Upgrading My Shitty Laptop

So recently I bought one of these.

Not my image.

This is a Dell Inspiron B130. Its based on a Pentium M, and has many different things you can upgrade. This is from the short burst period where dell randomly made their laptops more… how do I put it, server like? In general mechanical design at least. So many things about this laptop are pretty advanced for the time, and it possibly makes having a pentium M not a chore but more of a blessing because of it.

The cooling is pretty advanced for what this thing is, having one massive copper heatsink that bolts down to the bare CPU die. I could whinge about the general design of the pentium M and how much its both cool and horrible at the same time, but thats another thread. Basically, my point is, this thing is old, but its not crap. If anything, I can upgrade it with all sorts of shit and have a fast as fuck spectre and meltdown proof machine that actually can compete with a powerbook DDR2 on some level.

I at some point plan to make a thread for secure notebooks. It’ll be fun, ya’ll will like it.

Anyways, parts.

I’m looking at upgrading storage, getting a smartcard upgrade to have usb 3 or at least more USB ports, hell if theres a usb C card I WANT IT I WILL TAKE THAT SHIT INSTEAD (srsly if you know of one hit me the fuck up), I want to get a yubikey and a super slim usb thats like 4 or 8GB to have a bunch of installers on for anytime I want to do a rescue or something, or to just boot p9, cooling, the screen, all sortsa shit.

This might be a more upgradeable laptop than a thinkpad, I’m not even joking.

more to come

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I almost want to get kryonaut for it and try to do a bigger fan. Theres room, and dropping the temp on the chip would help with performance a lot I think.

Although, because it is a pentium 4 DESKTOP front side bus in the chip, would it want to be warmer?

I’ve also seen coolers where they move the finblock to like the CD drive bay. I could do that, and put a massive fan in there. Even loop in the GPU if its not a plastic packaging.

If I can properly cool that little 910 piece of shit GMA, it’ll actually play DX9 games excellently. They even made a desktop version of the thing and sold it because it was that good of a performer. Mostly I want it to handle the desktop smoothly, and if I can get a bigger res screen for it, handle that shit and not just explode.


https://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/Pentium_4/Intel-Mobile%20Pentium%204-M%202.6%20GHz%20-%20RH80532GC064512%20(BXM80532GC2600D).html

Side note if theres a modded one of these a la 4000 series i7’s that LTT looked at on those reiser PLA’s but for the pentium M socket 479, that’d be dank as shit.

Mostly for memes.

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This is cool.

I had a bunch of these for a while. They were pretty solid IIRC, but not super fast or anything.

But we were buying them to a price point and sure as hell not with SSDs.

I seem to remember we were still using shitty modem cards on these because of some specific software we were using.

I don’t think you’re going to get it cold enough in these conditions that you’re going to affect it negatively.

Looking forward to how this project pans out!

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This is… neat. It also explains what enhanced speed step does, which is cool. Its like an early autoclocking system, where it looks like previous versions were just a high and low energy mode for efficiency purposes. This is really cool.

Also the power system lies in this thing. I’ve gotten maybe 5 hours use out of the battery so far, I think it’ll max at 6. Its only lost 4% of its charge according to hardinfo, so I’ll trust that thats accurate. Its a 4400mAh battery though, and I want much bigger.

I found a battery factory online that you can order shit from. I’m going to ask if they can make me a 7800+ mAh battery for my unit. I very much want as much battery capacity as possible.

I’m legit jazzed though. I think I’m going to make a whinge post about it. The processor is a lot cooler than I thought, its a memory efficient system, its new but based on old ass architecture, its modular, I can connect like a 3080 to this thing if I want, GPU docks cost NOTHING, like, oh my god.

Like legit, I see what @Fouquin was trying to tell me now. PM’s are pretty cool. And the systems are even cooler.

God I’m so fucking jazzed… I really need to upgrade the storage oh my god its so slow. Even just a sata drive on an adapter, anything. Post later if I find something that fits.

Edit: I’m also going to bench this thing and show results. Before and after upgrades. Though I’ve changed the thermal paste in it already with some corsair XM150. Fan hardly ever spins. Get kryonaut, damn thing’ll be silent nearly.

mmMMMMMMMMM yes

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o3o

I’ll do that hell yeah dude

Can’t find on ebay.

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So I’m thinkin. Thats newer good, uh oh.

If I get good performance outta this thing, and I can actually identify that it won’t just explode, what if I started selling laptop builds on here? Specialy builds if someone needs it, but otherwise, like, hey, sell another b130, or even sell this one on and build more.

Idk, if ya’ll think you’d pay like 250 for something I built I’ll look into it more. I just have to know my roi is there going in.

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You doing this to make money, or for the lulz?

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Yes

Anything else?

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Don’t forget to factor your time. You’re valuable too.

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Well I bought this laptop for 20 bucks, I can buy msata ssd’s for nothing starting at 32gb, and if I get a ide to sata caddy for the disk drive bay, all whoever has to do is plop a drive in the caddy and install something.

Msata disk can do boot block shit, caddy does actual storage. Both run at 133 so it doesn,t matter atp.

Then the rest is time and making money back.

I figure, kitted out, 250 is a good asking price. Especially if I did some of the firmware magic I’m thinking about doing.

Imagine dropping to openfirmware at any tibellme to change bios settings at a keystroke, mid email, just bam.

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Open firmware has to be so epic for trolling buddies.

Sounds solid!

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Depends I guess? Mostly its just nice.

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For some reason I had never thought of coreboot until your post. I suppose I mean I’d never considered compiling it and installing it myself, on hardware that didn’t ship with it.

I’m going to put the crayons down.

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I thought me saying I was going to install openfirmware to this thing made the whole coreboot part obvious.

Also building vivaldi rn

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It did, I’m just saying I’d never thought of installing it on something i already own.

Not like me really.

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Oooooohhhhhh. Ok. Why not?

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Not sure really. Just never occurred to me to remove the firmware. It’s odd, because I wouldn’t think twice about degoogling a Pixel or installing Linux on a laptop.

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Lemme show you something that ifixit sent me.

If you can’t own it, you shouldn’t.

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You know what? You’re right.

Shame on me!

I haven’t dug up a spare craptop yet, will report back.

Edit: aww doggo

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Here I’ll do you a solid.

Don,t have to do my unit, but cool platforms are abundant and cheap.

I,d research what you’d wanna do with it first.

Rn I’m actually fighting with myself. Since I only have 2gb of ram I’m gunna have to make up for it with swap. But, I can’t do swap on an ssd it’ll just die. So do I do swap on an hdd and just have an ssd in the cd driwe bay? But I want silence. But abba dabba doo new challenge new day.

Its good mental practice if anything.

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