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The Barracks
#543

Laptop Restoration Log 1:

Started working on the dv6700 yesterday, put in the new battery and SSD. Installed W10H on it…and, well…the laptop is not happy. At least the CPU isn’t happy. It went from idling at about 85C to idling at 95 and then after some time idling at 100. What concerns me is the battery placement relative to the CPU. They’re about 20mm apart. Also, everything else seemed to be getting really hot. It got so hot that the glue for the Intel, Nvidia and Windows stickers on the palm rest melted off and the stickers fell off. If it continues like this, I’ll downgrade it back to WV.

I’ve got the new CPU ready to be placed in, but I want the RAM and WiFi card to get here first. I had to order a new WiFi card, because apparently the current one doesn’t have Bluetooth despite there being Bluetooth setting in the control panel. I need Bluetooth for the ExpressCard mouse which got here ages ago. That thing is great, tried it on the XPS and it is surprisingly good for what it is. Only the touch scroll is a bit iffy. However, for a £12 piece of 12 year old technology, I can’t complain.

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Personal Projects
#544

Laptop Restoration Log 2:

The RAM came in a couple of hours after I posed the first log, I fitted it on the day. As expected, it runs just fine, it’s twice the RAM from before (I went from 2GB to 4GB), but the laptop isn’t suddenly going to rival my XPS…obviously.

I spent today fitting the new CPU, getting in was quite the faff and I took about 7kg of 11 year old dust out of the heatsink and fan. The GPU had way too little thermal paste and the paste on the CPU was too much and solid because it hasn’t been touched in over 11 years. It was just as much a faff to reassemble it.

After reassmbling it, I fire it up and…well…the situation isn’t good. It switches on, but there’s nothing on the display. I thought maybe W10 was playing dirty, so I put the stock HDD with WV in and I was getting the same result. So it’s not W10. I then tried to plug it into the TV, again nothing. So it’s not the display cable. I doubt it’s the GPU as I haven’t done anything to it. My guess is that it’s the CPU. I’ll get back into the laptop tomorrow and put the old CPU back in. In the mean time, I’ll be digging around online to see what the issue could be. My guess is that it’s more of HP’s proprietary bullshit where they have a blacklist of CPUs, just like they do with WiFi cards.

My dad suggested that it might need drivers, but I’m doubtful of that. If it does, then I’ll just pop the SSD out, plug it into the XPS, download the relevant drivers from there and then put the SSD back in. That way I don’t have to waste time opening the entire laptop again.

Here are some pics from today:

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Upgrade CPU (left) and old CPU (right).
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In other news, there’s new info on the 2019 XPS 15. For some reason they’re calling it the 7590. Anyway, Not much has changed in terms of design, a lot of people are complaining about it. I’m glad it’s the same, because it looks great as it is now, it’s civilised style. The webcam is finally at the top of the screen though.

Speaking of the screen, they now have a 4K OLED option, and thank god it’s not a touchscreen, to me touchscreen laptops are just stupid. The laptop does still come with the 4K touch, but it isn’t OLED. Other new features include a WiFi 6 card and the ability of spec it up with 64GB of RAM out of the factory (which will be a total rip-off, buy the cheapest one and upgrade it yourself). It will also contrina upto an i9 9980HK and they will all be runnning GTX 1650 GPUs.

The 7590 should be released at some point this month.

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Personal Projects
#545

I’m setting up a 4G router only for myself and my PS4 in the country once I’m there
I mean, we have a WIFI but the connection is so damn slow because of the air bridge – the cable comes form the high voltage line outside of our territory - so it basically enters only the generator room where it’s connected to a TPLink outside router which is air bridged to another one on the top of our house. The issue is that the first TPlink one not only provides air bridge but also provides the network across the territory so the speed is kinda… kinda LOWS

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#546

What if you waited a bit for WiFi 6, or is it going to take 2 centuries before it gets to your area in the middle of nowhere?

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#547

I doubt WIFI 6 is gonna be working even in Moscow… it sometimes takes our providers a little too long. Plus I’m gonna be there for a week after 6th , so I need some games right now lol( gonna do all the possible stuff in a couple of days and get bored)

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#548

Laptop Restoration Log 3:

I’m an idiot, just plain and simple. I put the old CPU back in and the laptop is fine, in fact I’m currently typing from it. My dad was right, it was indeed a software issue. In my excitement for a new CPU, I completely overlooked the fact that the BIOS might not support the CPU. And what do you know? It doesn’t. I’ll try to find a way around it with a possible BIOS update or something similar, but if it doesn’t work, I’ll probably return it and buy one that is supported by the BIOS.

In other news, since I cleaned all the dust out of the heatsink and fan (there was so much of it that you couldn’t see through the heatsink fins), the laptop has now gone from idling at 95-100C to idling at 70-75C, that’s an insane improvement.

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Personal Projects
#549

Will you return the unsupported CPU to the store? Is it possible? AFAIK, CPUs are quite expensive…

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#550

This one is ancient, it only cost £60, I’ll see what the seller says if I try to return it, or I might just sell it myself.

#551

Still. Lol

#552

Laptop Restoration Log 4:

Looks like I’ll be selling that QX9300 myself as it was past the return window, not too big a deal. I’ve now found a CPU that will hopefully work, it’s chipset, BIOS, FSB speed, etc… seem to be on point. It’s a Core2 Duo T9500, so significantly worse than the Core2 Extreme QX9300 since it’s got two less cores, but this is the second best CPU that I think this laptop can actually run. I could have tried the Core2 Extreme X9000, but didn’t want to end up in the same situation having blown another £60 or so on nothing. The T9500 costs about £48 second hand, there aren’t any new ones on sale for obvious reasons. Weirdly though, the QX9300 was actually brand new, just not in retail packaging.

