I recently upgraded my wife Heather’s notebook computer.  It’s a two-year-old Dell Inspiron E1505 running Vista Home Premium.  When I bought it, it was about the time that the first Core 2 Duos were being released, so I got her the best I could for less than $1K.  For two years, the machine ran pretty well with tolerable lag (and terrible battery life), but then it started to get unreasonable.  As a result, I took it upon myself to upgrade the machine in the most cost effective ways possible.  Click to read more…