Dell Latitude C510 Upgrade

I want to upgrade my C510 to house a motherboard that has a P4 processor instead of the P3 it has now. Anyone have any suggestions or am I trying to accomplish the impossible.

 

Hi and welcome to the forums~
99.9% you will not be able to replace the mobo with one that isn't designed for the C510. And even if you do find one that does, the final price will most likely cost more than the cost of a brand new laptop with better specs.

 

if you reeealy want to you can get a Latitude C640 or Inspiron 4150 motherboard but you cant re-use your current CPU or RAM and probably some other parts.

 

Actually, I think there's a reasonable chance of fitting a C640 motherboard in there. I know for sure that the base of the C610 will fit the C620 and the C640, and I believe that the C510 shares the same chassis as well. If you go to eBay and just look at the pictures of C610 and C640 motherboards, you'll notice that the component placement is very similar if not exactly the same.

Nonetheless, as the P4 is, in general, a flaming piece of junk, I'd actually recommend sticking to the P3; you're going to get a very small performance boost for a whole lot of heat with a P4. That combined with the fact that the upgrade may not work - I don't think it's worth the time. Go sell that C510 and buy a cheap Pentium M laptop.

EDIT: Namaiki got there before me XD

 

You may be in luck,
I have almost an entire C640 in parts. I have a working motherboard, cpu and soforth.
All I am missing is an optical drive, power adaptor, pcmcia thing, and the whole base in plastic.
Here is the picture of the motherboard I have, if it looks like it fits, you may be able to upgrade.



If you want, I can take dimensions of the motherboard, and the location of the mounting holes

K-TRON

 

I actually have a C640 mainboard and plastics (including lid, LCD etc) in just about perfect condition as well. If you're interested let me know. The C640 and P4 platform use DDR RAM though so you won't be able to use your current memory when you upgrade. Otherwise everthing else will swap right in, or you can use the C640 platform to upgrade - I think that'd be easier than swapping out the mainboard since the plastics would be the same. The C610/510 was my first laptop that I actively upgraded and I loved it. I had the P3 1.2ghz and upgraded to 1gb RAM. The Inspiron 4100 and 4150 are also the same laptop, so look into that.