........I suppose I should just give up, cos I have no idea what I'm doing most of the time!!!

I've inherited a laptop a Dell Inspiron 510M laptop which is a couple of years old, but the hard disk is knackered. I need to get a replacement one, but not sure what to get - any recommendations?

Here you go Bhai .. I Googled and found the below for you

EDIT: Sorry just realized you wanted to know of a good hard drive not how to replace it. I'll still leave the below though.

DELL INSPIRON 510m/ 600m/ LATITUDE D600 FAQ

Link: Click Here

3.(iii) Can I upgrade the Hard Drive? What can I upgrade it too?

Yes, absolutely you can. These three models can be upgraded with any standard 2.5" notebook Hard drive. It can take the greatest capacity (100GB) and greatest speed (7200rpm) Hard drives currently available for laptops with no problems, anything that is in that 2.5" format pretty much.

But how to do it? Well it is very simple. But first, keep in mind to transfer the pin adapter from the old hard drive to the new one or it will not connect properly, below is a picture of what is meant by the pin adapter, it fits right onto the pins at the end of the HD.

I personally recommend the Hitachi 7k60 hard drive as the best laptop drive on the market at the moment. It has a decent 60GB capacity and is powered along with a 7200rpm rotational speed and 8MB cache making it super quick. To top this off, it runs cooler than most 4200rpm and 5400rpm laptop HDs and is also quiet, using about the same amount of power as those slower drives so you are not sacrificing battery life. Have a look at the Pricegrabber results for it here, with a listing of vendors and current prices you can find the best deal.

Now the instructions:
You can see the front panel of the Hard drive right beside the PC card slot on the side of the system, if you unscrew the single screw holding it in on the bottom you can pull it out like so



All that needs to be done is to disconnect all power (including the battery), unscrew the screw holding the bay in place, pull it out, undo the four screws in the sides holding the HD in the caddy, and take off the pin adapter. Then reverse those steps to install the new one. Following are the appropriate instructions so get going!:

http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/s ... tm#1123687

The 510m is slightly different with there being two screws holding the HDD caddy in place rather than one,



http://support.dell.com/support/edocs/s ... =dhs&cs=19

On Tigerdirect.com the top three highest rated:

Western Digital Scorpio 160GB 2.5" Mobile Hard Drive - SATA, 5400, 8MB
Western Digital WD800BEVE Scorpio Blue Mobile Hard Drive - 80GB, 2.5", EIDE, 5400rpm, 8MB
Seagate ST9200420ASG Momentus 7200.2 200GB 2.5" Mobile Hard Drive - 7200RPM, 16MB, SATA-300

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications ... 77|&Sort=2

I guess I should have Googled - sorry bhai! Thanks for the input though, I'll be using that guide to fit it - something to play with this weekend! In terms of installing an OS, should I just stick to Windows? Not used Linux or anything in the past, so don't know how user friendly it is. I'm mainly planning on using the laptop for internet and stuff, just as a spare computer really.

Another stupid question - how do I know if it's a SATA or IDE interface? Am unsure which one to buy because of that.

LOL No Worries Bhai .. Just glad to help

Personally have only used WinXP mostly, never really used or tried Linux myself but have heard some good things. IMO though if you not too tech savvy and want an easy way to surf and fool around with some lite gaming and movies WinXP should be good enough and is a sinch to install .. just boot the CD, enter a couple of things (serial #, name, timezone etc) and let it do the rest.

SATA and IDE .. for notebooks its SATA exclusive .. anyone feel free to correct me if I am wrong. When searching for a HDD for the notebook just be sure its 2.5" and says its for notebooks and you should be safe.

Hope it helps

UL

bhaskar, is this your laptop?
http://www.google.com/products/catalog? ... ps-sellers

it looks like an old model, which likely has a PATA/IDE interface --NOT SATA.
this drive is PATA/IDE http://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/5 ... o_IDE.html


If you have the old drive, look at the back...see what it looks like:


BTW, YouTube is a good site for "How to" videos if you've never replaced a laptop drive before. It's easy, just make sure you don't force anything in, and you do a self static discharge before handling any of the sensitive hardware

And yeah, stay away from linux. It's more trouble than it's worth.

To install WinXP or any other OS for that matter, all you do is load the CD into the computer...reboot. Then, the computer by default should boot to the CD drive, essentially starting up the OS installation process. IF this does not occur, then you have to go into the BIOS settings of your computer and change the "boot sequence" to set the initial boot drive to the CD drive. Let me know the progress. I'll post more info if this doesn't work.

Thanks for the help. I've got the hard drive in now, just need to install the OS. Yuvan bhai, the issue is that I don't have a Windows CD - it's always been preinstalled on all computers I've bought. I guess I just need to make a bootable CD from one of my other computers and use that on the laptop?

And another couple of unrelated questions - I've got an Acer Aspire Revo 3600:

http://www.google.co.uk/products/catalo ... sa=title#p

This is currently hooked up to my TV with an HDMI lead. However, whenever I try to play HD content on it (either separate files off the hard drive, or through BBC HD Iplayer), the video is very jerky, to the extent that it is unwatchable. Any idea why?

Also, I would like to use this with an older TV as well (just to watch video files etc) - is there any way of connecting this to TV that only has scart, S-video and composite sockets? It doesn't have an S-video socket at the back.

Thanks in advance!

You need an license to go along with the disc.


I've been trying to find the Revo with the Atom 330/Ion in the US. Anyway, what software are you using to playback HD(x264?) content? You need to use a software player that will off load the video rendering to the Graphics(ION) processor rather than the CPU. The CPU isn't good enough to playback HD. There is some info in the WDTV thread in the general forums here on zulm.

xbox media center(xbmc) has GPU(Graphics card) rendering for media center. If you want to keep the stock OS that came with your Revo, get a western digital passport on ebay or something and install it:
http://lifehacker.com/5391308/build-a-s ... e=true&s=i

if you don't want to go that route, just use Media Player Classic :-]
http://mpc-hc.sourceforge.net/

I'm not familiar with BBC HD player, but my guess is that it's a flash based player and ION doesn't support flash rendering. Ali?


Use what, the laptop or the Revo?

Yeh this a flash based video player, I don't think currently they are accelerated video drivers to assist smooth playback of flash content, although Adobe are meant to working on some - keep an eye on this site for info;

http://www.ionbased.com/2009/10/adobe-o ... dia-cards/

I'm thinking of swapping the xtreamer for ion based pc and running xbmc - I don't think any other media player or device has come close to replicating the xbmc experience as on the old xbox. Quite like the look of this one;

http://www.ionbased.com/2009/10/asus-ee ... the-flesh/

Ali

Cheers for the response -the laptop previously had Windows preinstalled on it, I believe the licence details are on the back, will check that out.

I'm wanting to use the Revo with the older TV. As for finding the Revo in the US, not sure what the situation is there, but I got it cheap here as it's been discontinued in PC World.

No luck with Media Player Classic - the video is still very jerky, and it freezes regularly. Any ideas?

try the MPC settings described in this article and let us know the results:
http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3562&p=3

That's sorted it - thanks mate!!!

awesome!

ps--join us in the unofficial HTPC thread at zulm..
viewtopic.php?f=1&t=11061&p=96024#p96024

Another quick question about this - with all the 720p and 1080p videos I have on my computer, when I play them in Media Player Classic, the videos are stretched vertically to fill the screen, and I can't seem to get them to keep the OAR of the BD they've been ripped from. Also, I can't seem to display subtitles from MKV containers - can anyone help???