6. Optical Drive Upgrades

Upgrading a CD or DVD ROM drive on your notebook is not only possible, it's usually pretty straightforward. Vendors tend to make these very specific to particular notebooks, with specialized bezels that work only for certain makes and models. If no suitable form factor part is available, you can sometimes remove the appropriate bezel and/or faceplate and use it on another optical drive. But this is something you must determine on your own, because not all notebooks will allow you to tinker to that extent.

As with hard disks, however, external units are also available for interfaces that include USB, FireWire and PCMCIA. Whether these are viable for your needs is entirely up to you and your notebook.

Battery Upgrades

Notebook battery upgrades are another easily overlooked upgrade that is worthy of mention. Over time, battery cells lose their strength and yield increasingly lower amounts of power. Replacing a notebook's battery often extends its run-time, especially when a battery seems to exhaust itself quickly with little change to usage patterns. However, you must also be aware that this is one of the more costly notebook upgrades around - a new battery can cost on the order of a few hundred dollars, even for older-model notebooks. At that price, it may be more cost effective to find a decent docking station that provides auxiliary power and also includes other useful features such as additional, fixed inputs (so that you can use an external keyboard, mouse and one or more monitors simply by docking up), along with secondary cooling.

If your notebook has a modular bay or two, check your vendor's Website for information about secondary batteries. Dell and IBM notebooks, for example, occasionally utilize one of these modular bays for a secondary battery to enhance the run-time of a notebook when separated from wall-plug power.