laptop CPU upgrade?

M

Matrox462

Gawd
Joined
Feb 25, 2004
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I'm trying to find out if it's possible to upgrade a laptop's CPU for someone. They're complaining that the Intel Celeron CPU is too slow (I agree). The laptop is an HP Pavilion zt1250 with a Celeron 360 (I think? I'll double check when I get the chance to) running at 1.3GHz. Ideally, I'd like to put a P4 Mobile in it. Do you think it's possible? I'm having trouble finding the specs on this laptop, and what it supports. The only pdf I found did show that it supports a P4, and a P4 M CPU. I don't know if the document was for the correct laptop though. Sometimes HP has incorrect info.

I don't know much about CPU upgrades for laptops, so is it as simple as just popping in a new CPU if the board supports it? What about heat? Do I need to worry about the chip running hotter than the OEM one?

Thanks :)
 
Yes, it's generally possible to upgrade socketed laptop CPUs.

The ZT1250 uses Socket 370 CPUs. If the speed of the Celeron CPU is 1.3GHz, it's a Mobile Celeron-T (256KB L2 cache, 100MHz FSB). A Mobile Pentium 4 (S478) will not work in a S370 board.

Replacing it with a Pentium III-M isn't going to get you much of an upgrade, especially for the price. The memory will still be PC100/PC133. I'd be surprised if you saw a 10% speed increase going from a Celeron 1.3GHz to a P3-M 1.26GHz (133MHz FSB, 512KB L2 cache).

Buying more memory and upgrading the hard drive should help. A laptop that old probably has 256MB and a pokey 4200RPM hard drive. Socket 370 died a while ago. Even a cheapie $500-$600 laptop is a huge upgrade over something as old as a ZT1250.
 
Thank you for all that info, I really appreciate it! Finding out that the only possible CPU upgrade is a Pentium III-M, I feel it's definitely not worth the money. The RAM was upgraded from the original 256Mb to 512Mb, but the HD is still the original slow drive.

I'll suggest it's time to just buy a whole new laptop.

Thanks again.
 
In our case, I replaced the dying 4200rpm hard drive with a Hitachi 7K100 60gb.
This alone made loading of the OS, or any program time cut in half.
For the $, this was the best upgrade we have done.
We did replace the 128mb memory stick with a 256mb stick, then installed another 256mb stick in the outside memory slot. For a total of 512mb of PC2100, this made the system slightly faster and definately works better with XP.
We have upgraded the CDr to a DVDrw DL DVR-K16, the dvdrw works flawlessly.
 
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