Upgrading a laptop??

[Ballistic223]

My wife has a laptop that has a P3 600 in it and she would like to know if it can be upgraded to something faster? I looked on pricewatch and I can get a P3 1.0g that runs on a 100Mhz FSB would this work in her laptop?

It is a Compaq Presario 1700XL
600 Mhz P3
192 Megs ram

If the 1 gig wont work what would?

Thanks for any help

 

[bacillus]

can't tell you if that cpu will work or not but usually you can get a big boost by simply increasing the amount of ram & getting a faster hdd like a hitachi 7k60.

 

[Jiggz]

This has always been a hard question to answer because there are some laptops with ZIF CPU mounting just like the ones on desktops. But some are actually soldered to the mobo. The other obstacle also is the way to access the CPU. I'm sure there is a way to access the CPU. I did upgraded by HP from 600 to 900 with very little ease. but with very little significant change in performance. The reason why is because the bus speed was still the same which was 100 Mhz. You can try to do the same. Since the P3-600 is 100 FSB then you can try upgrading to 900 FSB. You cannot use the 1.0Ghz because it's a 133 FSB. You also need to know the number of pins and type of array on the present CPU. usually you can get this from the manufacturer's HP. I would recommend upgrading the ram to 512 MB and using a 5400 RPM 8 or 16 MB buffer HDD. A 40GB HDD cost less than $100.00!

 

[corkyg]

In general, Compaq's are not built to be upgradeable. Each brand is different - and has been pointed out, some CPUs are hard wired as are other chipsets. Some current laptops are being built to be upgradeable - but that is just recently.