Laptop Upgrades

Unicorn · 17 Apr 2012 at 16:38

What can i do to speed my laptop up?

SSD And RAM?

Will my laptop utilise a sata III ssd fully or could i get away with a sata II ssd?
Also my current ram is 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 1333, Do i need the exact same?

Its a Acer Aspire 5552

Also were can i get these bays i can remove my disk drive and put my hard drive in with?

cmndr_andi · 17 Apr 2012 at 17:10

Hi there,

Yes SSD and RAM are the way to go for laptop upgrades.

I think a CPU upgrade is possible (depending what you currently have) as the laptop supports mobile Athlon II X2, Phenom II X2 and X4 CPUs. The top tier CPU is the AMD Phenom™ II quad-core mobile processor N950 which can be bought for ~£70. Though please bear in mind that CPU upgrades are generally much trickier than upgrading the RAM/SSD on the laptop or replacing a desktop CPU. Here is the service manual which shows you how to disassemble the laptop, page 116 shows the CPU replacement.

For the graphics, the standard 5552 only has onboard HD 4250 graphics, so no GPU upgrades are available for this one.

As for the SSD, the laptop uses SATA 2, so the super quick SATA3 drives wouldn't be fully utilised. But to be honest, for most operations a SATA2 connection won't limit the performance of a quick SATA3 drive, so I would just be looking for a good value, reliable SSD and don't worry about whether it is SATA2 or SATA3. Personally, I would go with this one. Also, bear in mind that this laptop uses standard height 9.5mm hard drives, so you don't need to go for a thin 7mm model.

As for the RAM you will want a 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 1333MHz kit, something like this.

Finally, the bay that converts the optical drive to a 2.5in HDD/SSD mount is one like this. The laptop uses a SATA connection for the optical drive, so it should work great.

Unicorn · 17 Apr 2012 at 18:24

Thats amazing and detailed info! Didn't know the CPU was upgradable to be honest, I currently have an AMD Athlon II X2 P340 so that could be a good option also. Seems most stuff i do isnt CPU restricted though its the Harddrive which is my bottleneck along with graphics.

Would an OCZ Agility 3, 120GB work well?

Last question would i have any problems re-installing my OS? I have no disks but Acer tool allows me to make some, But it being a new drive would it say no?

cmndr_andi · 17 Apr 2012 at 19:02

With an Athlon II X2 then you do have a decent CPU upgrade option available, though as you don't find the current CPU to be much of a problem then you may as well leave it as it is (at least for now).

The Agility 3 120GB will also work fine, though I would personally go for the M4 over it due to the greater reliability and overall better performance.

For installing the OS, I would personally just get hold of a fresh windows 7 disk (I would assume the laptop is licensed for Windows 7 Home Premium) instead of an Acer recovery disk - as going down this route doesn't install all the acer bloatware along with the OS.

If you don't have a suitable disk then you can legally download the Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bit image from here - and just use the license key that is on the underside of the laptop.

You can install the OS using a disk or with a USB stick (using an application like this). Personally I would opt for the USB stick if you have one to hand - as it is easy to do and means you can do the DVD to HDD drive swap at the same time as your other hardware upgrades. Just make sure you set the USB stick to be your primary boot drive in the BIOS before trying the install.