A31p: How much perf. gain if CPU upgrade from 2.0 to 2.4Ghz?

[danlimcy]

I currently have a A31p with a 2.0 Ghz CPU.

If I were to upgrade it to a 2.4 Ghz CPU, does anyone know roughly what is the type of performance gain I would get?

I chiefly use the laptop for software development and one of the frequent things I do is code compilation. Thanks.

[JHEM]

Maxing the RAM at 2GB would give you a greater performance increase than upgrading the CPU to 2.4GHz.

Upgrading to a 7200RPM HD would also give a noticeable increase.

Regards,

James

[danlimcy]

Thanks for the advice.

I do notice that the laptop is quite sluggish when accessing the hard disk, so I will take hard disk upgrade as the first priority.

Regarding RAM, I currently have 1GB, and I noticed that it is seldom fully utilitised. So will adding another 1GB help?

[a31pguy]

depends on what your planning to do.

Chances are likely that there are a few optimizations that you can do in advance of that upgrade that may help.

JHEM is correct on the hard drive. lower latency seeks by increased hard drive speed and larger cache sizes increase performance by leaps and bounds.

More memory will help if you either run a lot of applications at the same time or crunch a lot of data. I have 2 GB and most of the time - it goes unutilized. However there are times - then I have 1.2 - 1.4 Gb of memory used. The system will use the memory if you have more installed. It will just allocate it differently.

Upgrading the CPU - well it has caused more heat issues for me - but it has also increased the system speed. I rarely ever have to wait for the system to catch up.

As far as optimizations. Make sure you don't have any registry problems. Use NTFS and defragment it. Make sure the hard drives are not fully used. Rebuild the icon cache. Run sysconfig or sysedit and stop programs from running in background. Disable services you don't need in admin tools -> services. Check for spyware, adware, viruses. Run a personal firewall and disable file and print services if you don't need it. Install Intel Application Accelerator.

Good luck.

[abhi1309]

Hi,
I have a Thinkpad R51 i.e. Centrino 1.5, 512 MB RAM and a slow poke 4200 RPM HDD which doesnt do any justice to loading times. It also has Intel Extreme 2.
Now can someone suggest me a few upgradations. I want to get the CPU upgraded to 2Ghz and the Video Card to a different one because it can have some serious compatibility issues with a few games. Infact Farcry and HL2 are not supported officially, Intel says that. The best ones arent supported..what am I supposed to do.

Can any repair guy change the CPU and Video or whre can I give it for upgrades (If I can that is ). And yea how much would a 2Gig Pentium M cost me.

Thanks