Dell Latitude D600 Issue

Hi everyone.

I just purchased a D600 and I changed the Pentium M 1.4GHz with a Pentium M 1.73GHz (Dothan). However, even though windows detects Pentium M 1.73 GHz, CPUz shows it running at 1.3GHz at load.

Bios is updated (A16) and it also shows Pentium M 1.3GHz/600MHz. And also, after I updated the BIOS, ethernet card stopped working. The light is on, but neither windows nor linux will detect this. Since some of you guys have exp with latitudes, perhaps you know about these problems?

I think, in my inexperience, that maybe the Pentium M issue is due to 400MHz FSB requiring pinmod for 533. I'm not sure though, I think the D600 should be able to go at 533 MHz. About the ethernet card, I have no clue. I tried downgrading to A3, but I can't manage to do that, the bios installer will not let me.

Thanks!

hmm, I wish I could help you more, but you may be right about the FSB speed... the D610 which I have the same 1.73ghz PM in uses DDR2 ram @ 533mhz; my dead D600 had DDR 400 ram installed iirc. Also, are you sure the speed isn't ramping up under load? The ethernet (wifi?) card should still be working fine... I have no idea why that wouldn't be working unless you unplugged the antennas by accident or you turned the option off in the BIOS.

Thanks for replying. The ethernet card doesn't work. Wireless card does work and it's my only way to be connected. I checked the speeds: Idle = 600MHz and Load = 1300MHz. Is there any way to set default options in the BIOS? I think that might help. When I did the upgrade from A03 to A16, the LAN card (ethernet) suddenly stopped being recognized by the operating systems. However, the BIOS setup allows me to enable onboard LAN. I've tried enabling and disabling this and I have no luck.

Also, another important aspect I realized. Bios shows a service tag different to the one I have in the sticker on the chassis (and I confirmed with dell web page that the sticker's tag is the correct one). There is also the (assert?) tag, I can't remember the name right now and it's 3AM; which appears blank. Any idea on what does this mean?

Thank you a lot!

downgrade to previous bios and see what happens
i think there are some oc programs like clockgen that might work on your laptop, you could set your FSB to the 533 default. or the multiplier on the cpu could be at 13x, even though it should be at 17x on a 400FSB dothan.

you can try notebook hardware control if clockgen does not work, and try to set your multi/disable speedstep
if all else fails, then you could try a pin mod

It's possible that your motherboard has been replaced in the past which would explain why the service tags don't match. The D600 boards seem to have a habit of dying, so this is fairly probable.

Thanks for replying. I will try clockgen and notebook hardware control. Yea cyrix, when I looked up into the new tag in dell support, it brings up the same laptop so I guess you're right.