Processor Upgrade for an Old Notebook?

Amphigory asks: "I have a Toshiba Satellite Pro 400CS with a Pentium 75 Mobile Processor and am trying to find out if it's possible to upgrade the processor. The problem is that I can't find any information about this processor in the obvious places. What piques my interest is that the processor reports itself as a "Pentium Mobile 75 - 200" -- does this mean I could pop a Pentium mobile 200 in the same slot and have it work? "

Not likely

[An Ominous Cowherd]

I used to do a lot of bench work on Toshiba, Compaq, Gateway, DEC, etc. laptops and 98% are soldered to the board. I've seen a few socketed ones but you still need to be able to jumper to up the clock and I haven't seen one that would let you do that.

Try selling it. Laptops hold their value better than desktops, so you may still be able to get 500 bucks or so, which will put you halfway to a new one on onsale or one of the other discount houses.

Laptop Components

[Accipiter]

Nearly every laptop on the market has the processor soldered to the mainboard, as well as other main components. There are newer laptops that actually have processors able to be upgraded, but they're very new. The processor ID you're getting is probably the motherboard, meaning the motherboard can support up to a 200mHZ chip. (Most p75 boards can.) Unfortunately, the chip is part of the board.

Theoretically, you CAN replace the chip with a faster one, but if you could....would you really WANT to?

-- Give him Head? Be a Beacon?

Re:Not likely

[pm]

You wouldn't need to really jumper up the clock.

Pentiums have an internal PLL which generates the clock, and one or two pins (depends on the model) which determines the multiplier to use on the PLL. In theory, if you were good enough to be able to solder off the old CPU and solder in a new CPU, you could tie off the bus fraction pins (BF0 and BF1) of the new Pentium CPU and set it to whatever clock multipler you wanted. The soldering would be the hard bit. Hardwiring the BF pins would be easy after that.

In the unlikely event that the processor is not soldered to the board, setting the BF pins to override the laptop's board setting would easy with a pair of wire cutters and a wirewrapping tool.

My Two Toshiba's

[Presence]

I have two Toshiba laptops.. The first being a 486-80 T2450CD with 16 megs. The only way to get to its guts is to strip it of all its plastic casing, keyboard, and PCMCIA slots.. Only to find that the hard drive is hidden UNDER the motherboard, not accessable until one continues to strip the system even more. The CPU was most definatly soldered to the motherboard.

My nice new used (Thanks eBay!) Toshiba 410CDT P90's case also has been ripped off, out of curosity, and once again, the CPU is hidden deep within the machine, soldered to the backboard. There wern't any jumpers to be found, and CMOS/BIOS/whatever had no provisions for setting speeds. The hard drive and RAM were easy upgrades, but CPU was locked in. :^/ On the other hand, it runs FreeBSD great, full Active-Matrix x11, and even the sound card mostly works.

Re:Laptop Components

[emmons]

"The difference between theory and practice is that, in theory, there is no difference between theory and practice."

So have at it!

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Re:Laptop Components

[emmons]

The difference between theory and practice is that, in theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.

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Re:Laptop Components

[emmons]

The difference between theory and practice is that, in theory, there is no difference between theory and practice.

So have at it!

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Some upgrade options...

[SEWilco]

This BYTE article explains that laptops with Tillamook processor modules allow upgrading [byte.com]. But many laptops actually have it soldered in.

Unfortunately the asker of the question does not have a Tillamook system. Maybe he can at least Beta Overclock a Toshiba notebook [portables.com] as one of the upgrades from Portable Enhancements [portables.com]. Or see if NCS [laptop-notebook.com] has it in their list.

I doubt it

[jfunk]

I have a Satellite Pro 400 CDT which is almost exactly the same as yours, with a TFT screen.

I haven't opened it. I haven't been able to find any service manual and my attempt to open the damn thing failed (If anybody knows how, please contact me). Removing screws, pulling at the cover gingerly and not forcing anything because I'm scared to break it.

Generally, on laptops, most of the components are directly soldered in to save space. That was the case on my old Thinkpad (which IBM has a pdf service manual for...) with bad RAM. The RAM and processor were directly soldered in.

Then again, with the proper tools and *a lot* of SMT experience, you might be able to replace the processor.

Until we can open up our computers, we really can't tell. If it's socketed, well, that would be neat. I'd be getting mine upgraded, too.