the necessary components, buy them and install them. This is the easiest, but also the most expensive way. You can choose each part yourself on the same Yandex.Market or Aliexpress. Order and wait. And if there is a large electronics store nearby, you can go there and seek help from sales consultants.
As a small bonus, I can recommend the most budget SSD drives on Aliexpress. Their speed and quality certainly cannot be compared with the top Samsung models, but they will be more than enough to overclock an old laptop. These drives are also available on Yandex.Market. Just choose where it is cheaper at the moment.
ChatGPT’s Tips on Overclocking Your Laptop
The topic of ChatGPT and similar chats with artificial intelligence is very popular now. For the sake of interest, I asked him this question. Well, actually, I’ll post his answer here without editing. Well, and you can evaluate how smart he is and how much his answer corresponds to reality.
- -Write an article on the topic “How to overclock an old laptop”.
- Everyone knows that an old laptop is slow and hard to start. But does that just mean it needs repair or an upgrade? Let’s get to the bottom of this!
The first thing to do is to check all the components of the laptop for functionality and the absence of malfunctions. For example, if you have an old laptop with Windows XP or Vista, then be sure to replace it with a more modern operating system (for example, Windows 10). This will allow the computer to work faster and more efficiently. You will also need to install the latest versions of the program for working with files – this will help to optimally use the laptop’s memory, and also make the operating system easier to work with in general.
If all of the above did not give results and your old laptop still works slower – then you need to pay attention to the processor, memory (RAM) and video card of the computer. If they have the ability to be updated or replaced – you will need to do this!
Another important requirement for the speed of an old laptop is a clean solid-state drive (SSD). This will allow the computer to work much more efficiently and speed up the loading time of programs.
By following all the above steps, you can restore the speed of your old laptop!
