Hey guys. I hate to bore you with another "please help me" post, but I'm having more problems with clock speed on the computers in my house. I must have broken some computers by overclocking them in the past life or something. Call it karma.
I bought this Dell Inspiron 2650 notebook for my mom. I realized when we bought it that it was going to be fairly lame as far as speed goes, but I didn't quite notice how slow this laptop actually was. It was advertised as a 1.7 ghz Pentium 4-M.
One thing that I overlooked was that the laptop only came with 128mb RAM. My mom complained after a few months that it was impossible to get any work done since whenever she would open Firefox or Outlook or Word, the computer would grind to a halt. I watched her try to use it, and I could hear that tiny, 4200RPM hard drive thrashing its little heart out as the computer dived into its virtual memory. Dell's "128mb is ok for Windows XP" policy is pure fantasy.
We set out to buy some new RAM. In order to determine what kind to buy, I fired up WCPUID, which told me that the front side bus speed of the computer was 100mhz. I thought "100mhz? You can't get DDR100 memory. It must be PC100". It took a long time and a lot of money, but we finally hunted down a PC-100 512mb SODIMM for the laptop.
I went to install it, and - lo and behold - it didn't fit. I should have checked beforehand, but it turns out that the computer actually used DDR RAM. At this point I thought "what the hell is going on?". I fired up CPU-Z in order to get a look at the FSB and memory clock speeds, and sure enough, both were at 100mhz. What caught my eye was that, having a multiplier of 12, this gave the computer a 1200mhz clock speed. It finally dawned on me that Dell sold us an under-clocked computer by .5 ghz. The FSB should actually be at 133mhz, and the computer should actually be using PC2100 DDR SODIMMs. Later we're going to return the SD-RAM and buy the equivalent quantity in DDR.
Frustrated at how I had been duped into buying expensive, rare 512mb SD-SODIMMS by Dell's underclocking, I set about trying to clock the processor at its proper clock speed. Of course, when I opened up Dell's easy-to-use bios, I learned that there is no way to change any aspect of the CPU, FSB or RAM clock speeds.
So there are a few areas I need help in:
1) Do any Dell laptop owners have any idea how to change the clockspeed of the Inspirons? I know that some motherboard manufacturers make you press a key combination to access hidden menus (like Gigabyte). Is there anything I can do to change these settings in the BIOS?
2) If not, is there a way to overclock the FSB of this computer in Windows? Is there a program like Easy Tune that will work on this motherboard? Will Easy Tune work on this motherboard? Does anyone know of a program that will work?
3) Does anyone have any idea (from personal experience) if this Dell laptop has a RAM limit? Should I buy a 256mb stick and not a 512mb one?
Many, many thanks to anyone who can restore my sanity.