Thinkpads Forum

anyone suggest a good quality 7200 rpm drive for my A31P and has anyone managed to flash the bios and are running with 2 gigs of ram?
ps i am in new zealand so we are a backwater for information and cutting edge hardware

This thread
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=2506
is worth reading for the comment:

" I got whatever 1GB RAM is recommended for the T40 on Crucial, as per JHEM's comment here.
I did a little googling around, and found one reference somewhere (might've been on Crucial or on IBM's site, I can't remember) where it said to put the larger sized module in slot 0, the smaller in slot 1; but then there was another comment that said sometimes it's the other way around, it just depends on the machine. Anyway, lucky for me, it works! - Tim"

and a31pguy's comment here
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=23424
suggests you might want to get a fast drive first, especially if your machine has already got a reasonable whack of memory:

"The a31p will take 2 gb of ram and the 2.4 and 2.6 ghz processor. JHEM has aptly pointed out before - that the hard drive is the main component which increases speed - specifically a 7200 rpm drive with lots of cache memory. "
Notice that a31pguy has specced out his A31p as far as it can go: 2.4 ghz 2 gb RAM, 3x100 gb HDD, 2915 abg

You'll find this one useful regarding your HDD upgrade:
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=1524

Welcome, by the way!

sakkara wrote:anyone suggest a good quality 7200 rpm drive for my A31P and has anyone managed to flash the bios and are running with 2 gigs of ram?
ps i am in new zealand so we are a backwater for information and cutting edge hardware

I've got two Hitachi 7K100 HDs in my upgraded A31p (P4-M 2.6GHz, 2GB RAM) and they work a treat.

Flashing the BIOS isn't difficult provided you have a working battery. The battery doesn't have to be able to run the unit for hours, it simply needs to be able to report to the BIOS update applet that it's present and fully charged.

Regards,

James