Processor. Worth it?

[murray1]

I currently have a T40 with 40 gig 5k100 hard drive, 1.3 mhz banias processor. I am planning on upgrading to a 7k100 because I have heard that it is the way to go and will give the best return.

I am wondering how much difference would be noticed when upgrading from the 1.3 banias to a 1.7 dothan. I have NHC on my computer and I have noticed that my cpu maxes out a fair bit when I am working on different things.

I know that computer can take up to 2.1 ghz processor but the 1.7 seems to be quite a bit cheaper. Approximately how much is a 1.7 worth and how should it compare with the faster processors when it comes to price?

[sugo]

For word processing or web surfing, it probably won't matter much. For decoding 1080i HDTV TS / H.264 or software development, it will make a significant difference.

[Temetka]

I would say go for it. I personally would not pay more than $100 for the CPU. For basic tasks such as word processing, e-mail and such 1.3GHz is plenty of power. How much RAM does your system have?

[murray1]

My laptop has 1.25 gigs memory, I already upgraded it. The biggest reason my computer is slow is because I often have multiple programs running including Norton anti virus, comodo firewall, NHC, msn messenger, DAP and then whatever else I am doing, whether it be writing documents, searching the internet, or doing other things, sometimes I play games but lately university has been keeping me busy enough.

I often have many things going on at once on my computer, rarely my number of computer processes is under 50. The worst part is startup, It takes a good couple three minutes before I can start doing things. During these few minutes my cpu is working at 100% the whole time. My computer actually slows down quite a bit when just surfing the internet, lots of the time loading pages, especially if they have videos my iexplore.exe will use around 60-70% alone.

Does getting the bigger faster hard drive affect how much the processor has to work?

[tomh009]

Replacing the hard drive (with another ATA or SATA drive) won't really affect the CPU performance.

That said ... if iexplore.exe is taking 60-70% of your CPU, you might want to investigate that. In the past, I have had IE and/or Firefox suck up huge amounts of CPU as well. I keep Task Manager running, with "hide when minimized", so I can see when the CPU usage jumps way up.

And the most common culprit? Flash animations on web pages, often for advertising. You could see the CPU utilization jump up when you go to such pages (wrc.com was a particularly bad offender), and drop down when you close them.

My solution? Running Firefox with the Flashblock plug-in. It blocks all Flash content by default, unless you click on it to allow that particular one, or right-click to always allow Flash from that site. That, plus the IETab plug-in (to easily switch to using the IE engine for a given Firefox tab or a site) mean that I have control ... and my CPU can amble along at 20-30% even with 5-10 Firefox tabs open.

Food for thought!

[jdhurst]

I have a T 41 that came with a 30Gb drive and a Banias 1.4Ghz CPU. I upgraded the drive to a 60Gb-7200 rpm drive and the CPU to a Dothan 1.8Ghz. The difference was like night and day.

However, in my normal work (80 processes running), Office running, IE7 running, Symantec Client Security et al, I run less than 2 percent CPU more than 95 percent of the time. This was true before and after the upgrade.

I don't know if these kinds of upgrades will assist your performance issues. I would check elsewhere first (as tom009 noted). ... JD Hurst

[murray1]

Thank you Tom and JD. I have been aware thanks to NHC when my cpu has been working hard and yes it is when I go to sites that have flash or movies or lots of pictures etc. I happen to do that quite regularly though and it definitely is affecting my performance.

I am also currently trying to make sure that my computer is as clean as I can get it from bugs. I found a 100 gig 7k100 hard drive at a computer stores site that has a couple stores right by for just over $150, no shipping yay, so I am planning on getting it and I have found a 1.7 dothan that I might be able to get for hopefully around 70-80$. Do these sound like good purchases?

Also if I do get the processor, I have read that you have to take computer apart which is no problem and that you must clean and then apply thermal paste. What do you clean the surface off with and how? Do you just need to wipe around with cloth and soapy water or am I on the wrong track, never done this before.

[jdhurst]

I used a soft cloth moistened with isopropyl alcohol to clean the surfaces and, yes, you must use thermal paste. I got thermal paste at a nearby electronic parts store. ... JD Hurst

[kstuart]

For word processing or web surfing, it probably won't matter much. For decoding 1080i HDTV TS / H.264 or software development, it will make a significant difference.

I found this thread because I was thinking of upgrading the 1.3 in my T40 in order to use the Thinkpad to decode 720p HDTV H.264 files.

(The current processor works fine for 720p Xvid files, but is not fast enough for H.264)

What do people recommend ? Will a 1.7 be sufficient ?

[murray1]

I just did the upgrade a couple weeks ago from 1.3 to 1.7. I haven't done anything with hard drive but have also put in more ram. I have noticed a difference after changing processors.

I don't know anything about what you would require for speed for this but I do know that it speed up my startup and processes such as updates and such. I would have went bigger but to get anything bigger the processors jump in price.

When I took my laptop apart to change the processor, talk about way too much thermal paste from factory. They must have used a half tube, it was everywhere. If anyone is looking for thermal paste I found a really good ebayer, name is jdmadera, he is a big time ebayer and was a pleasure to do business with. After shipping arctic silver 5 will be less then $7.

[underclocker]

I went from Banias 1.5 to Dothan 1.6 and noticed a difference, not huge, but it got snappier.