For those who are looking for a reputable store that sells CPU upgrades, newegg has a selection of Socket P CPUs. For now they currently stock Merom procs but I'm sure they'll get the Penryn series soon. You can check with them until they do.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...&name=Socket+P

Well put. Are you running Vista or XP? If XP where did you get drivers? Vista is quickly pissing me off.

To be honest, ever since Vista came out a full year ago I haven't looked back to XP. I guess if you play around with vista and do some tweaks it runs without excessive problems.

I would think XP would piss you off more with the lack of drivers with this machine.

They've got XP drivers for everything but audio at this point, correct? I guess if Vista pissed me off too bad I could always get a PCMCIA slot Audigy card or something. I'm going to try to give Vista an honest try though. Which could be tough given I've been using Leopard...

True that. Any sites you like with tweaks for vista?

One of the first things I do is to change the performance options under system properties/advance. I have everything unchecked except:

-Slide taskbar buttons
-Use a background image for each folder type
-Use drop shadows for icon labels on the desktop
-Use visual styles on windows and buttons

That basically takes away the aero feature but it still looks good without.


Then I remove the most annoying feature, I turn User Account Control off. Some other tweaks I do is to turn off remote access, system restore and I reduce the size of the recycle bin to 1GB/1000MB.

I then install ccleaner to clean up the startup programs. Only thing I have on startup is my antivirus, touchpad driver (synaptics), and intel storage manager.

Tweakvista.com has a good services tweak guide:
http://www.tweakvista.com/article38662.aspx

These are all my personal preferences so I won't say it's the best setup but so far Vista has been running great for me. With the right video drivers I score the same as XP on most benchmarks.

Are you using stock drivers for your FX?

I'm using laptopvideo2go.com 169.09 drivers

I got the 160.28 running... seems to be pretty good.

Upgrades done - 15 minutes of work yeilded a TON of performance. 3dMark06 at 1280x800 scored 8500 flat. Upgrades from stock listed in sig, and next upgrade will be to a WUXGA screen.

I'm still bound by memory score in the Windows Experience Index - mem is 4.8. CPU is next lowest at 5.3, disk and graphics are all 58 or 5.9. All in all, awesome performance from a sub-2k laptop.

I'll still be working on the full conversion to 64bit, just to see what happens,

Spinitch, thank you for all of your trailblazing on this system. I would have missed the numbering on the CPU screws if you hadn't pointed them out.

Anyone know if the Penryn T8300 3MB 800MHz would see a performance hit due to only having a 3mb cache? I found a good deal on one but am wondering why intel only put 3 megs instead of the normal 4.

Also, I'm not sure what the fuss is with a raid set up. Does it run faster? Or is it more of a back up thing? Can I get a faster drive to run windows and programs and use the stock drive for storage? A little help here please.

RAID0 = data is striped across two drives, thus making your IO faster (more spindles = more speed)

RAID 1 = data is written to two drives simultaneously, so you always have a mirror of your data (Built-in fault tolerance)


You can certainly get a faster drive and run your OS on that, and use the other for storage.

Setting up 2 drives in RAID just buys you either better performance or better recoverability.

thanks

Will upgrading the ram really do anything? I think vista 32bit only see's 3 gigs anyway.