Acer 5735 cpu, memory upgrade

I was recently passed a very sad looking 5735 that had been a victim of ransomware to see if I could make it useable. It had been upgraded to W10 home and the ransomware was designed to intercept the boot and prevent W10 from loading.

The owner of the system had no money and couldn't pay any ransom, plus the system was really only used for skyping and browsing the internet so there was no need to worry about data recovery.

It had a basic spec with 2Ghz cpu, a single 2Gb of 667Mhz Ram and a 147GB HD. The keyboard had a missing key and the front catch had lost its rubber. The display looked good and the connectors and case were in ok condition.

I upgraded the bios to the latest version, 1.10 and sourced a T9800 @2.93Ghz and 2x2GB 800Mhz DDR2 SODIMMs from ebay. The T9800 is half the price of a T9900 and only a very small amount slower.

The parts went in easily although the service guide is misleading on removing the cpu heatsink. The 4 tiny fan screws need to be removed to allow the heatsink to be wriggled out. You can expect to find a dust devil trapped in there as I did. The T9800 is a drop in fit and just needs a drop of thermal paste to commission. The T9800 has 2 full fat Penryn cores and a 1066Mhz fsb which helps to keep the Input/Outputs running smoothly.

The RAM change is simple once the service panel on the bottom of the laptop has been removed, which had to be done to change the cpu in any case. Putting in two identical SODIMMs is important as it lets the RAM run in dual channel symmetric mode, aka flat out.

To complete the transformation I recycled a spare Mushkin Catalyst 100GB cache SSD from my workshop as the system disk. (Actually doing the swapover after W10 had been reinstalled and activated on the original HD). Although the 5735 disc controller is only SATA2 and this SSD is a very fast SATA3 its size compromises its usefulness for many situations.

The system runs really well now. It boots in seconds and is very responsive. So much so that I splashed out £8 on fitting a new keyboard.

The owner will be getting a very sweet laptop back, as well as a lecture about talking to strange people claiming to be from microsft on the phone.

 

great article. I've inherited my partner's Acer Asprie 5735 and bought Win 7 for it (£13 from London Computers, with certificate, activates, it really works). But the laptop is slow.

I can find the cpu and two ram sticks you mention on Ebay for £40, but I don't have access to a spare SSD. Do you want to sell one of yours, or can you recommend finding one elsewhere for £35 or so?

Also, did you find that the left button of the trackpad is very stiff to click?

George

 

I can't help you on the recycling of SSD front I'm afraid.

I had 2 of the 100Gb Mushkin drives, bought as an experiment to SSD accelerate HDD systems (Steam game directories often massively exceeded early economic SSD drive sizes). They were sold as a cache solution with software from Nvelo I think. All I would say is they sort of worked as cache drives but were not reliable (intermittent windows reported errors from software assuming it had direct disc access I assumed) so I never used them in anger. As it happens one of the 2 drives has now died completely, so ill be crossing fingers when the 5735 returns home. My upgrades often go with a lifetime warranty, thats my lifetime if its a family member as it is in this case!

I think you need to be careful when buying second hand SSDs. I'm not saying don't ever, but be careful. Many SSDs have had firmware issues and not every user keeps the firmware up to date. Even the mighty Intel have mis-stepped on occasion.

All SSDs have a finite wear life, probably not that much of an issue for regular users, but people running benchmarks over and over could cause a problem.

Careful SSD users who are upgrading, either for more room (I've done a lot of 128 to 256GB enhancements, and some 256 to 512GB) could have spare drives to sell. However I have a queue of folks with older systems (socket 775 and later desktops, Penryn-Sandy Bridge dual core+ cpu laptops) that they'd rather I tweak than they fork out for something new. This means all of my spares get reallocated very quickly.

The price you mention, £35, isnt far short of the new price for a small SSD. According to the price aggregator skinflint.co.uk £39-£45 gets you a new one via Amazon.

Good luck and happy updating.

PS Yes trackpad buttons were sticky but they did work and the owner hadnt complained about them so left alone in my case