Sorry for digging up this old thread, haven't done much with the notebook except for going back to the IDE HDD which actually made the notebook faster, must've been something wrong with the adapter.

I'm quite curious about something....what would happen if I put a delidded desktop Athlon 64 in it? That XP-M 2800+ is painfully slow, even in XP.

Try to install XP SP1 (and not XP3) or even Win 2000. You WILL see the difference !

Why is that, if I may ask?

My guess is the slowness is mostly the hard drive. What drive are you running? I used to run the Hitachi 7200RPM drives like the 7K60. Notebook drives were awful back then.

If you want to upgrade the CPU, you could just look for a Mobile Athlon 64 3200+. That should drop in and work. You'd go to 1MB L2 cache and 2.2GHz.

How much RAM does it have? It should be possible to run 2GB.

Task manager shows the CPU hitting 100% load most of the time.
It runs 1280MB RAM, 2 banks of 1GB were unstable.

I've tried mSATA adapter to an mSATA SSD but it ran very poorly, actually slower than the original 5400 drive, must've been something wrong either with the adapter or the mSATA drive itself. If anyone knows a 100% mSATA to IDD compatible adapter, let me know.

Regarding the CPU, I'm still curious if a delidded desktop s.754 A64 would work. S 754 CPU's are already quite rare here, let alone the mobile versions.

martin778 wrote on 2025-01-27, 22:58:

Why is that, if I may ask?

Some reading for you ...
Windows XP Service Pack versions - performance vs compatiblity?
XP SP2 vs XP SP3? Which one is faster?
https://msfn.org/board/topic/137073-sp2-vs-sp3/
My experience on such machines with low memory (1Gb or less) is better with xp SP1 and great with W2K.
In fact, I even use athlon-m portable pc to get snappy W98SE machines.