Hi, I have an old Compaq Armada E500 with a PIII 600MHz processor. The specs say it can take up to a PIII 900MHz. Off I went to fleaBay and got a cheap one, took the Compaq apart and discovered the processor isn't in a ZIF socket (I've never com across that in 25 years of fiddling with poots). It appears to be stuck down. Is there anyway of removing this old processor without wrecking it? Many thanks Terry
It has been a while but I think it isn't a zif but a standard low profile socket. You need a good light and check the edges to see if you can see the layers or where the cpu edges are. You should see the color differences between the plastic or the socket and the cpu. From above it will look like just a cpu but from the sides you should see the cpu overhand the socket a small bit or be flush with the edges.
The cpu has to be a M series P3 and you may need to adjust bus speeds and/or ram speed to make it work. May also have to upgrade bios as well.
Thanks Dave,
I checked further into it and Compaq made two different mobos for these computers. One had a ZIF and on the other the CPU is fixed (non-removable). Just my luck I have the latter type :(
Shaking my head here as I typed that out and erased it thinking I had to be remembering it wrong without any socket. You know one thing you might find is that you can snag the entire main board (and maybe cpu) off of ebay for not much more than just the cpu. If nothing else the one thing that helps the most on the older laptops is max out your ram. If you can find a copy of a boot loader you can also bust the 3gb hard drive barrier and use something a lot larger if you can find it with the older connector/controller drives (ebay etc) Can't really easily do much to these but they are still useful.
Yep, you're right. I have two sticks of 256Mb memory on the way (this is the max), will probably do more good than 150% increase in CPU anyway ;-)
Yup 512mb in a system that may have come with 128 as standard will definitely make a difference. If you stick in Xp (or Ubuntu) and keep all the bloatware down to a minimum ie the pre-cache things that reside in memory and don't really do a thing. It is surprising just how fast a lot of these older system really are. ;-]
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