Thinkpads Forum

Was thinking about upgrading my RAM from 1GB to 3 GB max Vista Business supports, but then decided to maybe go Vista Business 64 which would support 4GB of RAM, any suggestions on good cheap RAM, I really do not need anything special I would not be testing and running the computer too hard, but since I replace my laptop every 3-4 years I would like to get my new T61 loaded for the next few years... I came across this RAM kit... read a few reviews and people are having great reviews in their T61/p's etc..

Crucial - CT2KIT25664AC800

Any other suggestions?

Thanks

Clint

Just came across this kit from OCZ for a great deal local $76.99 for the kit...

Any experience with this? They had 30 or so reviews on their site and almost half were installed on thinkpads and all were really positive...

I think this is the one...

Any feedback would be appreciated...

I'm using 2x2GB G. Skill dimms from newegg ($70 a pair if I remember right), works great in my T61. Kingston 4gb modules are right now about $400 each but some desktop 4gb modules are suddenly in the $110 range. When 4gb laptop modules reach that level (or anything below $150 say), I'll probably upgrade to 8gb.

phr wrote:I'm using 2x2GB G. Skill dimms from newegg ($70 a pair if I remember right), works great in my T61. Kingston 4gb modules are right now about $400 each but some desktop 4gb modules are suddenly in the $110 range. When 4gb laptop modules reach that level (or anything below $150 say), I'll probably upgrade to 8gb.

i have the same 4gb kit in my t61 and it's been great. I run 32 bit vista but 64 bit Linux...8gb might be a bit overkill..

Installed the OCZ Ram kit, still have not upgraded to 64 bit system yet but 32 bit shows 3GB which is sweet, have not really had a chance yet to test it good...

Super easy to install... now I just neeed to decided on a good 7200rpm hard drive, nothing over 200GB will never use it...

Any suggestions?

I really like the Hitachi 7200 rpm drives. I have had several of them and have had very good experiences with all of them. I currently have two of the 7k200 200 GB drives that were state of the art a few months ago, but they recently came out with a newer generation that is apparently faster, larger, quieter (not that mine is loud), and cooler. Not sure what sizes it is available in except I know they have a larger than 200 GB version in the latest generation. Another member posted a very favorable review of it in this forum the other day. The thread is still on the first page of this section, I believe.

The max RAM on the T61 T9300 is 4gb right?

I think the chipset on the T61 can't address more than 4gb can it?

Did you really need more than 4gb though? What're you primarily using your laptop for?

Pae7 - Thanks for the info, the Hitachi Drives looks good...

Muffd - I only replace my laptop every 3 or so years, so I would like to have something that is a little up to date, and 4gb and running 64bit windows is getting more popular these days... also the cost to upgrade to 4gb was almost the same price as geting a 2gb stick...

I like my decision

flypenfly wrote:The max RAM on the T61 T9300 is 4gb right?

I think the chipset on the T61 can't address more than 4gb can it?

No. Search a little around here and you'll find posts to the contrary.

Bwadd wrote:Installed the OCZ Ram kit, still have not upgraded to 64 bit system yet but 32 bit shows 3GB which is sweet, have not really had a chance yet to test it good...

Super easy to install... now I just neeed to decided on a good 7200rpm hard drive, nothing over 200GB will never use it...

Any suggestions?

If you do not use hibernation, then you can use the fourth GB for a RAM disk, which can further speed up your system. Search around here a little bit to find the info on how to enable the RAM disk, if interested (sorry don't have the link handy).

If I were buying a new hard drive for my T61p, it would be the WD Scorpio Black 320 GB. It's one of the fastest 2.5" drives out right now, partially because of the platter density.

Also, for those of you looking for RAM, I just purchased a Kingston 4GB Kit for $73 shipped. Not a bad deal!

jodusc-
Will the WD drive play nicely with the active shock sensing? I'm also interested, but WD says they have not tested it in the Lenovo and have no idea how it will work.

I'm thinking that with the size of the buffer on the drive, and the limited speeds of continuous data transfer 9as opposed to burst mode, which the cache can handle) that the 5400rpm version will do very nicely.

