Upgrading on a laptop?

[jwied]

I have over a decade of experience building, fixing, and generally just mangling desktop computers. Upgrading hardware is an "every three months" kind of thing for me. Now I have run into a technical delima... upgradeablity of a laptop.

I have an HP Pavillion DV8040 (http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/...0484&cc=us&dlc=en&lc=en&jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN). Of course when I bought it it was capable of playing all the games I wanted of that day. Now, it's a bit sluggish. I have upgraded it to 2GB of RAM but what seems to be holding it back is the video card.

So the simple question: Can the video be upgraded on these? I'm fairly skilled with a soldering iron (although not with micro-printed boards) if there is just a few pins involved to get an old chip on and swapped with a new chip. I'm not afraid to break open the case and get my hands dirty.

If anyone has experience or knows if this can or can't be done, please let me know.

 

[dvregan]

I have over a decade of experience building, fixing, and generally just mangling desktop computers. Upgrading hardware is an "every three months" kind of thing for me. Now I have run into a technical delima... upgradeablity of a laptop.

I have an HP Pavillion DV8040 (http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/...0484&cc=us&dlc=en&lc=en&jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN). Of course when I bought it it was capable of playing all the games I wanted of that day. Now, it's a bit sluggish. I have upgraded it to 2GB of RAM but what seems to be holding it back is the video card.

So the simple question: Can the video be upgraded on these? I'm fairly skilled with a soldering iron (although not with micro-printed boards) if there is just a few pins involved to get an old chip on and swapped with a new chip. I'm not afraid to break open the case and get my hands dirty.

If anyone has experience or knows if this can or can't be done, please let me know.

You might wanna do a search over at notebook forums, google it up, not sure of html linking is allowed here so I'm not posting the direct link. Upgraded my dell i9300 to an xps gen2 with help from pple there. Most NB graphics cards aren't mxm standard so it's pretty hard, dell doesn't support it either. Most companies who wanna milk their customer base usually go this route.