Cpu Upgrade

If you are going to buy a new computer in 6 months, it's my opinion that your money will be better spent on the new computer.

But if you have to have the extra power, it will work.

Intel Core2 Duo Processor T7300
Sockets Supported    PBGA479, PPGA478
FSB Speed                800 MHz

Intel Core2 Duo Processor T7800
Sockets Supported    PBGA479, PPGA478
FSB Speed                800 MHz

Sketch, I have an older T61 Thinkpad with that T7800 processor you mentioned and I had a T60 with a T7400 (wife now uses) which is very close to the T7300 except runs I think at 2.2 GHz. I used both for several years and I am very familar with how they feel and behave. You do what feels best to you but I believe that going through the machinations to procure and change out that processor for the gain you'll see is not even close to worth it. I've been down that road and you won't notice any difference after the first ten minutes or you'll make one little slip and bend a pin or break a connector and you may as well through the system out. Then you will be wondering what the heck possessed you to attempt it in the first place. I would advise that you save the $ and put it toward a new machine when you're ready. BTW if you want to try something that may make a difference see if you can swap your old hard drive for a 128 or 256 SSD and reimage the system to Win 7 SP1 if you can, disable all the startups and only reinstall and run the minimal software and mission critical applications. Run the system really clean with minimal processes loading and I bet you will experience a huge difference. I did that on the T60 with the T7400 and it felt like a new machine (for a while). Good luck.

Yea I've kept my computer well maintained i think. Every time I install something I go into msconfig just to make sure I'm booting only programs I need at startup. The problem is I do a lot of rendering and cpu intensive tasks, I figured a little extra juice might help but I've never switched out a cpu so yes I'm afraid of the little pins.

Also I'm not very familiar with SSDs, I know it stores the files differently but is there a big difference in terms of accessing the files, say if I'm working with multiple 500MB files at a time.

P4 3.0 GHz passmark (old)=491.

T7300 passmark=1157.

T7800 passmark=1514.

i3-2330 passmark (new) = 2743.

I have P4 3.0 GHz; it frequently pegs out and is a major bottle neck.

I also have the i3-2330 and it rarely pegs out (I'm not gaming or video editing now).

Going from 1157 to 1514 is not a super upgrade in my book; I'd do it only if cheap.

7200rpm HDD is typically the bottleneck in my new system. 6GB RAM and i3-2330 usually run less than 50%.

SSD is significantly faster but it is fairly new and some people have issues; to be fair people have issues w/ standard HDD as well.

You can upgrade to a T7800 processor very easily.  Here is a couple of things to consider, first it will require fully dissassembling the laptop. But this is a good thing because you will be able to fully clean out the dust from the radiator and cooling heatsync.  Next, you must get a socket "P" T7800, a socket "M" type will not plug into the 830's MB.  To install the new processor you will need to remove the heatsync assembly,  swap the CPU's, clean and re-apply heatsync compound on the CPU, GPU and support chip.  One other thing to consider, the T7800 is a 800ghz fsb chip and will run the fastest using PC-6400 DDR2 memory.   You will also see the best performance using Windows 7 64bit OS.  This will also enable to use the maximum amount of the 4gb memory.