Upgrading Emachines W3506

[Kaos Kid]

So, my brother drops off his wife's computer for me to de-virus (Security Shield virus, lol). That's all done, but it is still a yawner (s-s-s-l-l-l--o-o-o--w-w-w). After researching I find that it is an intel D102GGC2 board (using CPU-Z) but of course has the emachines bios. It has the Celeron D 352 3.2Ghz @ 533fsb. When I look up the specs at Intel, they show the board is capable of supporting LGA775 cpus Pentium4>661 (3.6GHz @ 800fsb) and PentiumD>950 (3.4GHz @ 800fsb) either of which would probably give a sizeable performance gain over the poochy Celeron D, but then again that is with the Intel bios.

Can I flash the bios on this machine with the Intel bios to be able to gain the extra features, and then also use the faster CPU's? Plus, the memory specs say PC2-3200>PC2-4200, but I did insert a 1GB stick of PC2-6400 and the emachines bios saw it as 800MHz and it did boot into windowsXP/32Home.

Thanks for any info you can impart.

[Apoptosis]

It all depends on the flash... I tried to update a Dell system the other day and had no luck at all with it. Was stuck with Celeron only even though we all know the motherboard was able to do more. They just limited the CPU IDs used by the BIOS table. That system too wouldn't post with faster memory in it... Wonder if they were the same boards!

I say give it a shot. You might have to force the BIOS on using flags, but if it works you should be golden.

[Kaos Kid]

I've never forced a bios using flags so that will be another night of research, lol. If I fubar the board it will be out of my pocket because she has no idea that I'm trying to improve performance for her. She only has 512MB of PC2-4200 (also slowing her down) so I put a post on craigslist to see if anyone had some cheap DDR2 that I could add for her, sort of like an early xmas present. Its a shame that my little girls FIC ice cube box with a 3.06GHz 533fsb HTP4 and 1GB of DDR400 memory is faster than her newer computer

[Apoptosis]

how many slots does she have in her system?

I can see what i got around here from builds and system pulls.

[Kaos Kid]

She only has two slots. 2GB of memory is supported so I posted looking for matching 2x1GB, but she has one 512MB stick already so if I can find another PC2-4200 512MB stick that is close enough in specs to hers then it should run dual-channel and give her just enough pep to see a difference (she runs WinXP Home 32bit). She mainly surfs and does photo editing and scrapbooking type stuff.

This is what she currently has in her system:

Samsung 1Rx8 PC2-4200U-444-12-D3
M378T6553CZ3-CD5 0632

I tried plugging in a 1GB stick of PC-6400 out of my surfer and believe it or not the emachines bios recognized it and correctly noted it running at 800MHz. When everything loaded that she has going statbar showed she was using over 600MB (I'm gonna try to uninstall some of the junk she has running, lol). However, when I ran Microsoft Security Essentials it would only get about an hour in to a full scan before I would get a BSOD so it may be the memory, I don't know. That is why I'm just looking for another stick of PC2-4200 or perhaps 2 matching sticks of the PC2-4200 or PC2-5300 since the Intel board specs show it will handle it even though the emachines site doesn't.

[Kaos Kid]

Meh, I decided against trying the bios flash, I didn't want to risk having to buy her a new mobo for that pooch. I did find a 512MB stick of memory for her for only $10, unfortunately it wasn't the same specs so it won't dual-channel. Still, with the extra memory and a complete wipe/reinstall of her OS it runs a lot faster than it did (well as fast as a celeron D can run, lol). Merry Christmas to her, hopefully she will be happy with it. Thanks for the advice, guys!