"Vintage" early 2000s Alienware M5500 Upgrade Help! :)

[niceties55]

I bought a dirt cheap Alienware M5500 (pre-dell) laptop with an Intel Pentium M 2 GHZ a gig of ram and a nVidia GeForce Go 6600. It was in rough shape when I got it, but I fixed it all up! (new thermal paste, dusting, new OS) Runs very well now.

Now, my plans for this system is to use this as a more "vintage" gaming computer. From late 90s to mid 2000s. It looks great and is a classic design.

My question is, what is the max upgrade I can do with this model? I believe that graphics card is MXM standard (see photo) and an old PC Mag review said I could upgrade it to a nVidia GeForce Go 7800GTX (only $20 extra today). Can I upgrade the card any higher? Is the card I have MXM and upgradable? (please see photo)

Another question is, can I upgrade the CPU (pentium M included) any higher? Maybe a first gen dual core?

I know an SSD will help, but IDE SSDs are very expensive and not nearly as efficient.

 

[BikerEcho]

I wound't bother upgrading anything.
You might be able to upgrade the GPU to a decent but overpriced card. But that's not gonna help much because of CPU bottlenecking.

Your motherboard properly doesn't support anything better even if the socket is the same. (because CPU's that a newer than the motherboard sometimes require a BIOS update to support it, and dell is not gonna bother with that, unless they offered a step op model of your laptop with that CPU in it). Even if it does support a "Core 2" CPU, you are upgrading a terrible CPU to long time outdated CPU. The performance gain is not worth the money. You should move on and buy a more modern computer.

Install Lubuntu on it and use it for Email and web browsing.

 

[lhuser]

If you're going to use it for 90s to mid 2000s, don't change anything. The specs are good enough to run them.

 

[~mr mixx~]

I agree with Biker Echo, I would install a linux distro on it if you just want to use it on the internet.

You can download a linux live cd, and try it out on your computer to see what distro works best on your computer.