Dell Latitude D420

Hi Everyone,

My well loved D420 finally died yesterday. Systemboard gave up the ghost. My fiancé loves this little machine and after doing some research on EBay, systemboards are like $20. I can replace it myself so I am going to fix it.

My question; is there a upgraded board I can use? I believe that the CPU is built in and it can only have 2 GB of RAM. I have the 0XJ577 board which is the Yonah 1.20GHz. Is there a faster board or one that can support more RAM?

Thank you all in advance for the time. Have a great holiday!


Respectfully,

GeoGoGo

 

I recall that all of the Dell Latitude D420 models, Core Duo 1.2 GHz chips were the only ones I saw. Sorry, I can't help you find a faster one. I remember the D430 had a (64-bit) Core 2 Duo 1.33 GHz option.

The D420 had 512 MB of RAM soldered to the board and typically they had 512 MB in the open slot for a total of 1 GB. Supposedly the limit is "2 GB", however, we have been able to install 2 GB module in the open slot for 2.5 GB of total RAM. The old thing about the D420, is 2.5 GB more than the D430 can use! The D430 has 1 GB soldered to the board and the open slot can only take a 1 GB module.

Now that I think about it, I am not positive if the 2.5 GB was fully usable or if the system truncated it to 2 GB. Hmmm.

Also the Hard drive is a funny 44 pin ATA using a ZIF (zero insertion force) connector. It uses 1.8 inch 44 pin ATA hard drive (sort of like an iPod). Normally this 1.8 inch drive was a 60 GB or a 80 GB 4200 rpm (slow) model. But the 120 GB 5400 rpm drive (From the D430) works in the D420 I believe. It was very "less pokey" than the 4200 rpm option. There was at least one SSD that was supposed to work. A Mobi 3000 MTRON 1.8 inch ZIF 32GB. I recall it was very expensive. It also built-in garbage collection (TRIM) according to the spec. So it would have been possible to use in OSs without native TRIM (like Windows XP or Windows Vista). For the same price or less we could get the 120GB drives, so we went that route.