New thinkpad Owner with 2 questions

[leedy]

Howdy All!

I'm the proud owner of a new 2373HVU T42P. I bought it from Bill and could be happier with the ordering process and experience. He got it to me right when he said he would.

No dead pixels really made my day.

I have 2 questions for the group.

1. There appears to be a fair amount of heat on the right side of the palm rest above the 60gig HD. Is this normal? Is it something that can be corrected?

2. I'd like to remove the optical drive and put an 80 gig Hard drive in it's place. On this drive I'd like to keep 40 gigs for Windows storage space. with the remaining space I'l like to install linux (Fedora most likely). I'd rather not have linux touch my main drive. Can I install it there and then choose to boot to that drive via the BIOS when I want? I'd rather not have the linux boot loader mess with my main drive.


Any information would be appreciated.

thanks!

Dave

[ian]

1. No - unless you turn it off
2. Yes - sadly won't make the main drive run any cooler (well, ok, a little bit)

Edit: Welcome to the club - you've made a good choice, both of laptop and forum (he stated modestly)

[jdhurst]

I have a T41 with the 60Gb drive in, and unless I am doing something like defragmenting or some such disk-intensive operation, the palmrest is cool. Even with high disk activity, it is warmish, but not uncomforable - just barely noticeable.

I have the drive bay for another drive and yes you can boot from it. Up to XP Pro SP1, you could image the second drive with the recovery CD's and boot from it. I used this when transferring systems. I would keep my production drive in the main area and boot from it, then boot from the other drive to continue its setup and copying data. When done, I would switch and and format the old drive.

I noticed with SP2 that I cannot seem to do this any more - the drive in the bay becomes unbootable. Since it is the same image (and therefore a licensing no-no), it is probably licensing requirements that caused the issue.

That is a long answer for: Yes, you can boot from the drive bay, but use caution and test what you are doing first. ... JDHurst

[ian]

Just for info, I've finally gone and done what jdhurst (and others) have been advocating for a while and I've bought and installed a 7K60 - the 7200 RPM 60 Gb beasty from Hitachi (for those who don't know)

I replaced the original 80 Gb (got other things planned for that) with the 7K60, whacked in the recovery CDs and off she went - now the recovery process takes a fair while, with mucho disk access so not surprisingly the r/h palmrest got a little warm - this was yesterday evening. I've used the machine all day today (and I MEAN all day) and it's not even warm. I've used, during the day, WORD, Photoshop (quite a bit), surfed a while, back to PS etc. a bit of Dreamweaver for my sites etc etc. so it's been pretty varied but not that disk intensive. I do also have 1 Gb of RAM which helps of course...as yet haven't seen a crushing difference in terms of the 5400 v 7200 rpm but then I probably won't ever - aside from the fact that she boots REAL fast now - but then that may be helped by SP2 ?