In other news, I’m also going to buy a W10P key and upgrade to pro, because I want to see the difference and I want more control over the blasted updates.

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Personal Projects
#553

I’m now typing this on the other side of a W10P upgrade, it seems to have worked and everything is fine…for now. I can’t believe I actually managed to get a legit W10P key from amazon for about £8. I know it’s legit because I ran a command promt and it came up as a retail version. I’ll keep this thread apprised of anything that happens.

On a different note, Realtek audio drivers can eat shit, they keep breaking my custom EQ.

2 Likes
#554

Laptop Restoration Log 5:

The WiFi card came in today. Probably the best £1.90 I’ve spent. It’s a 3x3 card, but despite the laptop only having 2 antennae, the card still works and A LOT better than the last one. The last one was getting maybe 10 Mb/s on the DL when hooked up to 5G (I’m amazed that a card this old can connect to 5G), this one gets 60-70 Mb/s. This one has Bluetooth, but because the laptop and card are so old, the drivers for the card are not supported by W10. That means that W10 is running generic drivers that are only just enough to make the card work.

That means that I still can’t connect the ExpressCard mouse. As a result, I’ve just ordered a USB Bluetooth receiver, because I’ve spent too long looking for drivers and other solutions and found nothing. The new card is not a loss though, given the crazy speed increase.

Can somebody please break me out of the 3 post limit? Thanks.

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Personal Projects
#555

Setting you free :muscle: :grin:

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#556

Laptop Restoration Log 6:

This will probably be the second to last LRL. The T9500 came in today (annyoingly with some pins bent), spent the past hour or so fitting it and it works. The laptop is noticeably faster and it now idles at around 35C which is 10C cooler than my XPS.

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In terms of benchmarks, I didn’t get to test the exact stock setup as the software didn’t work on Vista, but I found someone else’s run with the same laptop and hardware and the results look as you’d expect.

Stock laptop results:

Fully modified results:

As numbers and benchmarks go, it’s still pretty terrible. However, as improvements go, it’s significant. Below are the percentage increases for various ratings.

  • Gaming: No difference (this is determined almost entirely by the GPU which hasn’t been touched).
  • Desktop: 42% better
  • Workstation: 16% better

For the 3 main ratings, the laptop is on average 20% better than before.

  • CPU: 70% better
  • GPU: 0% better
  • Drive: 143% better (this number would be even higher if the laptop had a SATA 3 port and not a SATA 2).
  • RAM: 24% better

For the in-depth ratings, the laptop is on average 59% better.

The final RLR will probably be out in the next day or two when the Bluetooth receiver comes in. Then I reckon the build will be complete. I might even consider this a project and put it on my site, but I’ll see.

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Personal Projects
#557

Laptop Restoration Log 7:

This is the last log for the restoration as the Bluetooth receiver came in yesterday, and as expected works just fine. I’d consider this a fairly successful project in that the end goal was achieved with a couple of hiccoughs in the process. Those include the CPU mistake on my part (a £60 mistake). Then there’s HP’s shonky build quality which means that the power button is now dead, but because the build quality is so dodgy, the touch buttons for DVD controls also work as a power button for reasons I can’t explain.

The project costs are below:

Part: Model: Price (£):
CPU Intel Core2 Extreme QX9300 59.99
CPU Intel Core2 Duo T9500 37.98
SSD Crucial MX500 2.5” 250GB 37.17
RAM Samsung 4GB 800MHz DDR2 15.90
WiFi card Intel 4965AGN 1.89
Battery Green Cell Pro 5200mAh (Samsung cells) 36.95
Mouse Mogo X54 Pro 11.67
Bluetooth receiver TP Link UB400 10.05
OS Windows 10 Home 0.00
Thermal paste Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut 0.00
Thermal pads Aikenuo thermal pads 0.00
Total: - 211.60

The paste, pads and OS I counted as 0 because I has them before the project started. If I hadn’t messed up with the CPU, the project would have only cost £151.61. Hopefully I can make some of that back if I manage to sell it. For £150 you can’t even buy a chromebook, for £212 you won’t find anything better on the market right now.

I spent today cleaning the dust out of the XPS yet again, I can’t believe how quickly it sucks up dust and how much of it it sucks up. I suspect it has something to do with the ancient carpets in the house and the amount of dust ingrained deep in them. We clean regularly, but the landlord won’t let us put new ones in.

Anyway, I was finding dust in places where I really didn’t expect, such as on the other side of the battery and some of the thermal pads were encrusted in dust. So I swapped out the pads, cleaned the entire laptop (took the motherboard out) and put fresh pads in, I decided to put pads on the RAM as well, despite it running perfectly cool and having zero issue. I also decided to experiment with pads on the sides of the fans. Not to thermally couple them to the bottom plate of the casing, but to form a seal around the intake grates to stop the fans from hurling dust all around the laptop. Their ability to cool the heatsink hasn’t been impeded at all.

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Personal Projects
#558

I’d say you’ve got yourself a decent laptop for quite a good price(for an impossible price if you ask me lol)

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#559

That was the point of the project. lol

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#560

Someone actually bought the QX9300 for £50 today, so I only lost £10 on it in the end. I also spent about 5 mins messing around with the new Donglebook Pro 15 in a shop today. Exactly the same as the 2018 one. Key travel is next to non-existent, keys are too noisy, the touch bar is pure shit, the trackpad is nothing special and the screen hinge feels like it will break if you so much as look at it funny.

@rickvanmeijel , there’s an opportunity for Apple bashing here.

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#561

Lol! I was just bashing yesterday evening about the ‘‘innovative’’ qualities of the company :joy:
But that sounds like fair criticism about the keys and touchpad. Never touched a Donkeybook Pro so I wouldn’t know though

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#562

Which thread was that in?