Not as dumb a question as it sounds: Celly or P4?

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fuelvolts

[H]ard|Gawd
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Jan 24, 2005
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My wife's Dell Inspiron 1150 lappy is starting to show it's age. It has 1.25GB PC2700, 2.6 celeron (no speed step) 400mhz, and an 80GB Seagate 5400.3 IDE.

I opened it up one boring afternoon and to my dismay, it's just a desktop proc s478 chip, heat spreader and all. My question is, does this laptop support a desktop P4? I think the biggest 400 mhz P4 is the 2.2 (I'm probably wrong, though). I have to get a desktop P4 because the hsf on this chip is designed to compensate for the heat spreader.

Is the ~$40 worth it? It is starting to lag (more than usual, though)

thanks in advanced (by the way, this is my only intel pc, so I'm not up to speed on this generation of intel)

EDIT: Her current chip is a 2.6 Northwood Celeron with 128K L2
 
Hi fuelvolts - yes you can use a desktop CPU in your wife's laptop; however you should not put anything higher than a P4 2.66 in there due to heat issues. I guess you could drop in a full-fat P4 & maybe get a little more performance?

TBH I think you may be better off reloading it (if you haven't already). Presumably you're running XP? Whilst I'm here, what's it used for?

EDIT - removed some erroneous info
 
You can probably drop a 533 MHz bus P4 into that lappy.

Dont go higher than 2.66 GHz though, as the heat will be intense.

Get some Artic Silver 5 too, and while you have it apart, apply it to the chipset and the CPU, as well as clean out every speck of dirt and dust.
 
haha yeah I had a 2.66 northwood in my old laptop for years, and on a hot summer day playing counterstrike, well, I was afraid it was going to melt!

When I stopped using my laptop I transplanted the cpu into my friend's old computer. It was actually an upgrade. Just one of the benefits of getting those "desktop replacement" laptops, eh?
 
thanks for the replies,

She uses it for the typical woman thing: internet, word, excel. It's been reformatted with XP Pro recently (about 4 months ago). It's always been slow, she has just dealt with it. Whenever she goes on youtube to watch a video, I swear it's 60% utilization and the jet airplane of a fan kicks in.

I found a pretty cheap 2.0 ghz Northwood chip on ebay, is that faster than the 2.6 celly? Mind you, I'm out of the intel loop, sorry.
 
You're most welcome. Lol @ 'the typical woman thing' :p I'm not sure it'd be worth the hassle to fit the 2Ghz P4 - I don't think it's going to give you loads more (if anything) - here's a link that pits P4 against Celeron:

http://www.tomshardware.com/2002/09/03/battling_brothers/

It is incredible how much stress 'everyday' stuff nowadays puts on the CPUs of yesteryear.
 
Update: Currently bidding on a 2.4 Northwood P4 SL6Q8 chip on ebay for the staggering price of $15! It's a 533 bus CPU, so hopefully it will work!
 
This is primarily for the googlers...

Got it installed and works perfectly idling now @ 52c (which I read is average for this generation of Dell laptops).

Since it's 200 mhz slower than the celeron, it is a little slower in pure number crunching (super pi), but it multitasks SOOO much better thanks to the 512K cache instead of the celeron's measly 128K. HD tach reports it uses 2% less cpu and increased burst 10 MBps. Overall, it's worth the $21 total I paid for it. The "butt-dyno" is in full effect for much of the overall feel of the laptop.

Final specs ever for this laptop:
Dell Inspiron 1150
Intel Pentium 4 Northwood 2.40 ghz 533bus
1.25 GB PC2100 (even though both sticks are rated PC2700 - can't change in the terrible Dell BIOS)
80 GB Seagate 5400.3 IDE

Thanks for all the replies!

EDIT: for those that don't know what a "butt-dyno" is, it is a device which implements a human being's rear-end to report a vehicle's performance in acceleration or engine power.
 
I should get one of those for my sister's old Inspiron 1150. I upgraded it from a 2.0GHz Celeron to a 2.6GHz Celeron a while ago, but it's still pretty slow.

I miss the good old days when you could get a laptop off the Dell outlet for under $200. :(
 
Yeah, I got this laptop for free a few years back for transferring my balance over to a new credit card. It had higher interest, but I got a free laptop! Only catch was I couldn't pay the card off for a year. I figured I'd pay about $200 more in interest, so I figured it to just be a $200 laptop that I could finance for 12 months!
 
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