Acer 5742, What Can I Upgrade?

iAPMG

Honorable
May 12, 2013
2
0
10,510
Hi,
I was wondering what I could do with my Acer 5742. Is there anything I can upgrade myself? I mostly am looking to upgrade my CPU what kinds of upgrades are available and what CPUs can I upgrade to?
 


Your Acer will be custom built for one CPU, you cannot upgrade as there will be different requirements for cooling and BIOS support, and probably different motherboards. You can add more memory, and if you are feeling adventurous you can replace your HDD with an SSD which will improve your boot time and Program launch speed immensely. I've upgraded several laptops that way, and for storage used 32Gb SD cards. Totally transformed them.
 

iAPMG

Honorable
May 12, 2013
2
0
10,510

Is there anyway that i can fit an SSD and HDD? Would I also need to purchase a specific kind of SSD or are all of them supported?
 

You can remove your Optical drive and use an adapter to fit your HDD as a storage drive. Nearest I could find on Ebay is for a 5741, but I would think that would be the same.
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/For-Acer-4535-4743G-5741-2nd-HDD-SSD-hard-drive-Caddy-/360645208870?pt=UK_Collectables_HardDriveEnclosures_RL&hash=item53f8212b26

Any 2.5" 9.5mm SSD will fit, I usually go for Kingston 60Gb SD Now 300V as its reasonably priced and a conversion from 7 to 9.5mm s provided. (SSDs are generally only 7mm deep, whereas HDDs tend to be 9.5mm)
I'm running several machines on the Kingston 60 Gb, but you need to do a bit of housekeeping to re-direct your User data and setup your SSD for max efficiency.
You should be able to get an adapter to convert your Optical Drive to an external USB drive, I have one but never bother, tend to use an SD card and transfer data via that.

 

analogsynth5

Commendable
Mar 12, 2016
1
0
1,510


I just started my account on here and realize your question's answer may no longer be applicable to you at this point, but for what it's worth I just upgraded my Acer aspire 5742 pew71 with a SanDisk Solid State Drive/ Hard Drive and I just literally plugged in the last compatible CPU, the Intel i7-640m from my original CPU without updating the BIOS or anything. I just plugged it in and windows 7 recognized it automatically and downloaded a few drivers for it that windows brought up a window for when I first booted with the new CPU installed and it's ON! This thing is blazing fast in comparison, more so because of the solid state hard drive but the i7-640m spec wise was twice as fast as my original processor. So if it's of any use to you or someone else out there like me you can upgrade your CPU and the i7-640m is the fastest and last CPU you can put in this laptop. I bought it on ebay for 45.00. I'm looking to possibly see if anyone knows whether it would be possible to install a graphics card on the Acer Aspire 5742 model pew71? I was thinking maybe removing the DVD drive and using that port for the graphics card if it would be possible?