Inspiron 1525 Upgrades

Hey guys, new here. I've been looking around for upgrading my inspiron 1525 and seems like just about everything I searched for the first result was from this forum. I read some of the guide around here and there are a few things I would like to do with my inspiron 1525:

1. Put a SSD in the primary and a HDD in the optical bay:
SSD would be OCZ Vertex 2 120gb
HDD is WD Scorpio Blue I already have, here is the caddy.

I have ICH8M Ultra ATA Storage Controllers. I read here that the controller hub have 3gbps but I would have to activate it through the bios, from what I've seen this is a dangerous operation so I'll hold off on that until I i'm sure the drives work.

2. Redo the cooling system

I clean out my heat sink and fan once in a while and the temperature usually runs great now even while I play online games or use photoshop. However I might tweak with the CPU after a while so I think I should at least redo the heatsink paste.
The paste I want to use is Arctic Silver 5. I want to use this because it has been used by a lot of people reparing XBOX 360 and PS3.
Here's a picture of the paste currently:

There are two chipsets I would like to put thermal paste on, they're on the right of the ram chips. The top one with the metallic plate I assume is the cpu. If I flip over the heat sink the area in contact with the set has thermal paste already hardened. I would like to clean them off and apply fresh paste.
The chipset on the bottom with the thermal pad. I t doesn't seam like the pad covers everything. I would like to take it off and put thermal paste on there. My main concern is that arctic silver conducts electricity and I'm not sure I should put it on because I suspect the little bumps might be individual components.

What do you guys think? I am buying the right stuff?

Thanks,

 

1) 3gb/s is enabled by default on a 1525... this isn't a Lenovo T61 where the controller is artificially capped at 1.5gb/s. There is no switch to place such a restriction on the controller either.

If you are talking about the ATA/AHCI setting, it is only "dangerous" if you're switching it after you've loaded an OS (particularly XP). I say "dangerous", because if you do everything properly in a post-OS load switch, there really isn't much a danger.

If the optical drive is on a PATA bus, it won't get the full 3gb/s. Either way, if you're putting a regular HDD there, it most likely won't even saturate the older bus, and thus this is a non-issue. A point to mention, nonetheless, in case you wanted to put something faster there...

2) The thermal pad is there because the gap between the chipset and the heatsink is too big to be bridged with thermal paste. I would not recommend removing the pad for a big glop of paste. If you really want to bridge the gap with something better, you could consider a copper mod, but this really isn't necessary for an northbridge like the 965.

 

I repasted my Vostro 1500 PM965 chipset, dropped the temperatures a good 5-6C over the standard thermal pad. Also clean out all the dust and crud in the fans/heatsink/heat fins.

 

Honestly? You're putting well over $300 into a 2-3 year old consumer quality notebook that's nearing the end of its life. You're better off applying that money towards a new notebook.

 

But if he only has 300 bucks to spend, I would upgrade older high end tech than invest in a brand new entry level computer. Tell me what new computer ~300 dollars is worth buying?

 

Considering that most of the $300 is going into a $200+ SSD, which he can later move to a new machine, I don't really think there's much waste going on here in the first place...

 

Well exactly my point, linuxwanabe just shoots down anyone's upgrade questions. Sure if I were a billionaire I would buy a new computer every 5 minutes. Unfortunately not everyone is made of money including me, so I upgrade my old stuff for the best price/performance ratio.

 

lol thanks guys for helping me. Yeah the SSD I think is a good investment since not a lot of new laptops have that model. The Hard drive i'm using right now is also relatively new, I dropped the laptop once and messed up the original hard drive. Over-all the computer is running pretty smoothly for a 3 year old laptop.

@commander wolf: Thanks man, that helped a lot. I clean out the fan pretty regularly so everything runs pretty cool.

 

The Inspiron 1525 has been TME-unlock PLL pinmodded, allowing for software overclocking. Eg: 2.0->2.5Ghz. Likely your bios allows dualIDA capability to get you 8-13% more performance.

Inspiron 1525 also had a T4200/T6400/T6500 option. They are based off a 45nm penryn, so will run your system cooler and give better battery life. Available for low cost off ebay.

Your system also appears to have 3 pci-e ports: wifi, wwan and expresscard. Probably the mPCie are port1 and 2, meaning you could do a x2E DIY ViDock if you wanted to comprehensively improve graphics performance. The same gear can be easily moved to improve gpu performance of future notebooks as well, particularly ones with pci-e 2.0 expresscard slots.

 

In most cases, it doesn't make sense to upgrade a 3 year old notebook PC, especially a consumer quality notebook with integrated graphics.

 

I pretty much monitored all the Black Friday laptop deals and there was nothing for ~$250 that had an SSD drive and little to nothing that would actually outperform a well equiped 1525 system. Especially one equiped with OCZ SSD drive. This seems like a smart upgrade based on the budget.

 

Since the Inspiron 1525 uses a SATA HDD, I see no reason against upgrading it to a SSD. Eventually, the SSD will just get moved onto a newer system, as the SATA standard isn't going anywhere. Upgrading something like the RAM or CPU might not be worth it, but I see no reason to shoot down a SSD upgrade based on laptop age.

 

I would say the limit for upgrades is 3 years, unless the parts are uber cheap. But 300 dollars won't buy you any decent notebook and he may like his old one so spending 300 on a pos notebook that performs worse is dumb.

BUT there is a point where the upgrades are futile as it cannot overcome older chipsets limitations, but his chipset isn't ultra low end yet, GM965 can still be healthily upgraded to a very good notebook to these days standard.

 

It's hard to set a time limit...as soon as the E6410 was announced with DDR3 memory, I decided that my E6400 won't be getting any more RAM because I won't be able to move it to a new laptop. I tend to get computers with fairly base configurations because I can either move parts over or get them seperately for cheaper, so anything that can be moved to a new system won't have a time limit.

 

I mean there is a point where spending the money is at the current value of the notebook, of course you can't put an arbitrary number on it but it seems like to me that is pretty much the limit. It should be on a case by case basis. Now dropping all that money into a 3 year old eMachines vs a 3 year old Dell..

 

How did the caddy install go? I'm thinking about doing the same with my Inspiron 1525 - replace the HDD with a solid state and move the HDD to a caddy in place of the optical drive.