Upgrading a notebook CPU

I have (a 2 year old) notebook at home, which had a Mobile Intel Celeron 600 as CPU. It is an old Gericom Silver Shadow. I wanted to upgrade the processor of this notebook, because I heard that Mobile Intel Pentium IIIs have more performance without using more power. So the first thing to do, was to check out which kind of socket the notebook CPU sat in. By reading an article about Mobile CPUs, I found out that normal Mobile Celerons 600 should come in a Micro-PGA2 package.

The next problem was to get a faster processor (the usual computer shops don't sell mobile CPUs here in Germany...); I was lucky and found one at EBay (a Mobile Pentium III with 750 Mhz and Speedstep).

The reason I wrote this web-page is that I had lots of problems to disassemble my notebook. After trying to unscrew each and every screw (have a look here... be careful this page has about 400Kb). I still wasn't able to disassemble the entire laptop.

Finally my cousin found the essential trick: The keyboard can be disassembled by pressing some hidden notches (have a look here), and by that you get access to the CPU.

So if you want to disassemble a notebook yourself, you probably should have a closer look at the keyboard; MAYBE you find that upgrading a notebook CPU isn't so difficult after all :-).