Upgrading my Dell Inspiron 1720 laptop

[Hotcod]

So my good old laptop is getting on a bit and there are some things that need replacing. It needs a new battery and it lost a gig of ram a few months ago. So at the moment i'm running

2.40 intel core duo
2gb of ram
geforce 8600M GT 256MB

If i buy new ram it may as well be a 2 gig stick which will give me 4 and i'm just wondering if any one knows if there's a way to upgrade the card. This was something I looked at at the time of buying and what I could work out is that to upgrade I'd have to wait for dell to introduce a new card into the line. I thought this was a fair enough risk at the time if I ever got around to thinking about upgrading instead of buying a new laptop all together.

The laptop is reaching the end of the life cycle I had in mind for it but the rest of my plans that had me in a job and or with uni loan to spend on something new if i was facing this choice... so upgrading if it can be done would be nice...

Only dell have gone and redone the whole damn line instead now so I have no idea where i stand on the upgrading the card front... do the cards in the new models fit with the 1720? was there a better card put in before the change that i could look at upgrading too?

I'm googling this as we speak but i'm not nearly enough of a hardware buff to understand all this stuff and work out what my options are.

edit:

What I do know is that the card can be taken out and replaced... so that's a good start... but if i remember right there wasn't a standard "laptop card" set up at the time (no idea if there is yet) so it was only cards that where fitted to work in a dell that could be upgraded to. For the most part this just meant going from the 128 bit card to my one... but I don't remember much more than that and it's been 2 or so years so ya i'm out of the loop

[mightbe]

Most likely you can't in any type of cost effective way.

[Hotcod]

ya probably but still if i'm going to spend money on fixing her up I may as well at lest give it a look see... if not then i can easily get another year or two gaming out of it with out much trouble

edit

the new dell 17 inspirons can use an, ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5450... now if only i could work out if that would be compatible with the 1720

[Khrymsyn]

Chances are that anything designed for a laptop OTHER than your 1720 won't work. Not saying it's 100%, but a pretty high percentage. Even if the video card physically has the same "plug" that would fit, the cooling components would not be properly routed for your laptop's chassis.

For instance, I have an Inspiron 6400/e1505 at home. It currently has a X1300 in it with the X1400 as the next highest option. However, examining the 9400/e1705, the video card "connectors" are pin compatible, meaning TECHNICALLY, there's a chance I'd be able to fit in the e1705's video card, which goes up to a GTX7950... but the problem is the cooling... the cooling for my laptop is a copper heat pipe that snakes along to the left for venting. The cooling for the e1705 is a copper heat pipe that routes off to the right (and might actually be dual copper heat pipes, I forget exactly). So while on a pure "tech" side, it's in theory possible for me to upgrade, from an engineering standpoint, my laptop and the cooling for that video card were NOT engineered to fit together, and therefore don't.

Sorry.

[Hotcod]

Well ya I was aware of that when I brought.... it's just they stopped the 1720 so there was never a new card put in and now they are on to the 1750 which is using ATI... what i can't seem to find out is if the engineering is still the same in terms of the graphic cards are fitted in to the case. It's a long shot I know but I thought I better check.

[muddi900]

Since its dell, even if you successfully upgrade, it will give a "I/O card parity error..." and freeze before post.