Celron M

[Frank Jr.]

I have a Celron M processor in a Pavilion 1410US notebook. It has 1k of memory. Is there any way to speed this thing up? Would it be worth changing the Celron to a Pentium. If so what type? I am about to swap out the hard drive for a 7200 rpm drive hoping this will help. Any opinions other than getting rid of the notebook ? Obtw my internet speed isn't the problem. It's fine. I have BellSouth 6.0. I have tested my speed and the tests reflect 6.4 Mbps down and 433.0 Kbps up which could be better but thats what I get with dsl .

 

[Mr_Movie_Dog]

You have a 1.6 GHz Intel® Celeron® M Processor 380 you could go to the 390 CPU which is 1.7GHz but the Pentium M you probably can't run with your step code the 90 nm Pentium M's are 2MB L2's cache not 1 MB and this will present a problem the 705 is a 130 nm 1 MB L2 but I'm not sure you can run this CPU. As to you HDD choice make sure your access time is better on the 7200 RPM drive as faster spindle rates don't always assure faster access times. The higher RPM will cause more heat to build, take more power (less bat life), and shorten MTBF.Do yourself a big favor start buying AMD their faster, cheaper, better then Insmell products and for mobiles the Turion X2 kicks but for a stripped down processor. I built up a new 6300 DuoCore and ran it against my OLD 939 4400 DualCore and the AMD was only two minutes slower then the (should be faster) Insmell when transcoding a two hour+ video, that doesn’t say much about Intel and they cost more for much less.

 

[mike123abc]

You may be better off finding a new laptop. You can find Core Duo processors (or now relabled as pentium) laptops for $450. You just have to get a sale, and it will run rings around your celeron M. Spending a few hundred trying to update an old laptop may not be worth it, compared to buying a new one.

Best Buy Acer - Aspire 2080 Notebook - AS5570-2067 is 499

Circuit City Buy the Lenovo 3000 N100 15.4" Widescreen Notebook PC (0768-A52) and other Laptop Computers at circuitcity.com $399 after rebate but a slightly slower processor than the BB one.

 

[Frank Jr.]

You may be better off finding a new laptop. You can find Core Duo processors (or now relabled as pentium) laptops for $450. You just have to get a sale, and it will run rings around your celeron M. Spending a few hundred trying to update an old laptop may not be worth it, compared to buying a new one.

Best Buy Acer - Aspire 2080 Notebook - AS5570-2067 is 499

Circuit City Buy the Lenovo 3000 N100 15.4" Widescreen Notebook PC (0768-A52) and other Laptop Computers at circuitcity.com $399 after rebate but a slightly slower processor than the BB one.

In the back of my mind I was thinking about selling it and moving on to something faster. All around it is a good notebook. I just get tired of deleting and cleaning up the thing to keep it from slowing down. Don't try running more than one program at the same time either. One problem about a new laptop or home computer, I have no use for Vista.

 

[mike123abc]

2 processors is the only way to go now... Takes 1 processor just to handle antivirus programs. I personally like quad, I wonder how long until notebooks get them. 1 processor for AV, 1 for windows background stuff, and 1 or 2 for the user to actually use. I bought one of these low level pentium duo machines and I was surprised how much faster it was than my old laptop. The extra processor really speeds things up, windows wants to do so much stuff in the background now, it is rediculous.

 

[Mr_Movie_Dog]

Acer use to be a pretty good notebook but they just are not reliable these days, to many come back for repair. Lenovo is the old IBM Thinkpad there is a reason they are Lenovo now. Yes you can find a cheap Intel but trust me, I know you won't, you'll get burned. The new Centrino's just don't perform I have three, actually two now one crapped out due to a bad MB, and the P3 actually runs faster then the DuoCore Centrino's.

I work on this stuff every day and provide support for customers and businesses all over the US and Canada so I see a lot of product and their faults. When it comes to notebooks there really isn't one that is just great they all have some issues. HP and Toshiba seem to be a bit better then the rest but Sony and Asus are also pretty good just too expensive for what you get.

Vista is a bugger you're right on that, but if you turn off UAC, the firewall, and disable Windows Defender in the Services it's not to bad but there are still some issues you could run into. I've talked extensively with the MS rep and you might as well hit your head against the wall they just won't get it. You can still get drivers for most of the new notebooks for XP so you could buy one and install XP on it. Circuit City is a pretty good place to go and even Worst Buy has deals from time-to-time you could also look at Sam's or Costco as they have deals too.

For Mike; If your running a quadcore you must run Vista or 2003 as XP will only utilize 2 cores. Also it's not like you have a choice on what core runs what, software has to be written toward multiple cores to use multiple core and so far OS load balancing isn't perfect.

 

[mike123abc]

Yeah I am slowly switching to Vista. I really like x64 version. Yeah the laptop cannot run it since Core Duo/Pentium Duo is only 32bit. The Core Duo/Pentium Duo is really just a souped up P3 dual core. My view is you may as well convert to vista, in a year from now about 1/4-1/3 of PCs will probably be running it just from tons being replaced.

My laptop is an HP, but I did not even bother with extended warrantees or anything. At $449 I figured I could just replace it in a couple years. 2 years is 225/year or less than $20/month. With pricing like that it is hard to argue against buying if you need a laptop or laptop upgrade. Spending more money will get you a lot of faster stuff, but ROI is not the best with laptops. For what I use it for (office/browsing) on the road, it is perfect. My old Celeron M laptop just got to the point where it was a hassle to consider turning it on and waiting for it to boot up. This one boots far faster.

I was going round and round thinking of buying a laptop, but when I would price out a model I would like it would end up being $1500. But, when I found the stripped down version for $449, I decided even at $1500 it would probably be less than 2x as fast. More likely in the range of 50% faster. It all depends on what you need to do on the laptop.