Dell e1405 CPU upgrade question, hdd upgrade

My e1405 is about 2 years old and has a t2400 (2mb,1.83ghz,667mhz) and a 40 gb 5400rpm sata drive.

I want to upgrade to the best value w/o spending more than $300. I think I want a seagate momentus 7200rpm 100gb which will run about $100 on newegg. Don't need a huge hdd as I have a wireless network drive for archival, etc.

I have never been happy with the processor speed and multitasking is non existent on this particular dual core (so whats the point). Anyway, Would a t7200 or better do a good job of multitasking like ripping a dvd & surfing (impossible w/ my current proc). I also do a little video stuff like capturing via firewire and creating slideshows and dvd's, etc.

Is there a better processor that will work in my laptop? I'm pretty sure I have to stick with the 667mhz fsb socket m chips but I could be wrong.

thanks for any input. I'm just trying to make it last till this fall when I can purchase a new one.

 

How much ram do you have in your laptop? If you've got a gig or less, check out the ram deals thread - you should be able to find 2 gigs of ram for less than $50, and that will help your multitasking.

 

The fact that you did not mention your Physical Memory but did tell us the lack of multitasking and so forth tells both Mr. Kubelwagen and I that you probably have 512 or 1 Gb of Physical Memory.

I agree completely as well and go for minimum of 2Gb SDRAM.

Personally I always max the RAM with the CPU as this makes a balanced approach to this tool.
With Win XP Pro and 4GB memory with a T7700 the CPU gets so much breathing room.
I am buying a Dell M1330 with 4GB of Memory.

Blessings,
Chetanji

 

I would not buy that 100gb 7200rpm drive, a 160gb 5400rpm drive will be identical in speed, and save you money.
I would look into getting a 250gb 5400rpm drive, or the Hitachi 7k200 series harddrives, as they are extrememly fast, and will not burn a huge hole in your wallet.
The T2400 is not a bad processor, you are probably not getting the most out of it because you have background processes running.
If you open task manager, and you have over 50 processes running, and the cpu never goes below 30% usage, then you need to shut off background processes. This will help free up the system resources, and will result in a huge performance jump.
Go to the start menu, click on run, than type in MSCONFIG.
then go to the serives and startup tab, and shut off programs and processes which you do not need from startup. You will be able to use the programs whenever, but this just shuts them off from starting with Windows.
I can guarantee you that if you shut off a number of processes, that your system will boot faster, and run much faster than it does right now.

I have the e1505, which uses the same intel 945 chipset, and it can only recognize 2Gb of memory, so do not upgrade to 4gb, it simply will not work.

If you need help in MSCONFIG, just post a reply, and we will be around to help you.

K-TRON

 

Great, thanks for the quick replies.

I am alraedy running 2gb in dual channel mode, got a nice deal from outpost about 6 months ago on some great sdram.

I also reinstalled xp the second I got the pc from dell to remove all the bloat. Probably a good cleaning of the hdd would help a lot but there are a lot of programs that are a pain to restore all the data and settings, i.e. itunes, messenger, outlook, etc.

I like the tip about the 7k200 although I haven't seen those for sale on newegg which is where I usually buy. is there a good place to get that drive?

any ideas on processor upgrades? I've seen the t7400 go for about 260 on ebay.

thanks.