Toshiba Satellite A70 Upgrade Posibilities? (And Questions)

Hi,

I just acquired a Toshiba Satellite A70 with the following specs:

2.8Ghz Celeron Processor
512 MB Ram

I was wondering what my options are in regards to upgrading the CPU? The ram is easy enough. (I just need to find a cheap 1GB PC2700 Stick) But I was wondering about the Processor. Can anyone give me some info on this?

Thanks

 

A Pentium 4 should work given that there were different versions of the A70 that came with the P4, so I think it might be possible to improve the performance quite a bit. Run CPU-Z( www.cpuid.org) should give you details about the Celeron which will help in what type of Pentium 4 would be needed.

 

Thanks for the info miner.

Well I ran CPU-z and I got this info:

Name Intel Celeron 335
Code Name Prescott
Specification Intel(R) Celeron(R) CPU 2.80GHz
Family / Model / Stepping F 3 4
Extended Family / Model 0 0
Package mPGA-478
Core Stepping D0
Technology 0.09 µ
Supported Instructions Sets MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3
CPU Clock Speed 2800.1 MHz
Clock multiplier x 21.0
Front Side Bus Frequency 133.3 MHz
Bus Speed 533.4 MHz
L1 Data Cache 16 KBytes, 8-way set associative, 64 Bytes line size
L1 Trace Cache 12 Kµops, 8-way set associative
L2 Cache 256 KBytes, 4-way set associative, 64 Bytes line size
L2 Speed 2800.1 MHz (Full)
L2 Location On Chip
L2 Data Prefetch Logic yes
L2 Bus Width 256 bits

I guess the important bit is the package? (mPGA-478) does that mean a desktop processor can fit in here? (but of course I lose the speed-step technology)

Oh yeah. What about the Hard drive? Maybe a bigger/faster one?

 

Hmm...the processor is a Presscot socket 478 processor built on a 90nm process, there are Pentium 4's available with that spec, similar to the Celeron in every aspect other than tht they have 1MB L2 cache instead of 256KB. That should give you somewhere inbetween a moderate to decent increase in performance. Try to find the mobile ones as without Speedstep the battery is going to drain faster & the cpu is going to run hot & frankly IMO not worth the trouble.

The hard drive on the other hand is much easier upgrade & if you currently have a 4200rpm HDD getting, a 5400rpm HDD would give you better performance without pinching your pocket too much. But if money is no object 7200rpm HDD's are also available. 5400rpms HDD are a pretty good upgrade, they offer the best price/performance ratio.

 

Wow cool.

So I can stick a Pentium 4 (Mobile/Desktop) Processor in this thing with a 1MB cache? That's cool... But this notebook doesn't accept processors built on a 130 nm process I figure?

As for the hard drive, any brands of the 5400 rpm you suggest? I'm kinda leaning towards Seagate hard drives because I've had good experiences with them. I might put a 60/80 Gig on this bad boy.

This is actually my first laptop (bought it second hand) so I don't know what I'm doing heheh..

 

130nm P4's might not work. Depends on whether the BIOS supports it.

If you are unsure of being able to do the upgrade, then dont take up the processor first, since it will invlove a lot of dissassembly(for most laptops) & if you cant get it working again then well...thats not too good a thing isnt it?
It (I guess) is better to have a fully working laptop with a slower cpu than one which doesn't workl.

Seagates are very reliable & a good brand, they also come with 5yr warranties which is the most offered by any manufacturer. Hitachi's are also good, so is Western Digital & Fujitsu. Toshiba HDD's are cheap & slightly noisy but they have the biggest caches(16mb) which helps in performance.

 

I was wondering because the Celeron takes alot of power because it's got no Speedstep.

I can probably get around 1 hour at most. Plus I wouldn't mind sticking in a faster processor with Speedstep in it