I was wondering if someone might know is it possiblie to upgrade the graphics card on a fujitsu seimens amilo d 1845 notebook. The card in question is a ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 with integrated 128MB DDR on-chip memory.
It would be unusual to be able to upgrade a notebook/laptop video card other than by using something like an external video card or a port replicator with video capabilities. Unless the video card is installed as a mini-PCI card that can be replaced. Have you tried searching the web for information on the possibilities?
I have been googling for awhile as I am also upgrading RAM and Harddrive for the first time. I have registered on the Fujitsu support forum and posted the question there and just waiting for a response. What I have come across so far is that it is not possible unless the chipset is MXM compatible. I have searched using keywords "MXM and chipset #" .This only returned german and I think chinesse results.
Wikipedia on MXM. Sounds like a graphics card equivalent of the Mini-PCI that I mentioned earlier. See also this Wikipedia article. Your laptop is not listed here which may not bode well... If your laptop does not support PCI Express then it most likely does not support MXM. If you don't know then run [broken link removed] to get detailed info about your hardware and check the chipset details.
If you are upgrading your RAM then make sure to get RAM that is guaranteed to be compatible. As I experienced the hard way RAM of the correct form factor and speed will not necessarily work in all laptops. Ditto for the hard drive although the scope for incompatibility is generally less there. If your existing hard disk is 4200RPM then you might be able to speed up the overall laptop performance with a 5400RPM one at the possible cost of slightly heavier battery usage (although possibly not since some newer and faster drives actually use less power than older and slower ones).
With regard to RAM, I have matched it using [broken link removed] and I verified this myself against the spec on the manual. I have updated the BIOS in anticipation. As for the HD I have ordered 5400 to replace 4200rpm using the same manufacturer and interface type. I plan to clone the old HD [broken link removed]. If I do run into problems with either upgrade could reflashing the BIOS help?
You should be fine so - especially if you buy from Crucial themselves since they offer a money back guarantee if the memory they recommend doesn't work.
For what it's worth I did a laptop hard disk upgrade recently and...
Downloaded Kanotix and burned the image to a CD (many other live CD bootable GNU/Linux distributions - in particular those that are smaller than the Kanotix 700MB download! - would probably do just as well).
Installed the new drive in the laptop.
Installed the old drive in an external USB housing.
Attached the latter.
Booted from CD into Kanotix
Opened a terminal console and ran dd_rescue to clone the old (USB connected) disk to the new (internal) disk (I think that I used dd_rescue if=/dev/sda of=/dev/hda but make sure to at least double check that you have the right device specifiers and in the right order before kicking it off!!!!).
Once the cloning had completed I used QtParted under Kanotix to resize/extend the partitions on the cloned drive (QtParted insists on root having a password so before running it open a command shell and type passwd password to set the root password to "password" - see [broken link removed] for more). Actually I didn't do the partition resizing until after I had verified that the cloned disk worked OK.
This resulted in a laptop which was identical to the original but with a larger/faster drive installed.
If I do run into problems with either upgrade could reflashing the BIOS help?
I doubt that it matters. If you have the latest BIOS and it works OK now then I can't see it causing problems with the two upgrades that you are carrying out.