Quick c451 Option question

[newbie]

I know the C451 comes with a 80gb Hard disk drive, But how much is supported? Can I upgrade it to a 320gb or even more? If there is special firmware that will allow more Hard drive space let me know, If its even possible at all. And I know the C452 comes with a 250 gb Hard drive and 2 gigs of ram with a 1GHz processor. And the c451 comes with a 80gb HD and a 867MHz processor and a gig of ram. Is there a huge difference between the two? As far as speed goes? Thanks in advance, I guess my main question would be can i upgrade the Hard Drive on the c451, If so what to. And how much ram will the c451 support?

[Stirton.M]

As near as I could tell, you are limited to the hard drive sizes available on the market. So if a 320G drive is available, you can use that. Currently as I understand it, there are no limits, aside from the issue of interface type. The 451 used IDE PATA, whereas the C452 uses SATA. Addressing maximums between the two for laptop drives are current based on market availability.

As for differences between the machines...there is a fair amount...some mechanical/physical changes, and lots of software differences. Most of those would be listed in the manuals and more importantly, training materials. From a user perspective, they wouldn't notice a whole lot under typical use. The 452 has movie files, so this could account for the need of a larger drive.

Memory cards (machine memory module) is a different part number for the 451/452 model lines, so those are not interchangeable. DDR2 vs DDR3 for example, though I doubt it is as simplistic as that for an explanation. On both machines, the manuals refer to the memory as standard 1GB/2GB respective. Without cracking a machine open, I could not tell you if they are expandable, though I suspect they are. Again, this might be limited to the availability of certain sizes of memory module at the time of manufacture/design. Keep in mind KM loves to proprietare everything, so do not be surprised if that memory module that looks like a laptop DDR3 is keyed differently from a Laptop DDR3. This might be the only limiting factor.

Now comes to question. What is it that urges you to need to expand the memory and hard drive space? I mean, aside from physical failure of the factory installed devices?

Increasing memory on the machine (C451) will likely not give you any gained performance, at least nothing noticeable. Nor will it give you additional image detail where scanning and or print processing is concerned. The hard drive also, will give you lots of space relatively, but truth be told, is overkill for the space already there. Scan a document of 50 pages at 600DPI full colour might yield a very large document of about 50MB, or 10MB if done compact PDF maximums, but even so, you would have to scan a lot of content before you made a dent on even an 80GB drive when scanning stuff to a box. Printing to a box yields slightly smaller file sizes. Useage of the user boxes in this manner is possible, and build for this kind of purpose, however, is not protectable in any appreciable way. Scanning the documents to a computer hard drive is the better option if available.

But as I said about the memory, you will not realize any performance increase by adding a hard disk larger than the one currently installed.