Usually not - it's a pain in the bum to take apart a laptop sufficiently to stick a new CPU in.

There are no methods of making a "USB CPU" either.

Some (but not all) laptops will allow you to upgrade the memory too - this is usually achieved by unscrewing a panel on the underside of the machine. Obviously you have to be careful which type of RAM your machine uses.

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The easiest thing to do is to upgrade the memory. This should give your laptop more to 'play' with and help things work a little faster.

Other components are harder to replace. Most laptops use surface mounted processors (i.e. soldered directly to the motherboard) and these are impossible to replace. You may find that you have a socket mounted CPU, in which case you'll have to find a similar pin/voltage CPU that is better than what you currently have. However, a faster chip will run a bit hotter and your laptop cooling system may not cope with it.

The best thing to do is to remove any old/unused programs and then run a Disk Clean-up followed by a defrag.

On some laptops you can increase the processor speed, but not all.

It depends very much on what type it is, and particularly whether the manufacturer has used a socket for the chip, or simply soldered it to the board.

Assuming you can swap the chip, it's still not a simple process.
Extra CPU speed means extra heat, and laptops are often a bit marginal on their cooling capacity anyway.


That said, there are things you can do to speed them up.
More memory will always help (within limits).
But you can sometimes switch to faster memory as well.

Running on batteries means the machine is trying to conserve power.
It should be faster running on mains.

But by far the biggest improvement in speed can be gained by turning off those horrible little icons down in the bottom-right of your screen.
Every single one is taking up memory, and being allocated processor time.
They all start every time you boot up the machine.
Most of them aren't doing anything useful - I mean, how many times do you need to be reminded to register software? Or check for upgrades to software you're already running and is working fine? And do you need to be constantly reminded about the ink levels in your printer?

Things like the Quicktime toolbar and Microsoft Office toolbar are real resource hogs, slowing down your bootup process considerably.
Why? Just so that a Word document or Quicktime movie will open slightly faster should you happen to click on one.