Found an old laptop and want to improve it!

Hey ya'll! (tl;dr at the bottom) Here's the deal: My dad just found this really old laptop and decided that instead of passing it on to his girlfriend he'll give it to me! Which is great, because I've been trying to scrounge up money to buy a laptop, but with this one now in hand I can save it up for a while and work this one until I have enough to customize and buy my own laptop.

I don't know too much about computers and updating and upgrading them. How to have it run faster and what kind of hardware I can switch off this laptop to have better capabilities!

Here's what I want to do with it:
1. Have high performance rate so that my laptop doesn't frequently lag and I can have as many windows both on the internet and on my programs up
2. Update my storage space on the C drive
3. Playing vidjya games like Portal and Guild II and yadda yadda yadda (if I can)
4. Keep it really protected
5. How to continually keep cleaning it
6. Best internet connection

If there are links that I haven't seen yet you can refer me to them. And talk to me in layman's terms or as simple as you can so I can get it! Thank you!!! here are the specs based on Everest:THANK YOU!

Computer:
Operating System Microsoft Windows XP Professional
OS Service Pack Service Pack 1
DirectX 4.09.00.0901 (DirectX 9.0a)


Motherboard:
CPU Type Intel Pentium 4, 2657 MHz (20 x 133)
Motherboard Name TOSHIBA Satellite A20
Motherboard Chipset ULi/ALi M1672 CyberALADDiN-P4
System Memory 224 MB (SDRAM)
BIOS Type Toshiba (05/19/03)
Communication Port ECP Printer Port (LPT1)

Display:
Video Adapter Trident CyberALADDiN-P4 v6.4612.22ICD_SE_NP (32 MB)
Video Adapter Trident CyberALADDiN-P4 v6.4612.22ICD_SE_NP (32 MB)
3D Accelerator Trident CyberBlade XP-Ai1
Monitor Toshiba Internal 1024x768 Panel

Multimedia:
Audio Adapter ULi/ALi M5451 AC-Link Controller Audio Device

Storage:
IDE Controller ALi M5229 PCI Bus Master IDE Controller
Disk Drive TOSHIBA MK4021GAS (40 GB, 4200 RPM, Ultra-ATA/100)
Optical Drive TOSHIBA DVD-ROM SD-R2412 (DVD:8x, CD:24x/10x/24x DVD-ROM/CD-RW)
SMART Hard Disks Status OK

Partitions:
C: (NTFS) 38154 MB (34653 MB free)

Input:
Keyboard Standard 101/102-Key or Microsoft Natural PS/2 Keyboard
Mouse Alps Pointing-device

Network:
Network Adapter Atheros AR5001X+ Wireless Network Adapter (192.168.1.103)
Network Adapter Realtek RTL8139/810x Family Fast Ethernet NIC
Modem TOSHIBA Software Modem

Peripherals:
Printer Fax
USB1 Controller NEC uPD720101 USB OpenHCI Controller
USB1 Controller NEC uPD720101 USB OpenHCI Controller
USB2 Controller NEC uPD720101 USB 2.0 Enhanced Host Controller (v1.0)
Battery Microsoft AC Adapter
Battery Microsoft ACPI-Compliant Control Method Battery

tl;dr: With the specs up there give me the best upgrades and updates I can do for this laptop so i can play video games efficiently, do my school well, and have a highly efficient working computer.

 

If you can find out what the max memory supported is, you might be able to find some cheap upgrades in the buy/sell forum on this or another computer site, but other than that laptops are getting so cheap nowadays that you might be better off saving any money that you might be thinking about putting into this laptop and instead putting it towards a new laptop. It's tempting to want to fix up old computers but they're just not made to be upgradable beyond a certain point.

Other than that, if you still had the XP install cd you could wipe the harddrive, do a clean install and then install as little as possible on it, both software and hardware peripherals.

 

Yes, your biggest challenge will be running with that little memory. Go to www.crucial.com and have it scan your laptop for upgrades.

And go to microsoft for the service pack upgrades.

You can make the present configuration limp by, by it will be very sluggish. I can make XP run just okay with 512M of RAM, but 1 G is much better.

I'd recommend antivir for your protection, just put in on a lappy almost identical to yours, in all specs, except it was XP home, not pro.

 

You can forget about multi-tasking with that machine but to improve the speed of it, grab a stick of 256MB if you can get it cheap, to make things bearable. You can probably forget most games. If you want to use it for school, then it would be perfect. I'm not sure what you mean about best internet connection. Both will work fine for you.

 

With that video chipset (which is not replaceable), you can forget about playing most recent games.

If the specs on this Toshiba site relate to the same motherboard as yours, you can install up to 2GB RAM (1024MBx2) of PC2100 DDR RAM module. Check RAM compatibility and details with crucial.com before placing an order for new memory.

Nice to have a freebie though, it should cope with your schoolwork admirably

 

Alright I get ya'll on the specs, its too bad I can't improve it alot but with what I've been told should be good enough to at least do school work now! Thanks really appreciate it guys!! I'll save up the money just to get another laptop later on then!!!

 

Oh, I just thought of this, how long does the battery last? That can often be a reason why someone will throw a machine like that out. Why bother buying a new and expensive battery for a six year old(min.) machine eh?