Upgrades and Warranty?

[ipark]

I recently purchased a T42 through their one year anniversary special on the Lenovo website. The specs weren't really what I was looking for, especially the 32 Radeon 7500 graphics chip, but I'm willing to live with that.

I definately want to to upgrade the harddrive from a 40 gig 5400 to a 60 gig 7200, and the ram to about a gig from 256. My question is... by upgrading these parts, will I void my 3 year warranty? I thought I might have read something about this and am a little worried now, or am I just trippin?

Also, how good are the 32 Radeon 7500 graphic chips for programs like photohop, and illustrator? I'm pretty sad about not being able to upgrade the GPU.

[christopher_wolf]

The GPU has little to no effect on programs like Photoshop and Illustrator; for those programs, RAM and HDD matter much more. The 7500 graphics chip is no slouch when it comes to graphics.

[MobileGuru]

You won't void your warranty as both those parts are CRU .. meaning that you can access them easily. The only time your actual system warranty could be affected(the new drive and memory won't have warranty with Lenovo unless you buy them from Lenovo) would be if those components fail and cause damage to the system itself.

Regards.

MG.

[GomJabbar]

CRU = Customer Replaceable Unit.
FRU = Field Replaceable Unit.

You can read more about it here:
http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... 46474.html

Both upgrades you are inquiring about are easy. (I know, famous last words). These are probably about the easiest hardware upgrades you can make. Lenovo also has film clips to show replacement of certain hardware items, and the Hardware Maintenance Manual has illustrations and descriptions of removals. Note that there are (2) memory slots in the T42. One is easily accessible by removing a small cover on the base of the ThinkPad. Normally this slot will be empty. The second slot is under the keyboard, and requires removal of the keyboard. This slot is usually populated with RAM at the factory, but you can remove that RAM and install a higher capacity piece. The two sticks of RAM can be different capacities (I have one 256 MB and one 512 MB stick in my T42).

Hardware Maintenance Manual - ThinkPad T40/p, T41/p, T42/p

[ipark]

thanks for all your guys' help!