Inspiron 500m Banias/Dothan CPU Upgrade

Hi all, I want to squeeze a few more years out of my Inspiron 500m by upgrading it's Pentium M 1.4 Banias CPU to either a Pentium M 745 (1.8) or 755 (2.0) Dothan CPU.

I know that the sockets are identical and I have the latest BIOS offered for this machine (A08). Does anyone know if this machine/BIOS will accept the new Dothan chip?

 

Yes 500M will accept Dothan upgrade with the latest BIOS on Dell website (A08 is the latest and you already have it). You will need 400FSB Dothans not 533FSB, i.e. 7x5 series. I have upgraded mine from 1.3 GHz Banias to 1.5 GHz Dothan (bought used from Ebay), working just fine. You can download the Service Manual of 500M from Dell, it has all the required information for replacing the CPU. Good luck!

 

Hmm, alright, thanks for the info. Just wanted to make sure before I went out and bought the thing. Benches for other Banias/Dothan upgrades have shown pretty good results, but out of curiosity was there a significant performance improvement for you?

 

About 25% improvement in SuperPi, this program really loves cache. Before the CPU upgrade, I have upgraded the LCD panel from 1024x768 to 1400x1050, and the user interface became a little sluggish with the integrated graphics. I thought upgrading the CPU could help and it really helped.

 

I recently bought a Pentium M 745A (SL8QZ) processor at Ebay. This is a rare OEM processor, even Intel website does not list its sspec, but it is correct and real, please see the links 1 and 2. This is a 400FSB, 2MB L2 Cahce, 1.8 GHz Dothan CPU with C0 stepping as opposed to B1 stepping that most of 400FSB Dothans have. C0 stepping has been mostly used in 533 FSB 7X0 Dothans. I installed the processor in my Inspiron 500M and now BIOS gives an error message regarding failure to update the microcode at every boot. Apparently, the latest BIOS A08 I have does not recognize this stepping. This is expected, since this latest BIOS release was in 2004 and SL8QZ was released in 2005.

Is there anyone who knows how to disable this annoying message, given that system works fine after Windows boots, or a later BIOS that I missed? Is it possible to add the microcode to the current BIOS?

These are very specific questions for a relatively old hardware, but I tried my chance anyway. And, I also wanted to add this information here for reference since Google gives this thread near the top when I search for an answer.

Cheers!