Vaio NW225f/b cpu upgrade

I just wanted to share my experience on upgrading the VGN-NW 225f/b. I'm totally new to Vaio and got this one on sale at Office Max (pre-black Friday sales). Until the Christmas sales, this was about the cheapest vaio on the planet. I'm not a gamer and mostly use the notebook for office tasks but I like to be able to watch recorded HD and the Intel gpu is satisfactory for that.

I upgraded Windows 7 to Ultimate in order to get XP mode so that I could run some legacy Windows programs and ran into the lack of VT-x in the T4300 cpu. So after stewing about it for a while, I finally just bit the bullet and found a T9300 on Ebay for $185. I figured if it didn't work, I'd just sell it.

Since I'd just been messing around replacing the MB on an HP DV6000, I figured it would be a major pain to find the Processor and replace it. But warranty be dammed, I started unscrewing screws. ("if you can't open it - you don't own it", dammit.)

To my amazement, the back just comes off after all of the screws are out and low and behold there's the heatsink/fan. So after replacing the CPU and rebooting (yes, it worked), the bios (R1120Y4) offered the option of enabling Virtualization! No hacks or bios updates.

I'm posting these comments mainly to comment on how impressed I am by the ease of service on these notebooks. I love the shell, screen and keyboard but I also like to be able to fix (change) things myself as necessary and not run into a bunch of proprietary bother.

I like this New Vaio alot (now). The T9300 runs very cool (idles 20-25C). I've maxed out (8gb) Ram and put in the Seagate 7200.4 500GB from my old HP and this thing really runs nice.

While it was open, I found the half-mini atheros card (I wasn't sure whether it was mini or half mini) and just ordered an intel 5300 to upgrade that as well.

In retrospect, I might have done better spending more initially and having a better chipset/MB starting place but I'm pretty happy.

 

wow that's a very great temperature of T9300

 

just a side question. did you buy a retail t9300 or OEM piece. im going to attempt this upgrade on my nw228f but it's my first time. the heatsink and fan that came installed in the laptop should be ok right?

 

I bought the cpu used on ebay. I assume it's an OEM. I just slipped out the T4300 and popped the T9300 in - put a little dab of Arctic Silver in and screwed the fan back down. I'm really amazed at how cool it runs - way cooler than the T4300.