NEED HELP, which processor will work?

[parkie]

I'm in the process of 'trying' to make my girlfriends Laptop a bit more productive. At the moment there is a 2.0Ghz Celeron in it and I'd like to try and get a fully blown P4 in there if possible. The Laptop is a Medion and the motherboard is a FID 2030 and I know for a fact that this board is used in other Medion laptops that utilize the P4 processor. My questions are simple:

Which P4 processor is compatible?
Will I need to flash the bios to support the P4?
Is the chip I'm looking for a mobile chip or is it just a standard socket 478?
Will this work or is it a complete waste of time? (bare in mind I've got a lot of free time at the moment)

I've run cpuz on the Laptop and the results can be read here

Hope you can help me, my main problem is not knowing which chip I need and what FSB it needs to have and all that good stuff

thanks

P

 

[parkie]

anyone?

 

[mikeymike]

Im not saying it wouldnt work, but i have a feeling this is a doomed project for the following reasons;
Processor cooling for a laptop is usualy only the absolute bare minimum needed to cool the processor in it, so trying to swap out a low power celeron for a much more power hungry, and thus far hotter P4, will in my opinion, likely just be too much for the laptop cooler to handle and i would not be at all surprised if it were to overheat a lot and be too unstable to use.
such is the nature of the beast with a laptop that the only part you can normally safely upgrade to improve productivity is the memory, if it has a spare slot i'd suggest a ram upgrade instead of a processor upgrade. Also maybe some software tweaks may help rather than attempting hardware upgrades at all, for example disabling the themes and other un-needed eye candy in windows might give it a more crisp responsiveness, cleaning up the startup list etc may help as well.
Still if you want to go for a processor upgrade im sure you may get it done but i think that route has a lot of pitfalls to it

 

[Mr-White]

heats gonna be a real problem, you run the risk of it overheating, memory is the only real upgrade you can do

MW

 

[parkie]

Im not saying it wouldnt work, but i have a feeling this is a doomed project for the following reasons;
Processor cooling for a laptop is usualy only the absolute bare minimum needed to cool the processor in it, so trying to swap out a low power celeron for a much more power hungry, and thus far hotter P4, will in my opinion, likely just be too much for the laptop cooler to handle and i would not be at all surprised if it were to overheat a lot and be too unstable to use.
such is the nature of the beast with a laptop that the only part you can normally safely upgrade to improve productivity is the memory, if it has a spare slot i'd suggest a ram upgrade instead of a processor upgrade. Also maybe some software tweaks may help rather than attempting hardware upgrades at all, for example disabling the themes and other un-needed eye candy in windows might give it a more crisp responsiveness, cleaning up the startup list etc may help as well.
Still if you want to go for a processor upgrade im sure you may get it done but i think that route has a lot of pitfalls to it

I had thought about the heat issue but as Medion have other notebooks that are built around the same case and motherboard that contain P4s rather than Celerons I presumed the cooling would be the same as well and therefore would be able to cope with the P4 processor. I obviously could be wrong but I thought it was worth a punt for little cost involved. I've put an extra 512mb of RAM in it bringing it up to a colossal 768mb and I suppose I could change the 256mb stick to a 512mb which would bring it up to 1Gb but what I really wanted was to get a half decent processor in it.
Can anyone tell me which chip would work with the FIC 2030, the Laptop is an MD-2853.

cheers

P

 

[parkie]

last bump

 

[Darg]

I can't find any info on that mobo on google so I can't really help much. I've never tried upgrading a laptop apart from the memory and once when my cat sat on the screen and broke it. If you really want a better laptop then save up the 3 or 400 and get a cheap dell or save up around 650 for a Zepto.

 

[oweneades]

Well I would assume that this is a celeron based on a northwood 'A' (400mhz FSB, 512k L2 cache) P4 so in theory a standard desktop Northwood 'A' P4 should be compatible with the board (they have/had the same FSB and chipset model so they shoud be compatible)

HOWEVER the laptop may not have sufficient cooling or power to run the P4 (unsure of the power consumption difference between a P4 and a celeron).

IIRC a lot of manufacturers used desktop P4's in their laptops and found they had a lot of returns due to the laptops overheating due to insufficient cooling.