Laptop Upgrade Help

[Swagijuana]

I've my mother's old Acer Aspire 5742Z. Given that it has a Pentium P6200 and 4GB of RAM @ 800MHz, it's going to run slow. She's in dire need of an upgrade whether it be a new computer or some kind of upgrade on her current laptop because she is going back to college for Digital Design. I'm not afraid of working with laptops as I've taken apart a rebuild several, latest was even 2 days ago.

 

The plan was to simply upgrade the CPU and the RAM to meet the current needs of professional design work.

 

Only the CPU upgrade concerns me, as laptops are never easy to work with CPU compatibility. The best reasonable upgrade I could find for the P6200 would be an i7-640M. It fits the same socket, has the same max TDP, supports the same memory type... basically everything seems to fit into place on the spec sheets (here and here). I havent researched buying it much besides this retailer. Would it be a safe bet to buy and upgrade?

 

The RAM doesn't really concern me. I found the correct SODIMM 204-pin DDR3-1066.

 

Would there be any problems making this upgrade happen?

[SovietOnion]

The BIOS is what I would be worried about (especially with cheap laptops designed not to have changeable hardware) look into the board and the BIOS version. 

[Swagijuana]

The BIOS is what I would be worried about (especially with cheap laptops designed not to have changeable hardware) look into the board and the BIOS version. 

 

From the hour of me skimming about the BIOS now, it should work from what I've read. The only big problem I've seen is someone trying to replace a CPU from my same laptop (not sure if it was a P6200) with an i7-740QM, and that's because his old CPU and the i7-740QM do not work together with integrated graphics. Later down the page it was discussed that the i7-640M should work.

 

The above happened here.

 

If anyone has no objections, I will plan to do this sometime in the future.