T60p 2623DDU

[mikek5117]

OK, so my employer and I are parting company - downsizing the N. American operation. Anyway, upside is I am keeping my T60p 2623-DDU Thinkpad plus advanced dock. I know this is one of the holy grails of Thinkpads and am pretty happy about keeping it.

Anyway, The computer has seen only light use since I am primarily a Mac guy and I home officed so I used my Mac Pro desktop when unless traveling. I have not kept up with things Thinkpad. I am just now updating all the firmware and Lenovo stuff that I had pretty much ignored for the past 2 years. Once that is finished I was thinking about what the next upgrade should be. It currently has 2gb, I might find a 2gb dimm and add that for 3gb total. What about a new processor, I understand this should be a fairly simple plug-in upgrade to about 2.3ghz or so?

My warranty is still good until May 2010 so that will be a consideration to not do anything to invalidate that.

Anything else I should be planning for my new toy?

[dr_st]

Battery, hard-drive, RAM upgrades do not invalidate the warranty. CPU upgrade, in principle, does.

Lenovo may or may not care that you fiddled with the CPU if you request warranty service for parts which are not related to the CPU.

[ZaZ]

I say put in a faster drive and see how it goes. Most things aren't very CPU intensive.

[mikek5117]

Yes, after spending a while researching past forum posts, it looks like a WD Black 320gb drive might be the most cost-effective upgrade I could consider right now. They are also relatively cheap and won't mess with the warranty. The existing drive is already 7200 rpm but the bigger capacity will also give a nice performance boost as well just being a 3-yr newer, large capacity drive. I got all of the Lenovo updates completed yesterday (long process, had to run the updater about 3 times before it came back with 0 updates needed on all fronts) and I can already see a notable improvement in performance.

[hausman]

Anything else I should be planning for my new toy?

Warranty extension to 5 years? Your T60p will continue to be useful for at least 2 or 3 more years, especially if you upgrade to Win7. The two most expensive components to replace are motherboard and LCD screen. Chances are they won't fail but if they do, how confident are you that you can replace either component yourself?

[mikek5117]

All good suggestions, thanks everyone. Right now I am torn about keeping this laptop (I really do enjoy owning it just won't use it that much unless I land some contract work) and selling it to finance a newer fancier Macbook Pro. Decisions, decisions.