1202 ALARM

I was given this really nice HP 350 G2 laptop by a very kind lady on Freegle. As is usually the case it was running slow under Windows. I offered to install Linux, but she had bought a new laptop and just wanted this one to be used. This is the first 15w laptop I've worked on and it needs low power RAM (1.25v), which I didn't have in stock, so I purchased a 4Gb module on eBay for under £5 delivered. This took the total memory to a respectable 8Gb. A 512Gb SSD upgrade (under £20, AliExpress) and a clean install of Linux Mint and I have a decent laptop to do me for the next 3 years. Performance is fine for my needs (mostly web browsing, Zoom and some hobby coding). The CPU is an i5-5200 which seems to be the fastest that the motherboard can handle so I won't be changing the CPU this time. HP Pavilion G6 CPU Upgrade As I usually do, I'm going to cycle my i7-3632M HP Pavilion G6 (above) into the workshop, which will leave two older laptops to pass on via...

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 ma...

So I decided to go for the ultimate upgrade on my trusty HP Pavilion G6 laptop which was given to me 3 years ago by a kind guy on Freegle. At the time I had to replace the fan and keyboard to get it going ( see post here ), but this upgrade was at another level entirely as I've never swapped out a laptop CPU before.  A lot of research went into this to make sure I was getting the right APU (combined CPU and graphics processor or GPU), because the same motherboard can work with a wide range of Intel and AMD processors. I went for broke and got the most powerful one the motherboard could handle for £20 on eBay along with an additional 4Gb RAM to bring it up to 8Gb. Here is the old 2-core APU (E2-3000M) ready to be removed. And the replacement 4-core APU (A8-3520M) installed with a smearing of heatsink paste ready for reassembly. So did it work? Thankfully yes and I am editing this post using the computer. The GPU runs a little hot which I am keeping an eye on,...