I see that the LeoG forum has gone, it was a good little specialist forum for Fujitsu P series ultraportables. I thought i would note down the upgrades that i have done recently and post some benchmarks.
Anyway in July 08 i bought a pink P7230 core solo 1.2, 1GB, CD Drive, 60GB 4200, 3945ABG from the US as a gift for someone in my family.
In the end the core solo processor and 4200 HD proved to be just too slow.
I had the core solo processor removed and fitted with a U7600 (U7600 is the max that it will support). I also added 2GB, DVD Supermulti, a 5300 wifi card, WWAN and a 128GB V4 Photofast drive. As you would expect the laptop feels transformed. It cost me 110 to have the processor upgraded. I bought a defective TZ motherboard for 26 and the processor was removed from that board. I reflashed the BIOS to make sure that the BIOS was seeing the CPU properly. I've also upgraded to W7 Professional 32bit.
I had the motherboard changed about a year ago under warranty. This laptop is under warranty until 2011 and i just actually sent it in last week to have the casing replaced for free. I sent it with all the upgrades and they never said a thing. Of course you can buy U7600's motherboards on ebay now but i wanted to keep the original one and serial number. Fujitsu Siemens international support continues to be excellent. They had the casing shipped from the US in less a week and told me to wait until it arrived to send it in. They sent UPS to me when it arrived and they got the laptop last Friday and i had back on Tuesday and this is in Germany and i'm in the UK.
First of all i opted for a 64GB V2 Photofast drive and then for storage space reasons upgraded to the V4 drive. I got the drive from Photofast UK and i got a 20 discount on the drive.
I also got a sim card holder soldered to the motherboard. I sent the laptop to vaiorefurbs on ebay to do that. I fitted the antenna in the bezel myself and got the wwan parts from a donar laptop. It is better to stick with cards that Fujitsu use and i used a MC8780.
I think you can buy the wwan board here.
The new cpu runs cooler than what it did with the core solo processor. I'm also using the copper heatsink with ICD7.
It is a lovely little laptop, shame that i cannot get the fingerprint reader working lol.
With tweaking battery life is outstanding over 12hrs with the standard and internal battery at 30% brightness.
The signal is very strong now as you would expect. I added a 3rd antenna and just stuck it on top of the heatsink. It seems to pull up a better signal than what i get with my TT with a half mini 5300 with the 3rd antenna located in the bezel.
I tried to look into overclocking but may be i was using the wrong settings but i couldn't get that to work. The PLL code for this laptop is ICS9LPR311BKLF. I will try again and if i get anywhere i will edit. It should be able to overlock to 1.33ghz-1.4ghz easily but the person who owns this won't go that extra mile lol. I know though that some people are interested in overclocking their P7230's.
It's all the extra touches like the modular dvd drive/internal batteries that make me like this laptop. It also looks pretty cute in white as well.
This laptop should last a couple of years now for the purposes that it is used for.
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