Taking advantage of a laptop fix?

[ScottyB]

Gidday guys,

As you know, I am looking at buying a new laptop as my one went buggery with its charging port connection to the motherboard.

I was just going to buy a new one, but have concluded that NO laptop will run FSX smoothly anyway, so I might as well just stick with my one which runs FS9 with Max settings and addons between 40-70FPS.

I will be getting my laptop fixed next week, and they have to take out the motherboard and re-solder the charging port to it. I was wondering if I should take advantage of the cost and hassels with taking the motherboard out, and at the same time upgrade some hardware that could potentially allow me to run FSX on medium settings with VLC? Woulkd this be a good idea?

I have heard that the reasons for limited upgrading on laptops is because of this reason - that removing the motherboard is difficult and time-cosuming (cost).

If so, what parts of the laptop would greatly improve performance. My laptop is a Toshiba Satellite A500. Specs below:

CPU Intel® Core™2 Duo processor T6600 (2.2GHz, 800MHz FSB, 2MB L2 Cache)
Operating System Genuine Windows® 7 Home Premium (32bit)
Screen Size 16.0" Widescreen HD TruBrite® Display (1366 x 768), supports 720p
Memory 4GB DDR2 (2GB + 2GB)
Storage 500GB (5400rpm) SATA
Graphics NVIDIA® GeForce® GT 230M (2032MB Total: 1GB DDR3 discrete memory + 1287MB shared memory)

Thanks in advance,
Scotty

[freaknout]

Hi Scotty

I would ask the company you plan to take it into, see what they say.

Typically, only RAM and perhaps the harddrive of a laptop can be changed, at least that what I can change in my own Macbook Pro. Graphics card and pretty much everything else is usually a no go.

Jay

[Dontcopy]

Usually, Graphics cards and CPU's are soldered onto the motherboard, so cannot be replaced. RAM and hard-drive almost always can be replaced.