Thinkpads Forum

Since I bought a nice X60 Tablet my beloved X41 is for sale now. It looks excellent and the top cover was replaced with brand new one about year ago. It is pretty much top of the line X41 with the fastest CPU available (1.6 GHz Dothan), 2.5 GB RAM (2 GB usable) and SATA mod. It runs Windows 7 Ultimate very snappy and has official GMA900 VGA drivers for Windows 7 installed that are downloaded from Microsoft Update website.

I'm asking $160 for this laptop and shipping to US is around $40, half of that to Europe.


*Pentium M 778 LV, 1.6 GHz
*2 GB DDR2 RAM
*80 GB 5400 rpm Toshiba 1.8" SATA HDD (accepts any 1.8" microSATA HDD/SSD). W7 WEI hard drive index is whopping 5.1 points.
*12.1" XGA (1024x768) LCD (can perform 12.1" XGA IPS conversion for additional fee)
*Intel GMA900*Intel 2915ABG wifi
*Bluetooth
*FP reader
*SD card reader
*72W charger
*4cell battery is good for around 1.5hours (in green)

pm sent.

PM replied.

For anyone who wants to see photos, PM me our email address and I'll send you both photos of the machine and results of both W7 WEI and CrystalMark HD test results.

EDIT: Sold to lophiomys. Thanks.

Just curious, what is Sata mod?

It is a mod that allows to use native SATA hard drives instead of original slow, rare and expensive 1.8" 4200rpm PATA HDD. It involves unsoldering the SATA/PATA bridge chip off the X41 system board and soldering SATA data and power supply wires to the board.
It is applicable to X41, X41 Tablet, T43 and R52. T43 and R52 can use regular 2.5" SATA drives but X41/T have to use 1.8" microSATA drives (many SSD's are 1.8" for example).

This mod increases disk performance by 2-3 times and at the same time power consumption dos not increase but usually cedreases because the SATA/PATA bridge chip is quite a power hog (just check how hot it gets during high disk activity).

Raceboy wrote:It is a mod that allows to use native SATA hard drives instead of original slow, rare and expensive 1.8" 4200rpm PATA HDD. It involves unsoldering the SATA/PATA bridge chip off the X41 system board and soldering SATA data and power supply wires to the board.
It is applicable to X41, X41 Tablet, T43 and R52. T43 and R52 can use regular 2.5" SATA drives but X41/T have to use 1.8" microSATA drives (many SSD's are 1.8" for example).

This mod increases disk performance by 2-3 times and at the same time power consumption dos not increase but usually cedreases because the SATA/PATA bridge chip is quite a power hog (just check how hot it gets during high disk activity).

Wow, would like to see some pics of that mod. So how do you get a sata controller on there? or is it there already.

I don't have photos of it and the laptop is packed in the box waiting to be sent out to the new owner but there's plenty of photos of the mod in the forum. Just do a search on "SATA mod" and have a nice read

Intel 915 chipset that X41, T43, R52 have has a native SATA interface but IBM put the SATA/PATA bridge chip on X41/T43/R52 in order to make use of regular PATA hard drives.

I've made a mental note to shoot some photos, when I will fit a SSD inside the X41sm.

For the T43 SATA mod: http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=94308
The X41 has the same chip, so all that T43 info also applies to the X41 removal.
If you know German: http://wiki.marek-walther.de/wiki/proje ... grade_sata

Thanks lophiomys, RealBlackStuff, Raceboy, now I understand, the mobo already has the sata chip, you just need to remove the marvel pata to sata converter chip lenovo/ibm installed, make your connections, make everything fit, badaboom. Really nice hack.

full article here

http://mikejmoffitt.com/sata/