Extend the life of your laptop with these 4 DIY upgrades

Everyone wants to make sure they are getting the most from their laptop. While keeping it up to date and doing some preventative maintenance is always good, upgrading some of the components can be an even better way to breathe some new life into any laptop. Even better, a lot of upgrades really aren’t that hard and can be done by almost anyone with a screwdriver and a few minutes of time.

If you’re looking to improve battery life, increase performance, or maybe just be able to store some more files, a simple laptop upgrade could be just what you need. While you may not be able to upgrade all the components on a laptop, you can upgrade enough components to make it feel like a completely new laptop in most cases.

4

Thermal Paste

Keep your temps low

Maybe it’s not an upgrade in the normal sense, but it’s still a worthy one, nonetheless. You can get a better thermal paste if you’d like, but the important thing is to change the thermal paste every couple of years. Thermal paste can dry out and become less effective over time, even causing your CPU to overheat.

Changing the thermal paste itself is not a hard job. However, opening the laptop to access the heatsink and change the paste can be a pain, depending on your laptop model. You are better off looking up what is required to change the thermal paste before you get started. If you feel confident in doing so, this can help to reduce laptop temps greatly. Also, while doing this, clean any dust out of the heatsink, which can cause your laptop to overheat. You’ll be killing two birds with one stone as you must remove the heatsink to change the thermal paste, so removing the dust should be easy enough.

3

Battery

Taking your laptop with you on the go

The whole idea of a laptop is ease of use and portability. Therefore, the laptop’s battery is crucial to the user experience. Over time, batteries can degrade and won’t last as long as they once did. While there are ways to extend your battery life, most laptops will allow you to upgrade the battery, though it is not as easy as it once was. In the past, laptop batteries could be taken out by the push of a button. Nowadays, you must take the bottom off of the laptop to access the battery, making the upgrade uncomfortable for some.

Laptop batteries degrade from improper charging and just from aging. A lot of people leave their laptops plugged in all the time, which can quickly kill the battery, meaning the charge won’t last as long if not plugged in. If you’re not confident in taking the bottom casing off your laptop, you can always find a local shop to do it. A lot of times, this can even be done while you wait if booked in advance.

2

RAM

Can be a bigger help than you may think

Ever thought your laptop wasn’t reaching the desktop quite as fast as it should? Or maybe programs take longer to load than you’d like? If so, it’ll be worth checking your RAM usage to see if an upgrade might be beneficial. High RAM usage isn’t always a sign you need to upgrade, but it can be a good indicator of whether the time to upgrade is coming.

If you are using 80% of your RAM and not noticing any issues, odds are you don’t need to upgrade just yet. However, if you are using 90+% and notice issues with programs opening slowly and just general lag not caused by network issues, then it may well be time to upgrade. When upgrading your RAM, it is always best to ensure all the RAM matches to avoid further issues.

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1

SSD

Can you ever have too much storage?

If your laptop still has a hard drive, it is time to upgrade to an SSD. Or, if you notice that you don’t have enough room to install new programs, games, or files, an SSD upgrade could also be a big help. Depending on your laptop model, you might be able to get up to an 8TB SSD with some pretty impressive speeds.

First, you will want to find out if you need a SATA or M.2 SSD. One of the easiest ways to do this is by searching for your laptop model on the manufacturer’s website to see the available storage type. From here, you can then plan out your upgrade. A good rule of thumb for storage upgrades is to go for 2x or 4x your storage amount. This will leave you plenty of room without giving you too much extra storage to just be wasted.

You can also prolong the life of your laptops without hardware upgrades

There are several things you can do that don’t involve taking your laptop apart to help get some more life out of it. One of the biggest helps can sometimes be a fresh installation of your operating system. Over time, it loads up with many files and programs you may not need anymore. Of course, you can delete and uninstall them, but traces may still be left behind, and it may have also affected your OS files as well. A fresh OS install can fix this and make your laptop feel brand new again.

For those who are into gaming, a cloud gaming service can be highly beneficial. It allows you to play newer and more demanding games on your hardware without needing upgrades. While you may have to pay a subscription fee, this will be much cheaper than upgrading or replacing your current laptop.

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You may also find external hubs and docks to help you get more time out of your beloved laptop. External hubs can offer more ports so that you can utilize external storage drives and extra monitors. You could even consider an external GPU (eGPU) if your laptop is compatible with it. This would allow you to easily perform more graphical tasks while keeping your current laptop and not hindering its portability.

While buying a new laptop may sound fun, there are plenty of ways to get more life out of your current one. Not only will this allow you to utilize it for longer and keep on enjoying it, but upgrading your old one also helps to reduce waste, which can be an amazing feeling as well.