Yes some ppl have put 8gb in their T61's. The T61 is such a big machine, I don't understand why they didn't put in 4 sockets instead of 2. Ram is like disk space, there's no such thing as too much. I put in 4GB in this T61 for $20 a GB. If I could have put in 16GB at the same $/GB I would have in an instant. If I could put in 32GB I'd have at least thought about it. For example I'm working on an application that uses a carefully tuned database to store stuff for rapid access (minimum disk seeks). With 32gb of ram I could just read all the tables into memory, then have instant access to them, writing updates to a serial log and processing them separately. More ram changes the ways in which you can do things. Having some 128GB machines in this project would be great.

"The T61 is such a big machine, I don't understand why they didn't put in 4 sockets instead of 2."
Easy: Money.
Each "thing" you stick in a computer can add a fast five dollars to the selling price. Add two more memory sockets, the price goes up $10-20 at retail and people WILL go buy a cheaper computer from Dell or HP. Even worse, 90% of the folks buying laptops are running a 32-bit OS and won't be able to use more than 3GB of RAM in the first place, so telling them they have to pay extra, for a bigger laptop (or one with less stuff in it, to make room for the bulky memory chips) is going to send them to Dell or HP even faster.
People don't want to pay for something they can't and won't use. The market for 64-bit laptops is still painfully thin, and Lenovo has been trying to get a mass market.

What do you do that needs more than 3GB of RAM ? I remember when I put 4MB of RAM in my IBM/AT, and people asked the same question.<G>

hellosailor wrote:...
What do you do that needs more than 3GB of RAM ? I remember when I put 4MB of RAM in my IBM/AT, and people asked the same question.<G>

if you run virtual machines, you can never have enough main memory.

Good point! Which VM app do you use? I'd love to get a VCD image of my old machine running on the new one, but the "easy" instructions that I've found just haven't instructed me enough.

I use VMWare occasionally. Somebody installed it for me. So I couldn't help you with installing it, sorry. Haven't had the time yet to create and install one from scratch.

I was looking at the KR200 Hitachi 200GB drive but cheapest here in Canada is $150, then I looked in to the WD Scorpio 250 also $150 anyone know anything cheaper in Canada or somewhere in the Us I wont get nailed for Duty at the border... I found the KR200 @macworld for 107.99-$20 rebate but I will get nailed at the border for Duty since the drive is made outside the US...grr...

Any ideas?

How steep is the duty? I doubt there's a legal way to order it from any retailer and dodge it. If you can get someone to ship via US Mail instead of UPS/Fedex, you only pay duty--no brokerage fees. That's a major savings.

The Scorpio 320GB drive is only $110 from Newegg and other vendors.

Well macworld will ship it USPS ground but I know from experience I will get nailed for Duty since the drive is not manufactured in the US and with a name like Hitachi i will pay upwards of 8-10% plus the shipping of $30 makes it pointless...

Newegg now has some 4gb G. Skill sodimms for $180 (oops, out of stock for the moment) so the price of these modules is falling fast. They will probably fall some more in the next few weeks. With two of them you have an 8gb T61. I will just about definitely buy a pair. It's just a matter of how long I'll hold out for prices to fall further.

I think being able to say "our laptop supports 16gb of ram while the competitors only support 8gb" is well worth $20 higher retail. With that much ram you can load your whole software setup (OS and applications) into a ramdisk so you never wait for the hard disk. Yes you could use an SSD but ram is much faster as long as you don't mind the volatility.

As for 32gb vs 64gb, I think ALL lenovos these days have 64 bit (Core 2) cpu's. It's true some people are still running 32 bit OS's for whatever reason. I'm using 64 bit Ubuntu with 4gb and it's working nicely.

Right now, 2gb dimms are about $35 each. If higher density parts and more sockets in the T61 were available at the same $17.50/gb but with 32gb capacity, I'd just about certainly stuff the thing to the max. That ram would cost less than $600 and make the laptop more powerful than the servers that we use at work. I wonder if it will be possible to put in a quad core processor...

