Two Questions About Customizing Laptops

Wandering Flame said:

1. Can you have a Compaq laptop customized? I seriously like the look of them on the inside and out, however I read they have some weak specs. Everywhere I go there seems to be Compaqs for sale that are uncustomized, and even on HP's site...so just to confirm, I can't customize a Compaq laptop? Of course I mean when I'm buying it, and not personally customizing afterwards...as I know jack on how to customize anyway.

2. As far as customization goes (like when you customize a Dell laptop online and buy it) how exactly is your personal laptop built? Do Dell technicians review your order and place the parts you want inside your laptop by themselves, with their hands, etc., or is the laptop "factory-customized" if you know what I mean. Basically a factory produced item while in the mode of customizing it, and it was not opened, seen or touched by the coworkers.

Thanks a lot!

All laptops are customizable to a point.
Most are factory setup and the manuf just adds a few items.

Somethings that may be different is screen size but that is with a specific model catagory

Factory installed CPU's depends on if you buy a business computer laptop or a school laptop. CPU are soldered on motherrboard.

HD can be upgraded easily. 160Gb min at 5200rpm's , Some larger are 7,200 RPM's

Wifi usually internal plugin

Inital memory is soldered in and you usually have one available plug in for up to 1 additional slot.

So I think if you just decide what you want the laptop for is the first question.
School, travel, business or gaming

Then you have to decide on CPU and buss speed.

Then Hard drive size

Then the amount of memory. 1 gig is basic with 1 additional if you need.

All the rest is basic, screen sizem wifi, # of USB ports, etc.

Hope this helps

Virtually all laptops can have the hard drives replaced. However, you can't add space to a hard drive. For example, a 160GB hard drive can't be expanded to store more than what it's rated at if that's what you're thinking.

It's fairly easy to replace a hard drive with a larger capacity one. The tricky part is copying over all the files from the old drive to the new one. There are several way to do this. On a desktop is pretty easy since you can have both drives on line at the same time and use a utility to clone one to the other. Laptops however don't support two directly connected hard drives (SATA or PATA) at the same time so transferring a drive image isn't quite as clean.

But since you're buying a new laptop, try and get the largest drive you can afford. Nature abhors a vacuum and you'll appreciate the extra space down the road. Video is another one. You can't upgrade the video once you've bought the machine so if there's an option for a better video, that's usually a good way to go.