[salve]

Hello all, as I've stated here I recently purchased a satellite A215-S7444 and am having issues with it's performance.

Can anyone tell me if the Satellite's HD is upgradable? I was looking to upgrade to an HD that runs at 7200rpms.

Thanks for any help!

[smax013]

salve said:

Hello all, as I've stated here I recently purchased a satellite A215-S7444 and am having issues with it's performance.

Can anyone tell me if the Satellite's HD is upgradable? I was looking to upgrade to an HD that runs at 7200rpms.

Thanks for any help!

According to the specs on the Toshiba website, it comes with a 200 gb 5400 rpm drive. Thus, if you want a 7200 rpm drive, you will NOT increase the disk size (maximum size laptop hard drives in 7200 rpm right now are 200 gb). Why do you want a 7200 rpm drive? Unless you are doing some disk intensive activities (i.e. editting video or playing higher end games), you likely will not notice much of a difference and that is a lot of money to spend on something that you may not really notice. !http://forums.pcworld.com/legacyimages/
1!



If you REALLY do want to do it (or if you want to go to a 250 gb 5400 rpm drive), then there should be an access panel on the bottom or a "tray/bay" that slides out the side that allows you to access the drive. There is a chance your manual might tell you how (I could not check...Toshiba did NOT have a manual available on their site).

[salve]

Hi, well the thing is it actually runs at 4200rpms and even without any intesive activities it has proven to be slow. I will soon need to run AutoCad and
Corel Draw for work purposes, so I'm imagining how excelent the performance is going to be while I have both running at the same time lol. What do you think would be ideal for me, I thought that having a Turinon 64 X2 ,2GB of ram and 200GB of HD was sufficient, I was wrong. Also the only upgrade information in the manual is for the RAM.

Thanks!

[smax013]

salve said:

Hi, well the thing is it actually runs at 4200rpms and even without any intesive activities it has proven to be slow. I will soon need to run AutoCad and
Corel Draw for work purposes, so I'm imagining how excelent the performance is going to be while I have both running at the same time lol. What do you think would be ideal for me, I thought that having a Turinon 64 X2 ,2GB of ram and 200GB of HD was sufficient, I was wrong. Also the only upgrade information in the manual is for the RAM.

Thanks!

I still doubt that you will see THAT much speed improvement even if it is a 4200 rpm drive, unless you have a LOT of hard drive activity. When you are doing stuff and it is taking a long time, look at the hard drive activity light and see if it is lit up for while. If so, then a faster drive MIGHT help. The point is that drive speed generally does not help as much as one might think. And keep in mind that the faster the drive, the short the life of the battery on a charge. Faster drives tend to eat battery life up faster.



As to upgrading, I cannot really find anything to help. The only thing that I have found is a "tour" on the Toshiba website that shows the bottom of an A215. But, it does not call out the hard drive location...only the battery and memory. You can see two additional covers/bays, one of which is likely the hard drive bay. If you are adventurous, then you could unscrew the cover and see what is beneath. The one thing to beware of is that if the manual doese not indicate how to upgrade the hard drive, then Toshiba might not consider it a user replaceable item and thus it could void the warranty to upgrade it yourself. So, if you are REALLY bent on upgrading it and you want your warranty, then you might need to take it to an authorized Toshiba dealer to have it upgraded.

[rgreen4]

What are you seeing that indicates that the drive is running at 4,200 RPM?

Another thing, what software do you have running in the background? When you boot, is there anything besides the anti-virus and anti-spyware running?

What anti-virus and anti-spyware are you running? Some of these can bog a machine down.

[salve]

Hi rgreen,
heres the link to the products description on the circuitcity site

Toshiba Satellite

it tells you that it comes with a 4200rpm drive

as far as when I boot besides my AvastAntivirus, there is a cd dvd acoustic silencer, the webcam assitant and the Catalyst Control Center,
all else I have removed.

anti spyware- i use is the freeware version of ad-aware which I myself have to initialize

any help, suggestions

thanks