How much of an upgrade would a T23 be over a T22?

[dwilsonfl]

I have a T22 900mhz, 512mb RAM, 60gig 5400rpm drive and am thinking about moving upstream in the very near future (any day now). I have docking stations and power supplies in my study and home office and so I thought maybe just go up to a T23 with a gig of RAM and higher clock speed.

The T22 does okay but I do seem to get the "increasing your page file" a lot and see things slow up when I have a few programs running at once. So I thought T23 might fix that.

But is that enough of an upgrade to mess with? If not, how far up the TP scale do I need to go? I'm not made of money or I'd not be asking. I really like the Thinkpad.

Thanks

[rkawakami]

In my opinion, the jump from a 900Mhz T22 to a 1.2Ghz (max) T23 isn't all that much. I had an 800Mhz T21 and have a couple of 1.2GHz T23s and I really didn't notice that much a difference, even with the larger memory in the T23. Of course I'm not running much in the way of strenuous graphic programs so that's probably not saying much. I did perform a couple of video transcoding sessions on the T21 which actually took longer than the run time of the movie itself. I haven't attempted the same operation on the T23. Given the 33% CPU and bus speed difference, I would hope that it might be at least 15-20% faster.

I believe that the most you could go up to with your existing docking station would be a T30, but then you have to consider what the real differences are between a 1.2Ghz PIII and a 2.4Ghz P4-M (not as much as the Ghz figures indicate from what I know). Plus, since you may be on a budget, you may not want to pay the price for a top-of-the-line T30 ($400+). What I generally ask people who want to know what kind of system that they should get is, "What do you intend on using it for?".

As you indicate that you are getting "paging file" messages, you must be running some memory hogs or have not setup the virtual memory correctly. What are the typical programs you run? How many processes are running? What is the size of the paging file and what OS are you running?

[ambientscape]

In my opinion, the jump from a 900Mhz T22 to a 1.2Ghz (max) T23 isn't all that much. I had an 800Mhz T21 and have a couple of 1.2GHz T23s and I really didn't notice that much a difference, even with the larger memory in the T23. Of course I'm not running much in the way of strenuous graphic programs so that's probably not saying much. I did perform a couple of video transcoding sessions on the T21 which actually took longer than the run time of the movie itself. I haven't attempted the same operation on the T23. Given the 33% CPU and bus speed difference, I would hope that it might be at least 15-20% faster.

I believe that the most you could go up to with your existing docking station would be a T30, but then you have to consider what the real differences are between a 1.2Ghz PIII and a 2.4Ghz P4-M (not as much as the Ghz figures indicate from what I know). Plus, since you may be on a budget, you may not want to pay the price for a top-of-the-line T30 ($400+). What I generally ask people who want to know what kind of system that they should get is, "What do you intend on using it for?".

As you indicate that you are getting "paging file" messages, you must be running some memory hogs or have not setup the virtual memory correctly. What are the typical programs you run? How many processes are running? What is the size of the paging file and what OS are you running?

I'm second to that.....I gave away my T22 to my girlfriend and get myself a T23 hoping that it will speed things up. But the reality its about the same....I would recommend you get yourself a Registry Mechanics and scan your system throughly.

[dwilsonfl]

Thanks for the help.

I'm running XP Pro SP2. Typically I'll have Firefox (couple of tabs), Thunderbird, AIM, MSN, AVG, Comodo running all the time, I'm also on a wireless connection. When I add PPT and maybe Word or a Bible software program it gets slow.

I went back and changed the page file to system set, best program performance. It was set to max at 384 meg. Maybe I should spend $80 for the K100 drive and put the 1 ghz (maybe 1.13 I don't recall) processor chip I've had for a year into it. I really do love the Thinkpads.

[pianowizard]

It was set to max at 384 meg.

That's definitely too low. For 512MB RAM, you should have 768MB of paging.

[dwilsonfl]

Just remembered that I already have a 7200RPM drive I bought from Brent presley last year.

Maybe I should format and reload.

