upgrading a trusty ol' toshiba satellite 1800

[Sl1m1thy]

hi all

as you see in the title i want to upgrade my toshiba (t'is getting old now)
but i have never done this to a laptop before
i need to know if it only takes certain types/brands or ram, cpu, hdd etc and how much of it, it can take
currently it has 240mb ram, 1.1ghz celeron,16mb trident cyberblade gfx and a 20gb hdd
i have searched all over the net and havent found any thing that helps me so im counting on you lot to give me a few pointers here :thup:
im mostly interested in a new cpu and ram.
so if you have any info on what it will take and where to buy the parts that would be amazing.

thanx for any info

[Slackfumasta]

I don't know what kind of CPU you can put into that machine, if any, but you can find your RAM pretty easily at Crucial:

http://www.crucial.com

I can't find that specific model number on Crucial's site, or on Toshiba's for that matter, but I would imagine that if the machine is upgradable, some laptop PC100 RAM would do just fine.

My guess is that you currently have 2 128 MB chips in there, and your graphics chip is using 16 MB of that RAM as video memory. Pick up 2 256 MB SODIMM SDRAM PC100 memory chips (about $47 each on Crucial). If they don't work, you can always return them.

[Sl1m1thy]

i suppose the cpu isnt a major problem yet, im not gaming or encoding movies with it
but you can never have too much ram :thup:

[sunrunner20]

Acctually you CAN.... Sorta. If you already have say 2gb ram, and putting another stick in disables Dual channel, and increases CAS by a few points.... Its just pointless... :D

[BUBBLE]

you can upgrade memory by kingston cause they got the correct part number for that model. visit there web site and select the toshib anad then the model, it'll show you the correct memory modules. BTW you can upgrade the processor but it'll be no much improvement at all and it is very costly thing. You can upgrade the hard disk to upto 40 or 60 gb (cause that will be the best according to my opinion)

[bigcrazau]

hi all

as you see in the title i want to upgrade my toshiba (t'is getting old now)
but i have never done this to a laptop before
i need to know if it only takes certain types/brands or ram, cpu, hdd etc and how much of it, it can take
currently it has 240mb ram, 1.1ghz celeron,16mb trident cyberblade gfx and a 20gb hdd
i have searched all over the net and havent found any thing that helps me so im counting on you lot to give me a few pointers here :thup:
im mostly interested in a new cpu and ram.
so if you have any info on what it will take and where to buy the parts that would be amazing.

thanx for any info

Hi, I also have a Toshiba Satellite 1800-s203. The beauty about the Satellite is that it's just a plain old socket-370 board, so upgrading the CPU is much easier and affordable than you'd think.. actually I'm just about to do that myself. I currently have a 900 celeron processor which is REALLY showing it's age. I've surmised that by upgrading this to a p3-933MHz processor, I'll improve system performance significantly. I bought an old p3 933MHz CPU from eBay for $30 Australian... like $24 US. In your situation though, I'd say that a Celeron 1100 CPU which you currently have would be nearly on par with the p3-933?? Maybe you could look at a p3-1.1GHz processor instead?

I've also bought some really good thermal paste, seeing as these Toshiba's do have heating issues... also, if you could get yourself on the original bios (not the updated bios) your CPU should run at full speed. I think there was some sort of case where Toshiba got sued for the heat issue destroying the charging relay to the battery or something.

With the CPU, make sure it's Coppermine. You might see some 1.4GHz Celeron processors... anything above 1.1GHz is probably the tualatin core, which won't work on our system board.

Oh yeah, and I added a 256Mb PC133 kingston stick as well. Yeah, just remember that the p3-933 has a 133MHz bus, so make sure the ram is compliant (although I guess the mainboard would cap this at 100MHz?).

Well, that's all I know about these laptops... if you wanted to, you could share your knowledge with me too :) I'm with you on finding it so difficult to locate anything useful on go ogle about this laptop... I'm sick of the rubbish you gotta sift through.

Cheers.

p.s. We had to have a smart arse tell us how anything more than 2GB of ram can raise latency... bravo mate. I'm sure we shouldn't hit that 2GB limit on our systems lol.

*** Edit ***

OK, I've done the upgrade! Now, let me first say again that information is hard to come by on the Satellite 1800 series - with respect to upgrading. I found a great source for disassembling the laptop, which came in handy when replacing the CPU and hard drive. Basically, this is what happened.

Before upgrade:

Toshiba Satellite 1800 series (with touchpad)
Celeron 900 CPU (on a standard socket 370 Motherboard).
1 x 128MB SD RAM PC100 (1 slot was free).
15GB HDD.
24x CD-Rom.

The laptop also appears to utilize 16Mb Video... I think the 1800 series has either 16Mb or 8Mb... I went through bios and couldn't find any setting for it, so I think you've gotta look at the model. This is "shared" memory - i.e. it borrows from your memory.

Now, I bought this laptop for a bargain. i needed a laptop to use during my Chartered Accountants Program. I also had a spare 2.5" 40GB Hard Drive around that I used in my external Caddy for my Desktop computer - it hadn't been getting as much use as I thought ti would, so decided to swap the 40GB with the 15GB. I also looked on EBay and grabbed a 1x256MB PC133 kingston so-dimm, giving me the grand total of 384Mb (less the 16Mb video). Now even though 128Mb memory module runs at 100MHz, and the 256Mb runs at 133MHz, they will both be capped at PC100MHz. This is two fold - firstly, it's capped at the slowest stick, and secondly, the motherboard doesn't offer PC133 speed - don't worry though, it'll work fine!


Now, the processor... I was a little bewildered when trying to research what processors the motherboard supported (as you can tell from my guess work above). I ripped out the Celeron 900 CPU and stuck in the P3-933MHz CPU. This is a huge difference, as the difference in cache performance is astronomical. The extra 128K cache really boosts performance! I'm also finding that the system isn't slowing down as much* it once did with the celeron.

I am able to download HDTV Divx movies and play them using videolan without a hiccup - something that was impossible with the Celeron 900 (even with the extra ram).

All in all it was a cheap upgrade, and fun! Oh, I bought the processor for $25AU ($33US). I could have paid double for a 1GHz, but decided to be humble and smart.

Now my system boasts a Huuuuuge PIII-933MHz, 384Mb SD-Ram, 40GB Hard drive, running Windows Xp really well.

One little note though, I found my CD-Rom (24x) is very picky and choosie. It doesn't like burnt Cd's that are burnt on any high speeds. I found 12X burns worked well. Even for my backup windows XP cd (to prevent scratching of the original) didn't boot, instead it would just hang. Some ways around this is to press pause during bios bootup to allow the cd to boot up when bios checks the drive (worked for me).

Anyways, I might post this in a more recent thread.

Cheers guys!

Craig