Laptop cpu advice

[ja3h]

Hey,

I recently bought a dell inspiron 1300 with a 6 cell battery. (currently lasts about 3-4hrs)

It currently has a celeron m 1.5ghz at the moment, i looked at the guide and it looks pretty easy to update the cpu on it.

I'm just wondering if is worth it, i can get hold of a pentium m 1.5ghz (1mb l2) for £25 including delivery.

Would the performance and battery life justify the £25?

thanks

[flcherb]

It depends if you are any good at taking laptops apart and putting them back together. If you know what you are doing £25 isnt to bad. I would do it.

[mmmalas]

good price, but if you could get centrno, then thats much better

[ja3h]

Well i looked at the guide and there is an expansion slot in the bottom and i need to detach the heatsink and swap over the cpu. Seems ok to do.

mmmalas as far as i'm aware a centrino is a pentium m right?

[mmmalas]

sorry my mistake, done a bit of search

Centrino is Pentium-m + intel wifi.

so yes if you get pentium m, it would be the same as centreno

[someone_mad]

It depends if you are any good at taking laptops apart and putting them back together. If you know what you are doing £25 isnt to bad. I would do it.

25 is very cheap, go for it

[GuruJockStrap]

Are you upgrading it in the hope of increasing battery life or improving performance?

[Ceefer]

I paid £70 for a 1.6 ghz Pentium-m last month (to replace a 1.3 ghz Celeron-M) , so £25 for a 1.5 ghz seems very cheap. Go for it.

[Nitestorm]

Yeah I think the Pentium-Ms have lower power consumption, due to more power management features? So should improve battery life slightly as well as performance. Although not sure by how much.

[GuruJockStrap]

The Celeron M is basically a Pentium M but with a reduced FSB and cache. Power comsumption would be pretty much identical.

If it was £25 for the 2MB cache version then I'd go for it but I think you won't notice any difference with your planned change.

I have an Inspiron 630m with a Pentium M 1.73GHz and a 6 cell battery. Under non CPU intensive task I can get around 4 hours use from the battery.

You won't dramatically increase battery time with the CPU change imo. If you want to see a big change, get the 9 cell battery.

Take it you've done the usual battery saving tasks like setting the backlight to minimum when running on the battery in the BIOS, disabling un needed devices in the BIOS (I don't use the modem), turning on Wi Fi only when its needed, etc? Also, how much RAM do you have? If its only 256MB, then windows will be useing the pagefile on the HD more frequently. A constantly accessing HD will impact battery life so make sure you have around 512MB RAM minimum.

The backlight for the TFT screen is the biggest drain on battery life. It accounts for 31% of battery useage. CPU is around 10%.

Intel reckon it'll be 2008 when we'll see laptops capable of 8 hours battery life.

[DeZmond]

If you're looking to increase the performance of that machine, I wouldn't bother looking at the Pentium M. The reason? Your motherboard only supports 400mhz FSB - if you buy the Pentium M, which last time I checked had a 533mhz FSB, you'll be slowing it down.

You might be able to take advantage of speedstep, however.

[nichomach]

Depends on the P-M; actually, first run P-Ms on the Banias core had a 400MHz FSB. They also, however, enabled all the advanced power management stuff (enhanced speedstep) that the C-M doesn't, so it can make a big difference to power consumption. In fact, there's 400MHz FSB variants of the P-M all the way up to 2.1GHz with 2MB L2 cache (the 765). Have a shufti HERE for details.

[DeZmond]

Well after a quick bit of research you can specify at purchase this machine to have a Pentium M in it - however it's a 533Mhz model and the review I was reading was dead set against paying the extra and remained adamant that there was little point upgrading the processor given the poor increase in performance and the meager battery life increase due to Speedstep.