Compaq C700/C760 T9300 processor upgrade

Some years ago I purchased this laptop. I think I paid about 400€ for it in 2008 (I lived in Spain back then). I had just founded a small company and needed a laptop to generate the invoices and to keep the database with the clients.

Anyway, the thing is that the laptop is old now and after having some problems with the hard drive I updated to a Kingston SSD. It works fantastic. Then I decided to upgrade to W7, and it worked fine. But then I started to think about upgrading the processor.

Google shows thousands of results for the C700 because there are so many different models. It was confusing and I couldn´t find information for my C760ES. So I took the risk. I went to eBay and purchased a, Intel T9300. I think it was possible to upgrade to T9500. I think I payed 35GBP for it, post included from the UK.

First thing I this was to upgrade the BIOS. In the new HP support webpage (nightmare because they have changed the page and now all the old links from google don´t work) I downloaded the F34 BIOS. I installed and it worked fine still with the old Celeron 550D.

I was time to install the T9300. I opened the laptop and when I tool the copped dissipator I saw I needed thermal paste. I didn´t have any and took the risk. First I had to clean the whole thing.

Anyway once the T9300 was in place I built the laptop together again and SUCCESS!! IT STARTED FINE!! I saw that the computer wasn´t reporting the temperature correctly. I continued searching Google and then looked for BIOS F35. HP does not give support for the F35 in my laptop so I downloaded the Compaq CTO BIOS. Installed it and it worked fine. However it didn´t fix the temperature problem.

After making some searches I found out that this is common for some reason, and at the moment I haven´t found a solution. However, the fan does works fine, starts and stops when the processor takes temperature as normal. It´s just that the readings are not updated in the system. For me this is a minor inconvenience as I have never been interested in the temperature of the processor.

So now I have a fully working 2008 laptop with SSD and a decent processor and I will probably keep it for another 2 or 3 years.

NOTE: Please do your own investigations if you are going to upgrade your laptop as I am not a professional and I wouldn´t want you to damage your laptop because of this.