[rkawakami]

Okay, while I normally don't run this many programs at the same time, here's what I've got on the 1GB T23:

- Acrobat 6 Pro, with three open PDF files (44MB)
- Excel 2003, blank sheet (28MB)
- Explorer (desktop) (28MB)
- Firefox 1.5.0.9, 4 tabs (44MB)
- Norton AV (13MB)
- Power Point 2003, blank sheet (1MB!)
- Paint Shop Pro 7, no image loaded (15MB)
- svchost.exe, 6 processes (55MB)
- Thunderbird 1.5.0.8 (22MB)
- Trillian (4MB)
- Word 2003, 3 page doc (43MB)

Total of 40 processes, with 560MB available physical memory (out of 1047MB). Page file usage is at 337MB; paging file size has been set at 384MB as I think I have enough physical memory. In your case, pianowizard is quite correct to suggest 1.5 times the physical memory for your PF area. Going to a faster disk drive will also help.

[phool@round]

A few important differences,

Front side bus; T22 is 100Mhz and T23 is 133Mhz.

Video; T22 has 8Megs and is AGP 2X, T23 has 16Megs and is AGP 4X.

Ultra DMA; T22 is 33Mbps, T23 is 100Mbps.

Chipset; T22 is 440BX, T23 is 830MP.

Processor; T22 has 256k L2 cache - 28 million transistors, T23 has 512k L2 - 44 million transistors.

Those five differences are important to consider in multi-tasking, they outstrip just the sole processor speed/page file size comparison. The T23 logic board was for the most part a completely new architecture over the T22's.

While looking up the information I learned something I didn't know......... I didn't realize how different the T23 was under the hood!

Maybe this information will help in deciding which direction to take?

[dsigma6]

I would ditch the T22 for a T23 only because 1) VRAM 2) Ability to control the fan.

Let's face it, 100/133MHz FSB is pathetic. Don't freak out, my only ThinkPad is a T23. It's so outdated, but it works for most of us. I have noticed a difference in watching videos, especially streaming...now if I could just get my cursor to stop jumping around the screen!!

I felt helpless on my T20 when the temps were at 70C, with AS5 applied to the CPU, and the fan wouldn't budge. Just having to sit there and worry was enough for me to get a T23 (even though I used them concurrently for a while).

[schen]

It's purely anecdotal of course and a "feel" thing on my part, but over the course of the last 3 years have worked my way from a T21 to T22 to T23 and recently to a T30. Each time I've basically run the same things on each machine. In my case: Firefox, Office '03, Photoshop Elements 2.0, Norton, and occasionally DVD and/or DeLorme GPS. In each case, the RAM has been maxed out and running Windows XP. With the T23 and T30, I've had first a 5400rpm Hitachi and then a 7200rpm Hitachi. OK, background aside, here's what I think IMHO

The earlier T21 and T22 would occasionally struggle, but not much and only when the OS load was a little old (I rebuild my machines every year). There was a fairly noticeable improvement when I moved to the T23 which I attribute to a combination of things: 133Mhz vs. 100Mhz bus, 1.2Ghz Tualatin w/512 cache vs. 1.0Ghz w/256 cache CPU, 1Gb vs. 512Mb RAM, 5400/7200rpm 80Gb vs. 4200rpm 60Gb HDD. Of course, you can get some gain by moving to that faster HDD on the T21 as well, but you can't do all of the above without moving to the T23. In fact, despite the physical similarity, virtually nothing below the keyboard on the T20/21/22 will fit the T23 which should tell you how much of a redesign it was.

In fact, for what I do; I haven't been able to see as much noticeable difference between my T23 and my current T30 (spec'd as indicated on my sig). There are also, some peripheral considerations as well. I was able to get my T23 with built in wireless which eliminated one of my pet peeves (things sticking out or hanging from my machine), on top of which I switched to an Atheros chipped MPCI card and AP combination that did "SuperG" at 108mps.

All-in-all, it's not that the T23 in it's individual component form is that much faster than the T20/21/22, but the ability to apply all the various upgrade created a much faster feeling machine (at least for me and what I do).

...and I also still miss T23s slimmer profile. I really feel that the next big change for the money is to move to the T4x series, but I was able to upgrade to my T30 for free, so I did!

[dsigma6]

Encoding files on a T23 can be quite time consuming too. It's not right to compare a T43 to a T23, but the T23 will take 1 hour to encode a file that would take the T43 5 minutes. Of course, the difference between a T23 encoding and a T22 shouldn't be that great.

[dwilsonfl]

Ok, I'm convinced. I'm moving on up to a T30.

Thanks for all the help.