Need an Opinion About Upgrading Latop

I presently have a Inspiron 8600. 1.6 Pentium M (banias with 1 meg L2
Cache). A 40 gig 5400 rpm drive and a GeForce Go5200 with 64 meg of ram. 512
Meg of system ram and a 1280x800 screen.

I was looking at either upgrading this system or just selling it and
scrounging some extra cash and getting a Inspriron 6000. I figure they will
be going down since Intel has released the Mobil processor.

If I were to upgrade the 8600 I would get a Dothan with 2 meg of L2 cache.
At least 1.7 GHz. And a ATI 9600 card with 128 meg of ram. Leave the drive,
system ram and lcd alone.

On the other had does the ATI X300 PCI express that much faster than the
9600 AGP?

I'm happy with the 1280x800 resolution on the 8600. And it has been a good
machine. I would just like a faster processor and video card.

Thanks
Greg

 

U better get a new machine then....do u use it for gaming or?
u cant put in a dothan CPU in it when it comes to graphics im
not sure what can be fitted into it.

What u can uppgrade is the RAM 1024 MB would be nice and maybe
fit another harddrive to i would go for a 7200 rpm
drive....upgrading the CPU or the graphics seems to expensive
.....if u cant find the parts very cheap

but i would not go for a I6000......get a Latitude model or
Inspiron 9300 or 9400

Pelle

 

Completely disagree. I have the 6000 and 9300 and MUCH prefer the 6000.
The 9300 is WAY too big.

 

depends how u use it i guess....i use my 9300 for gaming and
my Latitude D610 when traveling and surfing the web in my
sofa.... and i must say i dont like the 6000/9300 design very
much...the ergonomy of the latitude series are way better

Pelle

 

Greg,
Unfortunately, most of what you want to do is not possible.
Upgrading a notebook is not trivial, and I believe your chipset can't
handle a Dothan chip nor can you upgrade the video card. Even if you
could upgrade a video card, AGP and PCI-X are two entirely different
buses (so a X300 is out of the question). It's good you like the WXGA
resolution because there's no cost effective way of changing that
either. At best you can certainly upgrade your RAM and put a faster
Banias P-M in there. Honestly, you'd be much better off looking at
selling the current machine and picking up a new one if you want to
increase performance.

 

I'm going to have to disagree with you there. It is possible to upgrade both
the processor and the video card. I've already upgraded the video card in it
once. From the nVidia 5200 with 32 meg of ram to the 64 meg version. And the
Radeon 9600 will also fit in it.

http://www.bay-wolf.com/8500video.htm


And the parts list for the 8600C (which I have) shows both Banias and Dothan
processors. Same motherboard and chipset in both.

http://www.bay-wolf.com/parts_insp8600c.htm

 

Interesting, but I still maintain that it's not cost effective to
upgrade. What type of applications are you trying to improve
performance in? Are you certain it's the processor/graphics card that
is limiting you? If it's gaming performance you're after, you'd be much
better off saving for a machine that's capable of using an X600 or
better card (if you're curious, I have an X300 in my D610, and my
roommate has a Radeon 9700 in his 9100, I can run some benchmamrks to
see how they compare).