I've looked probably across half the web trying to find somebody that already did it, I've gathered parts of information there and there about how you could overclock or, most likely, underclock the celeron-m, I've found interresting to post what I've been able to do.
We all know the celeron-m is the budget version of the pentium-m, which half the cache in most cases, but the most frustrating thing, with speedstep literally disabled. This means the CPU will consume roughly 50% more power when idle (there is little or no difference between the celeron-m's power consumption and the pentium-m on full load). So the challenge for me was to try to underclock my celeron-m 1.3GHz in order to gain some minutes (or seconds?) of battery life of the already too-short battery life.
Most overclocking methods involves some kind of hardware manipulations, this one requires some skills and guts. You will need to open your notebook. If you never opened yours before, don't do it now. You risk damaging it trying to.
We know that you cannot change the multiplier on the celeron-m (neither does the pentium-m, you can only lower it, not raise it). That's known. There's nothing we can do about it.
But we usually can change the bus speed, either in the bios, or on the fly. Let's forget the bios for now, since most of us will find nothing useful for what we're trying to do.
Before doing anything, you need to locate the brand and the model of the chip which "creates" the bus speed. It's called a PPL and it is usually found near a crystal. You need to open your notebook at this point and locate, on the motherboard, a chip that looks like that.
It might not be ICS. It could be cypress, icw, winbond, imi, ppllabs, cmedia, realtek, pericom. Make sure to check below the RAM chips, and the wireless chip, they might be located underneath. You don't need to check under the hard drive or the dvd drive.
Once you've found that, get the utility called CPUFSB. This is not a freeware, but works if you'd like to figure out if it can be done with your laptop.
http://www.cpufsb.de/
Launch that application, and match the PPL you have found inside your notebook. From there, it will be possible to change the bus speed. I suggest you DO NOT overclock, but rather underclock. I haven't figured out how to change the voltage of the chip.
After some testing, going from 1300mhz to 1000mhz, or WHATEVER frequency, you gain absolutely NOTHING from it. Except added slowness's.
This was just to show you it could be done in some way. Until someone more intelligent than me finds a way to modify the voltage of the celeron-m, people like me will buy a new chip if they want to squeeze more battery from their current hardware.
Hope this gets indexed by google, and helps at least one person trying to find something about this. This way, it'll save them precious time. You can try, but don't hope anything from it.
Google, the keywords are there: celeron-m underclock fsb change centrino battery life
Math
We all know the celeron-m is the budget version of the pentium-m, which half the cache in most cases, but the most frustrating thing, with speedstep literally disabled. This means the CPU will consume roughly 50% more power when idle (there is little or no difference between the celeron-m's power consumption and the pentium-m on full load). So the challenge for me was to try to underclock my celeron-m 1.3GHz in order to gain some minutes (or seconds?) of battery life of the already too-short battery life.
Most overclocking methods involves some kind of hardware manipulations, this one requires some skills and guts. You will need to open your notebook. If you never opened yours before, don't do it now. You risk damaging it trying to.
We know that you cannot change the multiplier on the celeron-m (neither does the pentium-m, you can only lower it, not raise it). That's known. There's nothing we can do about it.
But we usually can change the bus speed, either in the bios, or on the fly. Let's forget the bios for now, since most of us will find nothing useful for what we're trying to do.
Before doing anything, you need to locate the brand and the model of the chip which "creates" the bus speed. It's called a PPL and it is usually found near a crystal. You need to open your notebook at this point and locate, on the motherboard, a chip that looks like that.
It might not be ICS. It could be cypress, icw, winbond, imi, ppllabs, cmedia, realtek, pericom. Make sure to check below the RAM chips, and the wireless chip, they might be located underneath. You don't need to check under the hard drive or the dvd drive.
Once you've found that, get the utility called CPUFSB. This is not a freeware, but works if you'd like to figure out if it can be done with your laptop.
http://www.cpufsb.de/
Launch that application, and match the PPL you have found inside your notebook. From there, it will be possible to change the bus speed. I suggest you DO NOT overclock, but rather underclock. I haven't figured out how to change the voltage of the chip.
After some testing, going from 1300mhz to 1000mhz, or WHATEVER frequency, you gain absolutely NOTHING from it. Except added slowness's.
This was just to show you it could be done in some way. Until someone more intelligent than me finds a way to modify the voltage of the celeron-m, people like me will buy a new chip if they want to squeeze more battery from their current hardware.
Hope this gets indexed by google, and helps at least one person trying to find something about this. This way, it'll save them precious time. You can try, but don't hope anything from it.
Google, the keywords are there: celeron-m underclock fsb change centrino battery life
Math
