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Question

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

Jul 31, 2016 9:22PM PDT

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.


Discussion is locked

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Answer
Your pretty much without options
Aug 1, 2016 4:46AM PDT

as the technology of today is light years ahead and the components require modern motherboards. You can't replace the laptop motherboard since they are designed specifically for the case and components.

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That is not my intention with this unit though.
Aug 1, 2016 7:38AM PDT

Ah, but I don't care because I am using this just to play more vintage, classic early 2000 games only. I just want to upgrade this to the best this thing can get to play the most early to mid 2000 games (that might not work on newer Windows 10 machines)

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Given the age
Aug 1, 2016 8:19AM PDT

I would not count on Dell spares. That looks like the MXM video card and replacements were rare to never found. You might find them on ebay.

But what is this about W10? There are only a few areas that I've run into and those were good riddance changes. For example EMS LIM support is gone due to an exploit there.
That is gone in W7 so you have to run XP unpatched to get that to work.

Anyhow, change out the HDD to a SSD and max out the RAM and it will be very nice.