Thinkpads Forum

this would be upgrade from t7300 on 'merom' board, as best i know from cpu-z program. i really don't want to mess with the bios, i just updated it to 2.30

windows 7 32bit with 4gb ram (i think it only uses 3gb)

no ssd wanted, thanks.

If you don't have a Peryn MB then no you can't, not without Middleton's BIOS. If you have enough technical skills to replace a CPU then flashing Middleton's BIOS should be a no brainer. It's not that difficult and is much easier than replacing a CPU.

Cigarguy wrote:If you don't have a Peryn MB then no you can't, not without Middleton's BIOS. If you have enough technical skills to replace a CPU then flashing Middleton's BIOS should be a no brainer. It's not that difficult and is much easier than replacing a CPU.

the cpu thing looks mechanical.

i saw a download for middleton in some "rar" form, how i go about putting that into a bios is a mystery to me still.

anyway i thought someone may have said it was possible without side effects.

halfcard1 wrote: i saw a download for middleton in some "rar" form, how i go about putting that into a bios is a mystery to me still.

There's freeware available which will take care of unzipping the file...

anyway i thought someone may have said it was possible without side effects.

If you have a Merom board, a Penryn CPU will produce a "thermal sensing error" causing the machine to shut down. Middleton's BIOS (as safe as Lenovo's own IMO) takes care of this...

so i unzip it to a disk, or ? not sure of exact steps

does the middleton thing change any appearances on my screen? icons, warnings etc.

will it kill my updates

Cigarguy wrote:If you don't have a Peryn MB then no you can't, not without Middleton's BIOS. If you have enough technical skills to replace a CPU then flashing Middleton's BIOS should be a no brainer. It's not that difficult and is much easier than replacing a CPU.

of course you can, LOL, all you have to do is press ESC when you see the "thermal error" and keep on booting. If you dont press it then the computer will keep restarting and showing the same error.

but flashing the middletons BIOS gives you much more than eliminating the need for pressing ESC, so use it. It will not affect your updates or icons or else, heh.

ok thanks. does this thing boot from the CD drive, i set it to do that?

Just like a regular bios update.

You can use WinRar (rarlabs.com) to unzip the .rar, their free trial is all you need, no need to buy. After it's installed just "right click" on any .rar and select "extract here, and you're done.

Next you can run the .exe from any 32bit windows version, or you can do it from a bootable CDrom disc, but you better make d@mn sure your drive and disc are good and your system is stable. I'd strongly recommend flashing before you do any work on the system.

You can also check the FRU number of your board, some merom systems have Penryn boards if it was made in 2008. I've seen them used on merom systems as early as febuary, and by may-june the merom boards were pretty much all used up.

I've seen mixed reports on the ability to boot after the thermal sensing error, some have reported it will, others won't. It is possible that the boards changed during production and since it's a moot point, I never bothered to research it, but as miro_gt has said, it works on his system so it probably will on yours too. Also be aware that the middleton patch doesn't give your board full penryn support, it just suppresses the error. Performance wise it shouldn't make a difference, but I suspect some of the advanced thermal and power saving features will be disabled since the board cannot read the Penryn chips digital sensors.

When flashing your bios, don't try to multitask, just leave the computer alone until it finishes, and close down all applications you may have set to autostart. A random crash during the flash could damage your system board, but I've done over 100 of them and the only one that damaged a board was a result of a cdrom read error, which is why I prefer to do it within windows.

Regarding your T9500, you can usually get the T9300 much cheaper and you'd never notice the difference, the main improvement in this series is the 6mb L2 cache which both have, the 0.1ghz difference in clock speed is trivial.