There comes a time in every mans life when he realizes that his laptop just isn’t running as fast as it once was. He can reinstall the Operating System, but it’s still won’t feel as fast as he remembers. Previously, we covered why upgrading your processor is a wise decision. But once you’ve completed that task, there are still options for speeding up your laptop.

One upgrade possibility is to move to a 7200RPM Hard Drive, albeit it does kill your battery more quickly than its 5400RPM counterpart. And then there’s the widely popular Memory/RAM upgrade. Upgrade to the 4GB limit on most computers (including the Inspiron 1525) and you’ll see a nice speed improvement. But what happens once all of these upgrades are completed? Is that really as far as you can go?

Well, I was stuck facing the same question when I realized the answer: no! There is still one more hardware upgrade that you can perform on your system to give it a speed bump; you can upgrade your Wireless Internet Card. This upgrade has much less of a direct effect on your computer’s speed as all it does it potentially speed up the load time on Webpages and downloads. Nevertheless, it is a hardware upgrade and it does provide increased speed in your web browser.

Wireless Card upgrades are much less common then, say, RAM upgrades, as not many users are aware that they can be performed. They are insanely easy though and I recommend them to anyone looking to jump from that aging Wireless g to the much faster Wireless N. This upgrade does have its quirks however, such as requring a Wireless N router to see any improvement. On the positive, you’ll be future proofing your laptop and possibly even upgrading to a card more compatible with OS X (if you’re a hackintosh user, that is).

See part 2 of the post for a How To guide featuring the upgrade being performed on my trusty Inspiron 1525.

Part 2 will be up in the coming days.