My new Aspire 5742, what can i upgrade?

Hello everyone, been a while since I've posted. Last time i was here, i had my 5920g, and wanted to upgrade the GPU. Well, it kept overheating, so, i formatted it, gave it to a relative, the work wont be taxing what she does.

Anyway, i got the 5742 (non g) for £300, after a desktop i had for christmas would not turn on. Im impressed with the laptop. Core i3 370-M. 500gb HD. 4gb Ram. All good.

Too bad it has processor graphics, Intel HD Graphics generation 3000. I can play games toning down the settings, CoD 4, AVA, FC2, run decent. But, because it uses processor graphics, is there a spare MXM slot or another slot in this to install what other versions of this laptop have, the GT420M, or the Radeon 6310/6370.

I feel a bit annoyed i picked the non Nvidia/ATI one up, but, any help with this is much appreciated, thanks!

 

Unfortunately no way to upgrade GPU.
You can upgrade RAM, CPU and HDD- the last one resulting in biggest overall performance increase provided you can afford a SSD.
You won't be able to make a gaming machine out of this one though.

 

Ah well, never mind. What CPU would go in to this. I imagine the i5 ???-M as this laptop has i5's as well.

 

These according to a service guide:
Intel® Core™ i5-450M/i5-460M/i5-540M/i5-560M/i5-580M processor.
Intel® Core™ i3-350M/i3-370M/i3-380M processor.

 

Sorry for such a late reply, that i5-580M certainly looks like a tempting buy. Cheers downloads!

 

Sorry to re-open this thread like this, but I've got one of those notebooks too, except it uses a P6100 CPU and GT420M GPU. Can I upgrade the notebooks CPU too? What do I need to watch out for, to reduce compatibility issues? I guess something like the FSB, clockspeed and socket or something?

 

It's almost the same situation- assuming you have the same chipset and you do if it's the same model you are looking at exactly the same possibilities.
Just update your BIOS prior to upgrading the CPU to be sure that the microcode is properly identified.

 

Hello Downloads,

I have a quick question if you can help. I have an acer 5742 as well, and I would like to upgrade the CPU from i3-380M to i5-580M. You said that for doing this a prior bios update is necessary. Do I need any special bios mod, or do I just go to the acer's website and download the latest BIOS update.

Thank you very much and look forward to hear from you

 

No BIOS mod is needed- Acer's newest BIOS does have a microcode for this CPU.

 

Thank you very much