"I think being able to say "our laptop supports 16gb of ram while the competitors only support 8gb" is well worth $20 higher retail."

Then you're one in a thousand. Meanwhile, the other 999 customers out of that thousand, are going to say "Who the hell needs 8GB of memory? I'm doing fine with one!" (or two) and sales plummet while the competition gets all the business. Except, for one or two guys like you.

That's the problem with mass-market commodity products. Taken a look at your keyboard lately? The labels are just decals that wear off--like every other laptop on the market. That's because it saves a couple of bucks to use decals, instead of sye sublimation or embedded lettering.

When IBM was shipping the PC and AT? They made a big point about not using cheap decals on the keyboard, the way most of the cheap clones did. Of course, that also meant a $180 keyboard instead of a $75 keyboard. Or the $5 keyboards today.

But if you want a laptop with a quality keyboard that adds only five bucks to the unit price? I don't think there's ONE on the market today. So, $20 for more RAM sockets? Ain't gonna happen. Not for another two or three years, when someone finds a way to push the video gamer market (which is still the big buck market) into "needing" that.

Picked up a Hitachi KR200 200GB HD tonight for a really good price, $114.99 CAN before tax and after Hitachi mail in rebate... sweet deal realy considering I was going to pay the same comming from the US last week and I did not have to wait plus/minus the duties involved.. now I'm gonna put it in with a fresh copy of Vista Ultimate 64 to run all 4 gigs of ram.. can't wait!

Just never installed OS before or a HD gonna be a fun night. if anyone has suggestions or install tips feel free to let me know...

Clint

It's just an old rule of thumb in computer configuration that you put about half your dollars into ram. So if I'm willing to spend $2000 on this T61, that means putting $1000 of memory in it which at $20/gb (and falling fast) would be 48gb. When you say you can run ok in 1gb, that just means you're running software that is written to use the disk a lot because it assumes that there's not enough ram to use instead. You might try booting Puppy Linux from a cd or flash stick to get a feeling of what a ram-based system is like. It loads entirely into ram (including all the system and user files) and doesn't use the disk at all, except when you shut down (it then writes your files back out from ram to disk). The result is that it feels incredibly responsive compared to the disk-based crap that you're used to. But, it is somewhat limited in its capabilities, since its ramdisk including all files has to fit in 200mb or so in order to have some program space left over in a 512mb or 1gb machine. Now imagine running a full featured system (using 10-20 gb) with zero disk delays. You'll never want to go back.

I have 4gb in this t61 which cost just $70 (a few percent of the cost of the whole machine) and watching "top" under Ubuntu I see that most of the ram is in use most of the time. That doesn't mean I couldn't get by without it--but the system would use the disk more and be slower. So, the 4gb really doesn't feel like enough, and 8gb will be an improvement but still not enough. 16gb or 32gb starts to get interesting.

Took my time over the weekend and installed a fresh copy of Vista Ultimate 64 on my new KR200 and let me tell you this is fantastic!

Everyone should do it... LOL What a night and day experience from the standard stock T61 I purchased. I'm now running 4GB ram with the new KR200 7200RPM drive and Vista 64bit and its fast really fast... I can boot up to a "ready desktop" in less than a minute!

Besides the RAM and HD upgrade I would suggest to anyone who has never done a fresh install to do so ASAP, it makes the computer alot less sluggish!

Bwadd wrote:Took my time over the weekend and installed a fresh copy of Vista Ultimate 64 on my new KR200 and let me tell you this is fantastic!

Everyone should do it... LOL What a night and day experience from the standard stock T61 I purchased. I'm now running 4GB ram with the new KR200 7200RPM drive and Vista 64bit and its fast really fast... I can boot up to a "ready desktop" in less than a minute!

Besides the RAM and HD upgrade I would suggest to anyone who has never done a fresh install to do so ASAP, it makes the computer alot less sluggish!

hehe, most users will do a fresh install right after they get their thinkpad to get rid of all the bloatware.