windows7

[allan gould]

To all of you , thanks heaps - and I mean it. I finally solved the problems by taking the laptop back to H Norman and getting a full refund on the whole deal as I said I needed XP to run everything. No problems and I couldnt fault their helpfullness and understanding - appears a problem with their touch screen models. In the end I sourced a Toshiba running Vista pro with XP3 discs with a $20 option to upgrade to Windows7Pro - can't loose. So in the end I get 3 operating systems to choose from.
Anyway thanks to H Nprman and you guys I think Ive come out of it OK - now if you can just pacify the wife who now thinks Im a complete retard.

[MrB (Simon)]

Originally Posted by PeterM

Simon, Do you know if my 18 month old Compaq laptop Celeron 1.86 can have its CPU changed to a dual core?

PeterM.

Hi Peter, sorry for the late reply I'm only able get online once a week these days.
It's hard to say whether you can upgrade to a C2D processor.
Arm yourself with the model number and do a search on the Notebookreview forums (under the HP, Compaq and Voodoo PC sub forum) to see what others have done.
If your Lappie has a socket P or socket M there is a reasonable chance you can move up to a C2D (mine originaly had a CeleronM), you will likely need to do an upgrade of the BIOS too, but thats no biggie.
If you haven't maxed out the RAM, do it now. Cheapest performance upgrade there is. I noticed more performance from the RAM upgrade than the CPU upgrade.
I got my CPU from Ebay, had to wait a while for a good price but worth the wait.
Stay away from any CPU's labelled as 'ES' (it is etched onto the chip with a laser), they are Engineering Samples... they are handed out free to developers and media(for reviews) and are essentially rejects that are crippled or defective in some way. There are people out there(mainly in China) that are selling these ES processors.
Some people claim they've never had a problem with their ES chips, but I'd rather not pay big $ for something that was handed out free.

Here is a list of Virtualization compatible processors:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_V...8Intel_VT-x.29