Toshiba Satellite L355-S7825 CPU upgrade??

Hey all,
I bought this Toshiba @ Best Buy a few months back and was wondering if I could upgrade the CPU in it... It's a AMD TL-60. If I can what would be the fastest cpu I could use in it? (I've already added another 1g of ram so now there's 4gigs of ram). It's an ok laptop for my needs, but it would be nice if it was a little more robust. Thanks in advance for any insights.

Here's the stats:


Satellite L355D Detailed Product Specification1
Model Name: L355D-S7825 Part Number: PSLE0U-01000R UPC: 883974146925
Operating System C1 2
 Genuine Windows Vista® Home Premium (SP1,32-bit version)
Processor and Chipset3
 AMD Turion™ 64 X2 Dual-Core Mobile Technology TL-60
o 2.0 GHz, 1MB L2 Cache, HyperTransport™ Technology @ up
to 800MHz
 AMD M690G chipset
Memory4
 Configured with 3072MB PC5300 DDR2 SDRAM (both memory slots
may be occupied). Maximum capacity 4096MB Ram has been maxed out
Storage Drive5
 250GB (5400 RPM) Serial ATA hard disk drive
Fixed Optical Disk Drive6
 DVD SuperMulti (+/-R double layer) with Labelflash™ drive supporting
11 formats
 17.0” diagonal widescreen TruBrite® TFT LCD display at 1440x900
native resolution (WXGA+)
 ATI Radeon™ X1250 Graphics with 128MB-831MB dynamically
allocated shared graphics memory
Sound
 Built-in stereo speakers
 Integrated Wi-Fi® compliant wireless:10
o Atheros® 802.11b/g wireless-LAN
Expandability
 2 main memory slots. Both slots may be occupied.
 ExpressCard™ slot (ExpressCard/34 and ExpressCard/54)
 5-in-1 Bridge Media Adapter
o Secure Digital, Secure Digital High Capacity, Memory Stick™,
Memory Stick PRO™, MultiMedia Card [shared slots]


Thanks again,
Chris

 

Your cpu is upgradeable. It is a socket S1 processor. The maximum cpu upgrade is the TL-68 processor.
(I am almost 100% sure the turion ultra's use a different socket)

The graphics card is not upgradeable, incase you wanted to know
The harddrive is upgradeable, and you can do that when ever you want. Just make sure to buy a SATA 9.5mm thick 2.5" drive

K-TRON

 

K-TRON, thanks for the info, I'm not really that concerned about the graphics card since we really use our ps3 for games. In your opinion, would the tl-68 offer a positive price/performance ratio? I think I can get one for a little over $200. Thanks for the heads-up on the harddrive; I may upgrade to a 7,200 later.

Chris

 

From a Chris to a Chris, I don't think its a good upgrade at $200.
The TL-68 is not really that much faster than the TL-60. The TL-60 is a 2.0GHz dual core, and the TL-68 is a 2.4GHz dual core. In reality the performance increase may only be 20%. They are both based on the same core architecture, so its just a 400MHz per core performance increase. You may want to try looking on hardforum or ebay for a TL-68. I would say the upgrade is good if the cpu costs $120 or less. (Than sell your TL-60 to recuperate some of the cost)
Please note that the actual performance gain of a faster processor will only be noticed when the cpu is running at 100% load.
If the software you are using is forcing your TL-60 to run at 100% load, than a faster cpu will be a nice upgrade
If your cpu is only running say 60% with your current software, than a processor upgrade will show no performance gain.

Your 250gb 5400rpm drive has probably a data bandwidth around 48mb/sec. (you can run the hdtune benchmark to find the actual bandwidth)
The latest 320gb 7200rpm drives can do around 65-70mb/sec. However do not upgrade the hard drive now, as the next generation 500gb 7200rpm drive should be out within a month, which should bring data bandwidth to 80mb/sec

5555th post

K-TRON

 

hey Chris, thanks again....

 

You only really need to do a couple things to this laptop to make it scream...
Dump Vista... put xp or Windows Seven on it... and
change out the slow hard drive that they put in it with a 7200rpm 16-32mb / cache drive...
By the way folks... I am Jonyjams the owner of Jonyjams Computers in Wellington Mo. (not my real name)
I have successfully installed XP on every laptop that users claim they cannot install it on... I also have a wild trick for all you IT Tech guru's (time for tech 101... back to the basics to show or teach all of us that have been duped by the likes of Microsoft to pay companies like Toshiba and Acer and Dell, HP and Compaq ect... NOT to supply drivers for XP (the best OS Microsoft has ever created to date... well maybe server 2008 ect... who knows? At any rate, I hate when folks like Toshiba actually conform to this kind of "you have to eat my brand of bread" type of thing. Ya know?

So Here goes fella's this is sooooooo easy... OK... First thing you want to do...
Purchase or download a neat little program called Driver Genius 8 or better
Nooooooooo, i don't sell the ... aint no agent bla bla bla... you freakin need the program to get your drivers for what ever laptop or desktop you plan on buying and putting xp on.(if your going to ???)

You now crank up the new box... be it notebook or desktop ect...
Load up your lousy Vista Crap (which by the way... If you have ever seen a Jonyjams Vista Premium or Ultimate machine you wouldn't be putting xp on it... Ours are pretty solid and secure with tons of stuff...

Back to the project... (have to pop off every once in awhile or I wouldn't be Jonyjams)
Crank up the new box... load it up like you would normally... uninstall all your bloatware and crap Norton and get rid of all you infections that come with your new Toshiba or HP or Dell ect... (they load Wildtangent on these things right at the factory and its in all their Images! These are real malware/adware/spyware folks... dump them and now here we go...

Make an image of your hard drive... Use ghost or my favorite Acronis...
Install Driver Genius and register ect... update the data base...
Now back up all your Vista Drivers and put them on another drive for safe keeping...
Now update your drivers with driver genius and instead of choosing Vista put a check or a dot in XP... Let it find them and download them... Now put these on the other drive you have your Vista drivers backed up on...

Folks your ready to slam XP Pro on that Toshiba or HP or what ever...
Some things get a little tricky like your Sata Drivers... which you can put on an image with NLite or change your bios setting to Compatible mode (your choice) I personally like AHCI mode due to quick swap ect... and I do think there is a performance increase regardless of what other folks have stated on lots of forums...

Now, when all done you need to enable via system properties devmgr_show_nonpresent_devices = 1 to see if you really have everything loaded...
Most Toshiba's are going to be left with one "unknown" that folks think is
a PCI standard ISA Bridge... actually this could bluetooth or a button software component or like in the case of the L355D-S7820 and 25, it turns out to be the "TOSHIBA Firmware Linkage Driver"

How did I find that out? well ya know those Vista Drivers you backed up?
You do a search with the * switch to find all the .inf's within windows search, you then copy them into a folder right from the search utility in windows... DON'T over write any of them.... you won't need them but you will need the .sys driver when it tries to load it... you will have to re-direct it to the proper folder. Wa-lah your done!

I am finding to this to work on every thing I have thrown at it... HP, Toshiba, Acer, Dell, Compaq, and Gateway's

If you need better detail, you can email me

Cheers, Jonyjams