An Adventure With Our Laptop

[Illiad86]

We just bought an Inspiron 6000 off of craiglist for $200. Not really a great laptop, Penitum 4 M 1.5 GHz 400MHz bus, 768MB RAM. We got it to run our DSLR off of it to take video while we are doing planetary and moon imaging with our telescope. It dragged quite a bit stripping the live view off the camera, so time for upgrades! :biggrin:

 

The guy wanted $45 a GB stick of RAM, so we got 2 GB off of newegg for $50 :smile: It worked when we put it in (phew) and now we have 2GB. Sadly, having 2GB made it load faster but the imaging programs and the live view program didn't really change...still draggy and laggy.

 

So, we were looking for another Pentium 4 M to put in there. People on ebay wanted $100 for the fastest one...and newegg wanted $150 for one new...urgh Intel. After some Internet scrounging, we found an article on how to "overclock" this laptop. Dell's BIOS are unlike ours...there's NO options to do anything pretty much. So with no BIOS overclocking...what to do?

 

Hahha, we stripped the laptop apart...and may I say it's NOT FUN. On my old Inspiron 1100 all you had to do was remove the keyboard and the plate under the keyboard to access the CPU, GPU, etc. This one, you have to take the monitor off, and unscrew the entire chassis. Luckily, Dell didn't put screws in weird obscure places, but there was still a million of them it seems.

 

After removing the top, we went and CO2 dusted out the entire thing...nice clump of dust in the blower fan as usual. We removed the CPU heatsink...and of course they put this weird thermal tape stuff on it. It wasn't even sticky...it looked like a piece of carbon paper with a coating of metal under it :rolleyes: So that went and some good old Arctic Silver went on it.

 

What you gotta do to overclock it is...well it was weird to me...but my boyfriend understood it completely. You have to insert a tiny tiny wire in pins 15 and 16 in the 3rd row of the socket. It "tricks" the motherboard into thinking that the CPU runs at a 533 bus instead of a 400 bus.

 

So we put the wire in, put the laptop back together, prayed to the computer gods, and turn it on....

 

Lol, it works...went up to 2 GHz :biggrin: I'm actually quite surprised it didn't blow up or die lol. Everything runs a lot smoother now :smile:

 

It doesn't go above 52 C on full load, so godly :smile:

 

So, if you have a 400Mhz bus Pentium or Celeron M laptop/system that's a Dell or somewhat, this works. Nothing like not spending $100 on a new CPU huh?

 

But, as I like to say, DO NOT do this if you don't have any experience with taking a laptop apart or handling really tiny wires lol.

 

Pics (if photobucket decides to upload them....grrrr)

 

Disassembled

http://i683.photobucket.com/albums/vv200/Illiana86/IMG_3711.jpg

 

Cleanin' the CPU (with cat butt :tongue:)

http://i683.photobucket.com/albums/vv200/Illiana86/IMG_3715.jpg

 

The heatsink (with the crappy tape stuff)

http://i683.photobucket.com/albums/vv200/Illiana86/IMG_3713.jpg

 

Ohh shiny clean CPU

http://i683.photobucket.com/albums/vv200/Illiana86/IMG_3714.jpg

 

The wire that went in the socket

http://i683.photobucket.com/albums/vv200/Illiana86/IMG_3716.jpg

 

End Result of the adventure

http://i683.photobucket.com/albums/vv200/Illiana86/untitled.jpg

 

:biggrin: Fun

[Thor.]

Nice!, i thought you couldn't OC a laptop without frying the thing, note the lack of cooling, you have accomplished something i would never dare to do. Lol intel sucks alot, its cool you OC'ed it though. Especially a laptop. That's coming from experience duh :verymad: the it sucks part :teehee: .

 

I had one once before, well it was my first and last Laptop, never went in that direction again :verymad: .

[Illiad86]

lol yea, this laptop kinda shocked me lol it actually has heatpipes :tongue: The temperatures actually went DOWN. I think most of it is to do with the crappy thermal tape paper whatever it is...lol. It was going on 62 full load before the thermal grease and overclock. Now it's 52 C lol. I just love it hehe

 

 

Yeah, I told myself I'd never buy a Dell again...but we did lol...It's a huge help for astrophotography, so it was worth it :smile:

 

Boyfriend took a shot of it running under a stress test in Everest:

 

 

godly :biggrin:

[bben46]

And cleaning the crud out of the cooling fan, cooling fins and air channels probably didn't have much to do with the temp dropping either.

[Illiad86]

haha...yeah. It wasn't as bad as I thought it was, but the guy that sold it to us said he cleaned it out. He didn't take it apart apparently....just took the keyboard off and blew it out I'm guessing. The blower fan had so much crap in it and it was about as nicotine stained as I've ever seen anything lol. Nothing a alcohol soaked hard bristle paintbrush doesn't fix :tongue:

[Marthos]

Hey well done, that was one small peice of wire :thumbsup:

 

Speaking of crud build up, I've just had to clean out a mates pc (he said it keeps shutting itself down, boohoo). It was that bad I felt like taking it down the car wash and jetwashing it, last time I saw that much cack was on the inside of a hoover bag.

 

Now its running fine but he looked at me like I was cuckoo when I told him to use a soft bristle brush to dislodge the muck and carefully hoover it out once in a while, anyhoo, he's happy.

 

 

Nice work on the laptop, last time I stripped one I spent quite a while swearing at it.

 

Regards, Mart.