CPU upgrade

[Alison556]

I've got a Dell E6400 laptop and it does me well. The amount of work I do, it's struggling to cope and I wondered about upgrading the processor. I know the easiest thing would be a new laptop but I can't afford it at the moment and the thought of having to transfer everything fills me with dread.

The current processor is 2.53 gigahertz Intel Core2 Duo. Looking at available upgrades, my options seem to be a 2.93GHz or 3.06GHz processor.

Question is, are either of them worth doing?

 

[flameport]

No. A tiny improvement at best, and that assumes the processor is the main cause of 'struggling to cope'.

 

[IT Minion]

As flameport says, no.

It might be worth putting more RAM in, depending on what you do and how much you have.

The other thing you could do is swap your hard drive for an SSD. That will make a huge difference to how fast your laptop feels, but it is a pain as you'd have to transfer all your stuff. Exactly as you don't want to do.

 

[mattylad]

as above upgrade to ssd and increase the RAM.
Also, clean the OS of crap, those add ons that you don't actually use, they also slow it down as they are loaded into RAM.
In fact a complete reinstall of the OS onto your new SSD may really help, it did with my desktop and will on my cruddy old laptop when I do it.

 

[Alison556]

I've already doubled the RAM and put an SSD in. I think most of my problem is that I can have multiple browsers and tabs open - multi-tasking at it's best I suppose.

 

[mattylad]

are you running 32 or 64 bit windows?

 

[Alison556]

64 bit Windows 7

 

[Nozzle]

Is it even possible to upgrade the CPU in a laptop? I thought they were all surface mount rather than socketed, with lashings of low profile heat management. If you've got an SSD and it has as much memory as it can handle - that's as good as it well get.

(Assuming the CPU isn't throttling back to avoid overheat...) Fan works properly and all the grilles clear?

Nozzle

 

[Alison556]

It's definitely possible to replace/upgrade the CPU on mine. I keep it running as cool as possible - regular cleaning of grilles and it's on a cool tray as well.

At some point, I'm going to have to bite the bullet and get a new one - but I'm a creature of habit and I do like my little laptop :/

 

[IT Minion]

The latitude lines are a favourite of mine, I've been using them on and off for the best part of a decade, they are well built, reliable and reasonably priced.

When you say the laptop is struggling, can you be more precise about how it struggles? For example if you switch applications from a browser to an office app and it hangs with a white screen that's normally a sign of RAM shortage. On the other hand if it just slows to a crawl every now and again, then starts running nice and quick then that's often an Antivirus crawl spamming your resources (less common with SSDs, laptop drives were always the weakest link before they came along). Have you fired up task manager or resource manager to see where you are limited?

That said, I suspect you will need to look at biting that bullet, in which case don't forget the dell outlet. Excellent value laptops to be obtained there.

 

[Alison556]

At first I thought it was my internet that was slowing things up, but I've changed over to fibre and it's not any better. I do confess to having at least two, sometimes three browsers open at the same time (there is a reason) and multiple tabs in each and it can be so slow loading up the pages.

It opens software absolutely no problem at all, but if I'm doing something like a graphic through an online app, it lags something cruel - lags on some online games as well.

OK, so now that I've read that back, my problems all seem to be related to being online

 

[IT Minion]

Fibre over wi-fi or fibre with a wired ethernet connection? That model probably only had G band WiFi, which means it could easily be a bottleneck.

 

[Alison556]

Fibre over WiFi

 

[IT Minion]

Fibre over WiFi

Then you're probably limited by the WiFi, try doing a speed check over wi-fi and then plugging in with a cable and running it again.

If they are the same then WiFi isn't slowing you down. If they are wildly different then you might want to look at your WiFi network