Upgrading old hardware, Toshiba C655

[wizard]

Recently a friend gave his lightly used Toshiba laptop to his 9 year old grandson who promptly returned it. "To slow" he said. So I was next on the donation list.

A Toshiba C655, 15.5" 1366x768 display, Intel Celeron 900 (64bit) single core, 2gb ram, 250gb hdd, from about 2010. The Celeron 900 has a Passmark v9 score of 658, pretty decent for a single core and it came with MS Win7. It could run Fossapup64 9.5 pretty well and could stream Youtube videos without issue. But, as usual, I couldn't resist upgrading it. Many manufacturers of that time sold systems like this as entry level and budget choices. The good news, most could be significantly upgraded with ram and cpu swaps.

A quick check on the web showed the C655 could handle a Intel T9500 dual core. Checking Ebay, and as I guessed, those were selling at a premium price of $36 US. From previous experience, I stepped down a couple of notches and chose a T8300, price $6 US. The T9500 had a Passmark = 1698, the T8300 = 1401, not a bad loss for 1/6 the price.

I'd rate the tear down as about "medium" difficulty, you've got to remove the top half of the case and keyboard, then remove the motherboard from the lower half to swap the cpu. Laptop teardown is puzzle work so found a Youtube video on a teardown of a similar model which was helpful, although the poster removed about 8 more screws than required to pull the motherboard.

c655-mb2.jpg (91.68 KiB) Viewed 842 times

Popped in another 2gb of ram and now have a dual core, 4gb system that is quite snappy. Runs dual boot Puppy Linux + MS Windows 10, both 64bit. Overall, it runs on par with the Dell D630 that @mikewalsh and I both have.

Total expenditure = $10 US.

Just for fun I also tried it with a cheap SSD drive, boot time for Win10 went from 88 seconds to 20 seconds. To my surprise Puppy also booted in 20 seconds.

Was a good rainy day project, Toshiba C655 lives to fight another day.

wizard

[Jasper]

@wizard

Is it okay to PM you regarding an old desktop PC that one of my neighbours threw out?

Only the RAM and HDD are missing.

The other thing I realised is that there's no WiFi or Bluetooth available.

[wizard]

@Jasper

Sure, just tell me the make and model and I can recommend what you can do to improve it. Have done many of these over the years.

wizard

[mikewalsh]

@Jasper :-

I take it you are aware that wireless is not a standard built-in option with desktops, yes? Most older desktop rigs tend to be Ethernet only.

Having said which, I'm still trying to get my head round the fact that this HP desktop rig of mine DOES have a combo wireless/Bluetooth chip onboard. Apparently this is becoming more normal with newer desktops, despite that a desktop can't move around like a laptop can!

Of course, there's nothing to stop you using a wireless dongle. I can only assume that many folks, upon having a desktop PC for the first time, are so used to laptops with built-in wifi that they expect it'll be standard on a desktop too..... A lot of the younger generation don't even know what Ethernet IS.

I still say Ethernet's far more stable as well as being generally faster, though of course you will have to run an RJ-45 cable from wherever your router happens to be to the PC itself. And not everybody wants to go to all that trouble.

Mike.

[Jasper]

@mikewalsh

Thanks for your interest and input.

I have sent a PM to Wizard and hopefully I can get some advice/suggestions.

The mobo has a PCIe 1x and I had hoped a laptop WiFi/Bluetooth module would fit in that slot (?) A WiFi6 & BT5.2 module (INTEL) only costs £20+ (Amazon UK). Which I thought would better than having to purchase usb dongles. The motherboard only has USB2.0 ports.

No RAM, but it will support 16GB DDR3 1600Mhz, which is roughly the price of 2x cigarette packs. Which is double my current available amount lol.

According to the manual it will accept faster speeds ie OC but that is dependent on the CPU.

