[SOLVED] Thinking about upgrading the CPU of my old Sattelite

[TheDarkOne198]

I have a now about 11-year-old Toshiba Sattelite A505-S6979 laptop and while I am surprised it still works sometimes,I paid a lot for it back in the day so it had better. Still, It's little Mobile Core 2 Duo can barely keep up with anything now, I am often seeing it pegged at 100% while just using Firefox. I have done some online searching and know I can probably slot in a Mobile Core 2 Quad in either the Q9000 or Q9100 variants, which I can get on eBay. The only major question is whether the power delivery and cooling system can handle it. I have not been able to find anyone online that have done this to this particular laptop so I am going to Tom's Hardware community and maybe even a couple of others to ask. Someone has to either have knowledge, experience or can make a good educated guess based on experience in something similar. Thanks ahead of time for any response.

 

[R_1]

with laptops its not so much the power as the thermals, the cooling is built into the unit and placing a hotter chip with poor cooling is never advised. what good are two more cores if they are all throttled at 800mhz?

if your laptop had shipped with the mc2q you are eyeing it would look good that the system can handle the thermals and power issues. if the unit did not have that CPU as an optional upgrade, its unlikely the motherboard or the BIOS can operate with the CPU. in my experience anyway.

 

[TheDarkOne198]

with laptops its not so much the power as the thermals, the cooling is built into the unit and placing a hotter chip with poor cooling is never advised. what good are two more cores if they are all throttled at 800mhz?

if your laptop had shipped with the mc2q you are eyeing it would look good that the system can handle the thermals and power issues. if the unit did not have that CPU as an optional upgrade, its unlikely the motherboard or the BIOS can operate with the CPU. in my experience anyway.

I see,thank you. I do not remember if it was an optional upgrade or not, as it was a long time ago and my knowledge of computers was very small back then. I guess I will just live with the MC2D I have, until the system dies and probably salvage the components in some way and sell them,if possible.

 

[geofelt]

While some tasks may well be cpu limited, the big performance boost for laptops comes with a change from a HDD to a ssd.

If your laptop had less than 4gb of ram upping ram to at least 4gb helps a bunch also.

 

[TheDarkOne198]

It came with an SSD for the OS. Its only 64GB and I have to manage its space but It is still an SSD. Maybe one day I will migrate the OS to a bigger SSD that can hold all my apps and then some, as most everything that isn't on the SSD is on a 300GB 7200 RPM HDD. I have also upgraded the DDR2 to 8GB, the max I can have. That helped performance for sure but, as I said before, I am just seeing the CPU max out very easily. I even have windows set for performance, without any bells and whistles turned on.

 

[R_1]

a 64 gb SSD of that age is slow compared to even the cheapest 512GB SSD today.

 

[TheDarkOne198]

I am sure that is true,hence me thinking of changing it out but how would that be what is causing the slowdown? If anything,I would think the faster SSD would be even more for the CPU to try to keep up with and peg it at 100% even more,would it not?

 

[geofelt]

I read your specs as saying you have a P8700 which is really quite a decent duo.
Is this 100% cpu busy a new phenomenon?
If so, I might expect that you are throttling due to thermal heat.
Try something like HWmonitor.
It will tell you the current cpu temperature of each core, the minimum and the max.
At idle, you might hope for 10-15c. over ambient.
If you see a max near 100c, that is the throttle point.
Look to see at what rpm your cooling fans are spinning.

What happens is that the processor under load detects a dangerous temperature and throttles by reducing the multiplier. That eases the cooling load and the multiplier is raised and the cycle repeats.
To you it just looks 100% busy , sometimes at a high multiplier and sometimes at a very low multiplier.
Carefully clear out the intake and exhaust vents and see if that helps.
You may need to be more aggressive and open up the case to wipe down the cooling fan blades with a qtip.

If you want to upgrade windows to a larger ssd, buy a Samsung 860 evo in the size you want.
256gb is $55, 500gb is $80.
I suggest Samsung, not only because of performance and reliability but because they have a nice ssd migration app that moves your C drive to one of their ssd's.
You may want a usb to sata adapter cable to do the job.