T61 Repair/Tuneup

[ogcj11]

Hey guys,

I have a few issues with the T61 (7658-CTO) I've had since Jun '07. It's a 14.1' widescreen with the standard core 2 duo and 2GB with windows 7x64

1. I disparately need to replace the LCD hinge's, the wobble annoys me to no end. I have not been able to find these from a reliable source. Where can I get these? Also I would need the legit screw kit for the machine

2. Does anybody know how much ram the motherboard can support while running x64, basically can I put more than 4gb in it.

3. Also need a new a power brick & battery, I assume the knockoff's on amazon do the job.

What I'm trying to do here is squeeze some more life out it until I finish school. So I also need to keep it cheap.

[miro_gt]

look in here for hinges for sale in the members section, somebody may have broken laptop that parts out for sale.

you can put up to 8GB RAM (2x4GB), but that is overpriced as hell.

you can find power adapter and battery on ebay; look for genuine parts though.

[j.harris]

I would stick with 4gb of ram, 8 won't be noticeable. I would stick with IBM/Lenovo batteries and chargers, I bought a knock off battery for a friend's t61 and it didn't exactly right.

[TuuS]

You can indeed use upto 8gb of ram, that won't be a problem at all.

As for the rest of the parts, I have everything you need, send me a PM and we can discuss it if you like.

[Zak]

I would stick with 4gb of ram, 8 won't be noticeable.

Without knowing how the OP is using the computer, it's hard to evaluate the accuracy of this statement. I, for example do text classification research on my laptop and often load data sets that make 8gb feel cramped. If only I could get more in something with a UXGA Flexview. The $100 I had to pay for 8gb of DDR2 was worth it even with the knowledge that I could have had it for $25 a couple years ago.

Aside from that, modern operating systems, and programs that think they're operating systems (I'm thinking of Chrome here) cache things heavily if they have the memory free. I'm told Chrome does some sort of pre-rendering-caching to speed up scrolling, but don't quote me on that. In any case, it's using almost 2gb for 20 tabs at the moment. Right now, my OS reports that I'm using 4.3gb, plus 3.6gb used by the OS for cache. Everything in the cache means there's a possibility of avoiding disk access, which is about 100 times slower.

In short, even a casual user might notice a speedup from extra memory. A heavy user might get substantial benefits or even find it impossible to work on a machine with less than [insert arbitrary amount of memory here].

[TuuS]

I agree with zak... it's true that an 8gb machine won't be faster then a 4gb machine until you've actually consumed the entire 4gb, but if you like to do a lot of multitasking as I do, then the 8gb is well worth it, but I doubt you'll find it for $100, more like $150, which is enough to buy 20gb in 1gb sodimms or 12gb in 2gb sodimms.

[Zak]

Wow, that went up fast. I see $135 on Amazon. I paid $100 earlier this year.

What's really ironic is that two years ago when DDR2 was dirt cheap, I needed 8gb of DDR3 for my W500. That was over $100 then and DDR2 was under $30. I have terrible timing.