Thinkpads Forum

Finally, after getting the T60p back from the service center, put in a new 500GB hard drive, 4GB of RAM, re-installed everything, after a day and half of installing, updating, finally everything is in order. Already, with the 5400RPM 500GB HDD, there is a noticeable improvement in speed over the old 5400RPM 160GB HDD.

Man, I never knew how much I would miss the IPS screen.

Now that everything is all set up, I think the only upgrade I will be doing for the foreseeable future will be to purchase a 256GB SSD, once the prices come down, to use as the OS disk, and then relegate the 500GB HDD to the ultrabay. Man, that would be one SWEET laptop.

I just "inherited" a T60p from my previous employer a couple of weeks ago and have to agree, it is a sweet machine. I added a WD Black 320gb and partitioned it for XP, Win7 and Linux (don't need a lot of file space, my primary computer is still my Mac). Windows 7 is VERY nice on this machine and I only have 2gb of ram. Almost competes with OS X on Mac, lots of nice features and very snappy. Still can't get over how much faster it boots and shuts down over XP.

Hope you enjoy your newly refreshed computer. Let us know how the SSD works out, I would sure like to hear how much performance improvement you get.

furrycute wrote:Man, that would be one SWEET laptop.

No kidding! I have been using a T60 Flexview as my main machine for a few months now and it is by far the best computer I have ever encountered. I got tired of waiting for SSD prices to drop, so I finally gave in and bought an OCZ Vertex 60GB SSD about a month ago when I found a good deal on it. And oh boy, this drive makes my T60 fly. Besides being absolutely silent, it boosts the performance of the machine by quite a bit. Application launch times are noticeably faster, and so far I have not experienced any stuttering or freezing common with the old SSD's that have the JMicron controllers.

The Windows XP SP3 on it right now is a fresh install (not with ThinkPad recovery disks) with MS .Net 3.5. I installed everything System Update has to offer and AVG 8.5. To test boot time, I put Firefox in my startup folder and started recording time when I push the power button, similar to what Ray did recently with his Transcend SSD in an X22. The results are as follows:

Time to desktop: 25 sec
Firefox starts: 38 sec

I did this a couple times and the results were within 1 second or so of each other. Of course, some things were still loading when Firefox started (for instance, it took a few more seconds before I saw the battery icon from Power Manager), but the machine was already responsive at that point.

Interesting. I had the Samsung SLC SSD. While my machine certainly booted a little faster and a few laggard apps like Photoshop or iTunes opened a bit quicker, but other than that, I couldn't really tell much of a difference between it and the 7200RPM drive I had in it for general usage. The T60 SATA controller is a SATA I controller. Drives like the Vertex or X25-M will never hit full speed.

FredGarvin wrote:Drives like the Vertex or X25-M will never hit full speed.

Agreed, and especially more so in sequential read. In fact, I benched the drive on both my T60 and desktop with CrystalDiskMark a few days after I got it:

On T60: http://tinypic.com/r/4qk579/4

On desktop: http://tinypic.com/r/jskcbn/4

You can see that sequential read tops out at about 130 MB/s on the T60 and close to 200 MB/s on the desktop. On the other hand, from reading various article, I got the feeling that the high random small files read and write speeds of the Intel and Indilinx-based drives are the real difference.

Anyone tried to run Windows 7 with T60 , with 3 GB RAM?

Does it run well in a heavily multi-tasking Windows 7 environment?

Or are you better off using a T400/T400s for Windows 7 ?

w0qj wrote:Anyone tried to run Windows 7 with T60 , with 3 GB RAM?

Does it run well in a heavily multi-tasking Windows 7 environment?

Or are you better off using a T400/T400s for Windows 7 ?

See my sig. Win 7 is noticeably faster, snappier and uses less memory than Vista 64-bit. Both were clean installed from scratch.

w0qj wrote:Anyone tried to run Windows 7 with T60 , with 3 GB RAM?

Does it run well in a heavily multi-tasking Windows 7 environment?

Or are you better off using a T400/T400s for Windows 7 ?

I run Windows 7 on my T60 w/ 3GB of RAM, a 7200RPM HD and Intel Graphics.

Man this computer is snappy. It felt quick under Vista and somewhat quicker with XP, but with Windows 7 it just flies. From working in photoshop to writing code in Visual Studio, or even running World of Warcraft, it just smiles and keeps on running.

Minus the SATA controller issue prevalent in the T60 line, Lenovo got the special sauce formula for this machine just right. Sure it doesn't fully support 64-bit (i.e. more than 3GB of RAM, but 64-bit CPU is fine), but it is still one kickass machine. By far the fastest laptop I have ever used and by far one of the best built.

The T60 line is no slouch and while a T400/500 would of course be faster, trust me the T60 is plenty fast. Plenty.

Speaking of Vista and Windows 7.

Has anyone compared Vista service pack 2 to Windows 7?

I read that there were significant improvements in with the Vista service pack 1. I am wondering with Vista service pack 2, is there really that much significant improvement with Windows 7 over Vista service pack 2?

I just installed Windows 7 on my T60 2623 a few days ago.
My T60 with 3GB ram and a Hitachi 7k320 and Winodws 7 RTM does indeed boot up faster than XP.
Most OS tasks are noticeably faster. 3D games like Quake, etc, play alright. I haven't gotten any FPS rates yet.
The only minus is the ATI X1300. It is not as snappy as it is in XP. The Aero in Windows 7 is
a little hard on it. The X1300 is a rather mediocre GPU, so it will hold the Windows 7 experience back.
The one thing that I really, really like is the ease of configurability that 7 has over Vista. Drivers are also a lot less of a pain.
Windows 7 is a definitely worthwhile jump from XP, and a justifiable jump from Vista if one hates Vista.
The only reason I still am running XP is the crappy Cisco Clean Access Agent that my university
forces down my throat. Under Windows 7, CCAA does not recognize any valid antivirus that I install, thus I have limited access to the university network. So I'm stuck with XP until Cisco updates their worthless client.