Upgrade CPU in Inspiron 9300

It'll work, but don't expect much difference - the difference will be negligible to barely noticeable.  Unless you're getting a 780 for free, it's not worth paying for.

Thanks husky0894. So I won't need to do anything else apart from swapping over the CPU!?!

I am surprised, though, that you say that I won't notice much of a difference. I am doing a lot of video converting and I am hoping to cut down on convertion time. I would have thought that going from 1.73 to 2.26GHz would make a big difference for such applications, since this is a number crunching exercise....

There's not enough of a clock speed difference between the CPUs to make a major impact on that.  You'd see far more of an improvement by moving to a Core 2 Duo or Core 2 Quad CPU.

That of course would require a new system.

I would have thought that a 30% increase in clock speed would have a similar increase in performance for number crunching exercises. If this is not the case, I'll save the 250 bucks and leave it as it is. It works really well for me otherwise. So I am not really in need of a new system. It just would have been nice to shave 30-45 min of a 2 or 3 hour conversion job without spending big bucks. Thanks for your advice husky0894. 

I need to step in here and speak for the M 780's performance. I upgraded the CPU in my Inspiron 9300 from the M 760 at 2.0 GHz to the M 780 at 2.267 GHz. The Windows Experience Index subscore for the CPU rose from 3.7 to 4.0 after the upgrade. My laptop is noticeably faster and the overall latency has been dramatically reduced. I also found empirical data that measured the M 780 as about 12% faster than the M 760. I would venture to say that the performance gains moving from the M 740 to the M 780 would be even more substantial.