R3471 upgrade

Crazyboyalain

I have acer R3471 laptop and I need to upgrade the laptop. Is it possible? If so how can I do it? 

billsey

Is it an Aspire R3-471T or an Aspire R3-471TG? The G has discrete graphics onboard. Either way it runs on 4th generation Intel CPUs. Is yours the Pentium, i3, i5 or i7? Most of those came with 4GB of memory onboard, though some come with more. The maximum is 12GB using the 4GB onboard and an 8GB stick. It should be DDR3L-1600 and the L is important there. That runs at a lower voltage than the regular DDR3. Most systems came with either a 500GB or 1TB HDD, which does yours have?

OK, the first and biggest boost you'll get is to replace the HDD with an SSD. You want to start with a USB 3.0 external case for a 2.5" SATA drive and a suitable 2.5" SATA SSD. Prices are much lower now than they were even a year ago, a 1TB SSD should be in the range of $100. Once you get the drive and enclosure you put the SSD in the enclosure, plug that into the USB 3.0 port on your laptop and use one of the cloning packages to create a full copy of the HDD. Assuming that all went fine shut down, take out the HDD, install the SSD and boot with only the SSD installed. It should boot MUCH faster than before! When you are all done you can put the old HDD in the enclosure and use it as an external drive. Use Disk Management to remove all existing partition and create one big volume that uses the whole drive. You can then use it for backups or data or whatever.

Next upgrade I'd look at is memory, take your system to either 8GB or 12GB if it's not there already. That will help Windows 10 to run as smoothly as possible.

I probably wouldn't upgrade the CPU unless you are planning on keeping the notebook for more than two or three more years, and then I'd bump it to the i7-4510U that came stock with some of the models. The U type is the low power version and is needed for this model.

The only other real option is more of a maintenance thing. How well is your battery doing? I know you won't get the 8-16 hours a new system gets, but you should be able to do two or three. If you are struggling with that then a new battery might be in the cards.

So, what do you  think?