The downside is that it has a Gen2/3 Intel CPU. Without the RAM it doesn't POST. I would have taken out the CPU to look but have no thermal paste. It has been ages since I have delved into the insides of a PC

So being of that CPU generation, they generally tend to be power hungry TDP, so not economical for running as a server. Especially when SBC can do this so easily nowadays.

I might fix it up and donate it to a social enterprise near to me. I have spare SATA and SSD drives lying around.

For a new user WiFi/Bluetooth connectivity is a must. These young people lol

Thanks for taking an interest and please do feel free to offer advice/suggestions..

Only today, I thought this section could be utilised more. There must be others who would benefit from some DIY advice.

I have a pet project I need to get off the ground ................ I have some bookshelf passive speakers that have some personal history which I would like to use. My mum still has my floor standing speakers in storage.

BTW Hope all is well is with your mother too.

[mikewalsh]

@Jasper :-

2nd- or 3rd-gen, huh? So.....that would make it, what; SandyBridge? IvyBridge? Haswell? OK. Yes, they were "hungrier" than more modern ones, it's true. I mean, my Pentium G5400 in this Pavilion rig is 9th-gen "CoffeeLake"; 3.7 GHz; nominally a dual-core, though H/T effectively makes it a quad-core (which is how I think of it, anyway).

No Turbo or boost core clocks on this thing, though it does have the full complement of modern, up-to-date SIMD instructions. Including AVX and virtualization, etc, etc. Makes my old dual-core Athlon64 X2 look like a snail, though back in its day - 2004-5 - it was hailed as being one of the best all-rounders in existence, beating Intel's Pentium 4 hands-down when it first appeared.

This thing is very much a middle-of-the-road desktop PC. It came with just 4 GB of DDR4 when I got it at the start of the pandemic. After years of struggling along with only 3 GB DDR1, I swore I was never going to be tucked-up for resources again. So; 4GB rapidly became 8GB, courtesy of Offtek up in the Wirral. A couple of months later, I upped that again, to 16GB of brand-spanking new RAM from Crucial's own website.

Late 2020, a few weeks before Xmas, I found a cracking good deal on Crucial RAM at Amazon; a 32GB kit for not much more than Crucial had charged me for half that amount back in the summer! I couldn't resist the chance to "max-out" the new PC, so I grabbed it. Remember, this was the year of the national lock-downs; I was used to going out fairly often, but with that curtailed by COVID I had a definite, steady build-up of extra cash in the bank that wouldn't normally have been there. Thus, 2020 became the year when I upgraded my entire computing experience, including going for a discrete GPU for the first time....

I don't have wizard's experience of tear-downs & re-builds, but I've done my own fair share of bare-metal hardware swaps & upgrades over the last 12-15 years, including CPUs, RAM, GPUs and a fair assortment of various PCI/PCI-e add-ons for various things. Hopefully, I can pass on a wee bit of that know-how to others.....including yourself.

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As for Mama, well; she'll be 90 next January, and is still hanging in there. They were all long-lived on her mother's side of the family; most of the Grey clan from the Northampton area all got within spitting distance of their 100th, and one or two even made it past it!

She's had mobility issues for many years, following a major spinal op in the early 70s, when she had to have 2 crumbling vertebrae removed, followed by the remaining vertebrae being literally "fused" together (so she's around 3 inches shorter than she used to be).....and this without damaging the spinal cord! It's left a legacy of side-effects behind it though, which I won't go into. The 22hr-long operation was one of the very first instances of early "keyhole surgery" anywhere in the country, and was performed at the former RAF base hospital on the outskirts of Ely, in Cambridgeshire, in early '72.

She won't go without a fight, I know that much.

Mike.

[Jasper]

@mikewalsh

Thank you for the kind offer of support

As always wishing her well and you too for continuing to provide support.

I have to admit I had to do a double take on the age scale .......... very good innings

Hopefully England will take a leaf out of the Grey clan's longevity and do well against the Aussies in the Ashes