Another HP Pavilion G6 Upgrade

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So back in August 2020 I upgraded a HP Pavilion G6 laptop running an AMD CPU.

HP Pavilion G6 CPU Upgrade (AMD Processor)

A few months ago I got some more laptops and one of these was another HP Pavilion G6. After cleaning it up and installing Linux Mint, I checked out the CPU using the Linux command 'lscpu' (list CPUs), which told me that this second Pavilion G6 was running an Intel Pentium 2020M. Compared to the other laptops I had lying around the performance of the Pentium CPU was pretty poor so I started looking for upgrade options. This being an Intel system board (the previous one was AMD), there were some reasonably tasty upgrades so I went for broke and ordered the fastest option, a used Core i7-3632QM on AliExpress for £60. It took about two weeks to arrive and by that time I had done a bit more research on the HP Pavilion G6 series laptops. While cosmetically the 2 laptops I had looked the same, inside they had important differences.


I had downloaded the HP service manual for this model and followed the instructions for dismantling the laptop and getting the system board out. At the same time I cleaned up the fan, which as always was full of dust.


Off came the fan and heatsink and after cleaning the old thermal paste off the heatsink with solvent, I installed the new CPU with a smear of paste before replacing the heatsink and fan.


So moment of truth. The computer booted up and this time 'lscpu' reported the Intel Core i7-3632QM as installed and working, all 4 cores and 8 threads. Other people had reported problems with the BIOS not recognising the new CPU, but this didn't seem to have been the case here, possibly due to a previous BIOS update at some point.

I installed a 128Gb SDD (solid state drive) I had left over from another project and managed to clone the HDD from my other HP G6 to this SDD so that I would have the same suite of software and data. A bit of fiddling and re-installing the boot software Grub2 and it is all working. Boot time to the log-in screen is just 20 seconds and another 20 seconds to the desktop which is perfectly acceptable.

Another laptop saved from the scrapheap!




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