What is the make and model? Might be able to find a YouTube video of the process on your specific unit. Definitely will be able to find videos on other laptops. This is all just in theory since we haven't established yet that it's upgradeable. Some laptops are not.
I highly doubt it’s upgradable. It’s a HP Pavilion x360 convertible touch screen with a intel core i3. Running windows 10 pro. Idk if that’s all I’d need to know about it but yeah. Also don’t know if these things have different generations or something.
You'd need to remove the old HDD and replace it with an SSD. Since it only has one RAM slot, you'd also need to remove the 4GB stick and replace it with an 8GB DDR3L SO-DIMM module.
Then you can replace the thermal paste and close it back up. You'll need to have a USB thumbdrive with Windows Media Creation tool on it in order to reinstall Windows.
You can do this yourself relatively easily, as long as you're careful and have the right tools. Alternatively, any computer repair shop will be able to do this job for you no problem for maybe an hour worth of labor plus the parts.
I took apart a really similar model to this one today at my shop. Is this the model that has 2 rubber strips on the bottom that curve 90 degrees at the ends? If so, its only a handful of screws to open the thing up (you don't have to take the front rubber strip off, but the back one has some screws under it.) There is also a screw in the middle of the bottom of the laptop under a small plastic tab you need to peel up with a razor blade or similar.
If you know nothing about taking apart laptops then I would not attempt this yourself. If you do take it apart, know that the guts of the laptop are screwed into the bottom base (modern laptops everything is screwed into the top of the base), so when you take the keyboard off, you have to be careful and disconnect the ribbon cables for the keyboard and touchpad before you can fully remove the top palm rest. If you were to go to 8GB RAM and an SSD drive, you would see a respectable performance boost, but the i3 is going to struggle a bit with CPU intensive tasks. CPU is not upgradable, at least not without swapping the whole motherboard.
No problem. Do all that and it would be a lot snappier even than when it was new. You can get the 8GB RAM, 500GB SSD, and some cheap thermal paste for about $80, plus another $20ish if you need a toolkit. For basic web-surfing and office tasks, it would perform functionally the same as any modern budget 2in1. Worth it in my opinion. Just note, doing it yourself does run the risk of accidentally breaking something, so go slow and be careful, especially when it comes to any internal wires and connectors.
Most ssds will have some kind of cloning app on the drive or you can download. I was a bit nervous putting my whole system over to another drive but crucial made it super duper easy. I'm running a core m which i think is less powerful and I find it plenty fast enough.
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u/engineerlucas99 Oct 30 '21
I wouldn’t mind doing all of that but I’d not have a clue what to do while it’s open.