Giving Toshiba Satellite new lease of life.

NathG79

NathG79

NathG79

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Toshiba Satellite Pro C850-1K3 - 15.6" - Core i3 3120M - Windows 7 64-bit - 4 GB RAM - 500 GB HDD​

My partner has a old laptop that we use occasionally for phone backups and other boring stuff.
During the last 12months it has been getting increasingly slow to react to normal desktop use.
I have upgraded it from Windows 7 to Windows 8, then 10 over the course of its life and it doesn't meet the requirements for Windows 11.
It currently has 8gb of ram over 2x 4gb sticks (which I upgraded previously) and a slow 5400rpm mechanical HDD.
I have ordered 2x 8gb Ram sticks and a SSD to try and give it a new lease of life.
Am I wasting my time? Will the CPU be the weakest link here even with a SSD and 16gb of ram helping it along?.
 
Little update.
After a bit more research I've found that the laptop CPU is not soldered on and is upgradeable.
I've managed to snare a i5 Quad core that boosts from 3.0 - 3.7 and has the same TDP (35w).
It was only £23, (I couldn't bring myself to go full on i7, cheapest I could find was £40-60.
 
SonicSW20 said:
SSD will make the biggest difference. Recent degraded performance could be a sign the HDD is dying too. 8GB RAM is probably fine for a machine like that, going to 16GB if it supports it probably won't make much of a difference as you're ultimately limited by that CPU. While the socket might take an upgraded CPU, there's no guarantee the BIOS will like it (though someone may have done it and can confirm it works on that machine). Worth a gamble for £23 and your time I suppose.

I did a similar upgrade on my Nans laptop a couple weeks ago - AMD A9 9410, 4GB RAM, 500GB HDD. Put a cheap Crucial BX500 in with a cloned image of the original drive, upgrade the RAM to 12GB (machine has 4GB on the board and an empty SODIMM slot) - for her usage of email, internet, and playing solitaire variants its fine on Windows 10. She lives in a very rural area where you're lucky to see more than 10Mbit anyway, so for most modern internet tasks the connection is the limiting factor. Will have to look at OS options next year as Win10 ends support, not keen on the Linux support as she's barely comfortable with Windows, learning a different OS will be a nightmare. I'm not the only one supporting her either and I don't think any of the other family members who help have any experience outside of Windows either.
Click to expand...
Thanks for your advice. Yeah, I'm hoping the bios will play ball with the new CPU, I've watched a few you tube videos of teardowns and forums where people have done the same, the only ones that had trouble were running old Celerons and Pentiums 1st edition with that model kinda stuff, with a slightly different chipset, they ran into trouble whereas the laptop would shut down after 30mins of use even though it posted and ran OK.
This particular model has the same CPU I've bought on more expensive versions of the laptop. We shall see.
 
Had a bit of time tonight to move over files and backups from the old HDD to a spare SSD.
I have a brand new blank 500GB SSD installed into the laptop, I have a usb drive with windows 10 media creation tool on usb, tried enabling ufei/and csm both do not boot the usb. Swapped boot order to usb 1st.
Changed usb settings to enable during sleep.
Basically tried everything.
If I boot from ufei I get this screen, and the laptop seems to do nothing.



And if I change to csm I get a blue screen (not bsod) laptop keeps running for a bit then turns itself off.



Not sure why this is happening, I will put the media creation tool on another usb tommorow and see if that sorts it.
 
tamzzy said:
you've made sure that the new ssd works yeah?
if no luck, you can jerry rig to install win 10 in the ssd on another computer first then put that ssd into the laptop

also have you installed the new ram?
i would do one thing at a time first
pick either the ram or ssd, not both. then at least if something goes wrong it would be the part that has just been installed
Click to expand...
Thanks, yeah, new SSD works, I installed the ram a week or so and Bios recognised it.
Going to try the media creation tool on another usb drive.
Failing that I'm going to burn an ISO windows 10 install onto DVD then boot from that.
 
tamzzy said:
do you have usb 2 and usb 3 ports on laptop
if i recall correctly, the mobos of the day did not accept booting from usb3 and had to use the usb2 ports for os installation
Click to expand...
I do yes, and tried it in a USB 2.0 port.
That didn't work.
So I re burnt media creation tool on another USB drive.
And it worked.

 
I don't have working WiFi yet on the laptop so will have to get the driver installed before I can do any more for now.
But pleased with the speedy boot and Windows is much more snappier already.
 
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