Suggestions on how to upgrade old laptop.

My old Dell is about to turn 5 and I'm needing to extend its life a bit if I can. What drove me to look into this is has been my lackluster experience with running Ableton on it. I recently swapped one of the stock 1gb ram card for a two and I've reached the limit of my knowledge. Any and all suggestions welcome.


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Hi mistrmangan,
I'm thinking the same with old Acer Extensa 5220,

you have two options:
1) upgrade your CPU, since its socket P, I think you can go up to T8300 / T9300 / T9500. but first you should consider your motherboard chipset model CPU compatibility and Bios support.

2) upgrade your HDD to SDD, but it is not cheap.

before you decide to upgrade, you have to consider upgrade cost and whether its worth it or not.

Hoping all success with your upgrade.

 

You could look at the CPU as its really outdated, however your socket wont allow a nice i5 or i7 which would be a definatly a bigger bang for the buck. But indeed you need to consider if its even ossible to upgrade the CPU, most laptop wont allow voltage increases on the BIOS as some CPU's with the same socket have different power consumption

Next to that you are left with an SSD upgrade, which is indeed very costly, once you had a SSD though its hard to live without it.

You indicate that the RAM upgrade was were your knowledge ends regarding this project. This job requires a lot of confidence, knowledge and money. The risk is IMO not worth it. Just keep it how it is and enjoy its retirement a bit more with just a 128Gb SSD and swop your old HDD in an external adapter. Good luck

 

First, you can upgrade to Service Pack 2 for Vista if you haven't already. Or better yet, to Win 7.

As far as hardware upgrades go, the best processor I believe you can put in there is a T9500. Feel free to peruse through this page for additional info on the CPU, as well as comparable models, and keep rusty_dough's two cents in mind on the power consumption (TDP) to ensure functionality before you buy. Bear in mind that your CPU upgrade is also limited to the FSB set in place by your north bridge.

Your north bridge - or NB - can support memory speeds up to DDR2 667 (or PC2 5300). You can put higher clocked memory in the slots, but the module will most likely downclock to run at the supported speed.

The biggest performance improvement (in terms of sheer access times) will probably come from installing a SSD. That software's requirements don't seem terribly demanding, so even just one of these upgrades should yield some improvement.

Good luck!

 

What is your units Service Tag that would better inform what exact dell model your referring about???