I have a Toshiba Satellite A40-151 laptop and use my laptop, and all of my machines to the max.
I play online games, edit graphics and videos etc etc etc.
My laptop currently has:
2.60 Celeron
512 RAM (333)
30 GB HDD
Intergrated 64Mb Graphics
Toshiba Satellite A40 Motherboard
Motherboard ID: <DMI>
I am unfortunately aware that i cannot upgrade my grahics :(
But i was wondering if it is possible to upgrade my processor to something like a pentium M.
(obviously for better performance and power saving)
I am a student and so cannot just buy a new laptop, which in an ideal world i would just build another one.
If anyone has any suggestions / advice / help that would be much appreciated.
Matt.
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Since this is a laptop you are kinda limited to which processors you can run. It looks like the fastest processor they put into an A40 model is a 2.8GHz P4-M with a 533MHz FSB. You might want to start with more memory since games and graphics could be memory intensive. A quick and easy upgrade would be to bump your memory up 512MB to 1GB.
You can't pop in a Pentium-M cpu in place of a Celeron - they are designed to work with an Intel 855 chipset, which your current laptop doesn't have. The Celeron 2.6 runs on a 100 FSB, so you can probably drop a P4 2.6 Northwood in there with the same voltage and FSB requirements, but you will lose battery time. If the motherboard supports 133 FSB, you can use a mobile Northwood 3.066 Ghz cpu.
Since this is a laptop, your upgrade options are severly limited. As posted above, upgrading the CPU in a desktop is easy, but on most notebooks, the CPU is actually soldered to the motherboard and is impossible to remove (well, at least not without destroying the computer...).
If your looking for a little more speed there are a couple of things you could do software wise.
1. Defragment your drive
2. Minimize the number applications that load at boot-up
3. Disable unnessisary services from under administrative tools.
Mugman
I would like to add to this. I have been working on a couple of laptops. A Dell Inspiron 5100 and a Dell Inspiron 5150. The 5100 HAD a 2.4GHz P4. It was upgraded to a P4 3.06GHz HT. The thing I have found out, it depends on what chipset the MB uses. The 5100 uses an Intel 845PE and the 5150 uses an Intel 845PM. The 5100 can use a standard desktop P4 CPU because of the standard chipset. However the 5150 uses the 845PM which is only compatible with the Mobile P4 CPUs. Both use the socket 478 CPU.
Since the Toshiba A-40 has a capable FSB of 533MHz and uses an Intel Mobile CPU, the fastest CPU you can use would be a P4 Mobile 3.06GHz w/533MHz FSB.
I had also found out that the Mobile Processors are about half the cost of the desktop processors.
As far as I know and I know this for a fact, the Dell Inspiron 5100 and the 5150 have ZIF sockets for P4 socket 478 CPUs.
http://support.dell.com/su
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by: simkissPosted on 2005-04-14 at 11:53:16ID: 13784691
I upgraded from Celeron to Pentium on one of my PCs last year, but on a desktop. The first thing you want to find out is what socket the chip is. Most Celeron 2.2 GHz - 3.0 GHz and Pentium 2.2 GHz - 3.0GHz chips share the same socket type (478). Also, you'll need to find a Pentium 4 that has a core voltage of 1.5 +/- 0.025 V and works on a 400MHz system bus. With Socket 478, you won't be able to reach the new 3.6GHz/3.8GHz speeds because Intel switched to socket 775 only at +3.4GHz.
Upgrading to a Pentium will speed up graphics-based apps (games, video editing, mpeg, etc.) I would be less concerned about pure clock speed. Moving up to 2.8 GHz only gives a theoretical increase of 7% in speed, but it depends mostly on how well the software is written. For example, Adobe Premiere will use the extra 7% but Adobe After Effects will not because it's poorly written. It's going from Celeron to Pentium, even at the same clock speed, that will dramatically improve certain types of performance (which appear to apply to you.)