upgrading Sony Viao lappie

[graham.hobart]

Hello all, I want to increase the capability of my venerable 2009 lappy -Sony viao P series I think . I googled and found out it has a 64gb Hd and a non upgradeable 2gb DDR2 RAm which is soldered to the mother board.
How can I increase it's performance apart from deleting all my good astro software that's on it?
It has a SD drive slot, a memory stick (? is this a sony thing?) and a 'multi media' drive slot? The cd/dvd drive is non functioning.
Some bloke in the local computer store said that it would not support a SSD as it is not SATA or something (it's PATA HDD)
Cheers Tech heads
Graham

[Colin_Fraser]

Probably not a lot you can do to improve performance.
Loading the latest drivers and stopping services you do not need may help a bit as does uninstalling the software you DO NOT NEED.
Remove all your startup entries is another way to increase performance albeit slightly.
Increasing the size of the HD will not make it go better, only hold more data. You may gain a bit of speed by defragging the HD
The soldered in RAM is a problem and probably not worth spending a lot to remedy.
Maybe a letter to Santa is your best option ;)

[graham.hobart]

Nice one Colin, knew the forum would come to the rescue on this one! Just as I thought, now should I write Dear Santa or Dear Sata?
Am a bit concerned about getting a new lappie as they are all Windows 7 and would hate to go through making it work with PHD/Maxim DL/ APT/ Nebulosity/ Stellarium etc as I have got it all doing slow but ok on my current model.
:thumbsup:

[2stroke]

You can still get pata ssd's, i had an older vaio and did a run around back then the only problem is the price. Another problem you have to strip them right down to get to the hd. Your really screwed with this ultra ports and the best thing you can do is try http://www.nliteos.com/ and make a custom install with sp2 not 3 and strip out any un-needed packages/components. Try using win 2k desktop settings/theme to save on windows rendering desktop background, icons ect

[Colin_Fraser]

Should not be a problem.
Bet those programs can run on new laptop & Windows 7. The only difference you will notice is they will run FASTER.

[Irish stargazer]

I run all my astro stuff like stellarium, nebulosity on Windows 7 without any tweaking required. It's not Vista;)
I picked up a new Sony Viao E 15 series yesterday for my wife (she insists in having a colored laptop) from JBHiHi. Reasonable spec on it but could have picked up a better spec if vibrant color wasn't an issue. Sony's are a bit overpriced for their performance. I use Toshiba or Samsung myself which are great machines.

[naskies]

The best "quick fix" in the short term may be to find an unused SD card (e.g. 1 to 4 GB, or larger) and turn on the ReadyBoost feature (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReadyBoost). This lets Windows use the SD card as a cache, as even a slow SD card is much, much faster at random read operations than a spinning disk.

If you don't have an SD card handy, I'm sure there are plenty of people who have an unused one of that capacity lying around.

Is the Sony Vaio P series one of those small ultra-portable netbooks? There's a good chance that it uses 1.8-inch hard drives (most standard sized laptops use 9.5 mm high 2.5-inch drives) which can be a bit hard to source economically.

I wouldn't recommend spending much money on upgrades, considering that $500-$1000 will get you a much, much faster machine.

As for Windows 7 - most software that is being actively developed will work fine, as John says. The only catch is if you use any old hardware - e.g. my Canon 20D is no longer supported in Windows 7 (as in Canon won't release drivers for it), so I can't use it with BackyardEOS.

[OICURMT]

As mentioned above... Image the drive, then replace the HD with a Solid State Drive (restore the image so that everything you had is still there). You'll get a huge increase in the access times with respect to the drive. This will greatly improve performance. Note that your Sony uses a PATA interface, so you will need to get a PATA SSD (obviously... :P)

As for the SDIO slot, unless you get a Class 6 or higher (and your laptop supports it), you won't get much in the way of an improvement.

OIC!