X41t - Need new 8 cell battery/RAM/new hard drive/Win7 -help

[thebigalphamale]

-Picking up my 1st Lenovo/IBM x41t tomorrow morning with a ultra base docking station/recovery & driver disks - used for $175 US Dollars. I was really looking at the new lenovo s10-3t multitouch 10 inch netbook tablet and or waiting till the slightly upgraded 470 lenovo s10-3t came available. But I came across this x41t and offered to take it off their hands for 175$, so I couldnt pass it up to try it out.

-It will need a new battery I am sure so I am wanting to get an 8 cell with the highest capacity. I see a few different mAh versions it seems 4500 or 5400 or something like that. I knew someone who bought a generic battery off ebay and had to keep sending it back and forth for replacements bc they all wouldnt hold a very good charge. So I am kinda leery about purchasing a generic or refurb off ebay. I see some prices vary from less than 50 to $150 US dollars. Can someone point me to possibly the best price for a quality 8 cell battery.

- I am also interested into possibly getting the ThinkPad Ultrabay Slim Li-Polymer Battery for the x41t to extend the battery life. Can anyone comment on this and if its worth it and or where I might pick one up for a good price.

-It comes with a 60gb hard drive i believe and ive read around here that its pretty slow. So i am also interested in looking into the most cost effective way to replace the slow 4200 drive with a faster decent size ssd or cf drive or whatever you all can recommend. Im not new to replacing hard drives, but ive heard this one can be a little tricky with the pata zif and such technical jargon. So tutorials and or all things needed to do the replacement would be greatly appreciated...

- It has 1GB RAM, and from what I can tell on here its 512 onboard and so ill have an additional 512 stick. I would like to upgrade the ram to its max and Im guessing that would be adding a 2GB stick. With a win 7 ultimate install will 2.5 GB or only 2GB be useable? Can someone point me to a good price on a working stick that I should use

- Lastly it will have a clean install of win xp tablet, but I am interested in putting windows 7 ultimate on it. How is xp tablet vs win 7 on this tablet. With a clean install of windows 7 do all the drivers load up or is there some work to be done to get all drivers and buttons and such working. Isnt there a windows 7 tablet pack to download?

- Any tips, cool software and or games that the x41t can play/use. Ive heard about crayon physics being cool on a tablet. Art Rage or something like that. I would love to learn do draw, paint and learn some basic graphic design using this tablet if those are good possibilities.

- I also am hopefully going to use this as an ebook, pdf, emagazine and zino magazine reader. Any tips or comments on using it for this purpose?

THANKS EVERYONE FOR READING AND HELPING A NEW TABLET USER OUT

[greg.billings]

I have been looking for the 2nd battey, only place I have found one is from Lenovo directly. It's a four cell battery that will bump you up to an advertised 11 hours total runtime, I think real world is 5 - 6 hours.

There are many posts on the HD problem. If you want the simplest solution, expect to pay $200 for the IBM 60GB SSD, otherwise, any other solution will give you a bios error which, if you configure the bios correctly the error message will appear and the system will continue to boot without requiring a keystroke. If you go the later route, buy a CF adapter (found on ebay for $15 or so and the best CF card I can find is from ncix.com, it's a 533X 16GB. A 32GB exists but it's always on back order. This card sells for $60

Officially the unit only supports a 1GB stick to max out at 1.5GB but there are some posts showing a 2GB generic stick will work but the bios will only support a system maximum of 2GB even though there is 2.5GB installed.

[thebigalphamale]

Thanks... I am now writing this on my pristine x41t ... This tablet is in perfect shape XCept the battery/ Ram ...these tablets are awesome...great build quality even at a few years old... hard drive isnt as bad as I thought it would be... handwriting rec is awesome... It does load up Super slow though 4 Min to useable Stats up , it was 7 min after fresh lenovo recovery.....lenovo had so much loading it wasnt even funny....l am going to keep XP for now and see how it goes ... been tweaking xp all day...seems decently quick...

[astroidea]

hah install win7 when you can. You're in for a treat. It's WAAAY faster than the stock install, which is bloated.
Get the ram when you can too. Your boot times should be in about a minute, and the machine should be pretty snappy in general with the OS lightened up.

With the kingspec SSD, photoshop loads up faster than my 3.5GHz core2quad desktop with a 1TB hard drive.

[Tasurinchi]

replace the slow 4200 drive with a faster decent size ssd or cf drive or whatever you all can recommend

HDDs are not difficult to replace, currently you can have some models with 80GB for around 100 USD including a ZIF adapter. Once you have both it's just plug & play...

There are also models going from 120GB up to 240GB if you need storage space.

Checks for more details here

Cheers...

[thebigalphamale]

thought i would update....

battery had 41% of initial charge for the 8cell and im getting 2.5 hours in max performance mode/wi fi/bluetooth on... and 3.5 hours with brightness turned down in power saving mode, wifi off (using this for reading ebooks/emags).... this is in windows 7 ultimate

I did my windows 7 ultimate install... over the lenovo restore of xp tablet that was pretty slow starting up etc....... I decided to put windows 7 ultimate on it even though it only had 1gb ram.. I figured I would pick up a 2gb stick soon so i could live with it slow with windows 7 till then.... WOW... it is pretty darn fast as fast or faster than xp tablet IMO...even with only 1 gb RAM... it is so much better than the xp tablet install that i even tweaked to get it as fast as i could...... even with the 4200 hard drive... and to be completely honest from what I can tell its taking up about the same amount of hard drive space on install and also using the same amount of ram.... the ram is hovering at 32% on start up to 60-70% max ... ive not seen it go above that as of yet... so I can highly rec windows 7 premium or ultimate (dont think basic or starter have those extra tablet capabilities) and man do those extra tablet/pen functions and the on screen keyboard and hand reco...man do they work so much better than the xp tablet ones...

the only thing that i dont have working on the windows 7 install is the volume up/down and mute buttons (not sure why..i believe ive got all drivers and stuff loaded)... but all other buttons and functions are working..

my wifi didnt work right off the bat... so i had to get the drivers and manually install everything and finally got wifi driver working...then updated... maybe it would have been different had my wifi started working right off the bat and updated automatically... but manually loading wasnt that hard...

i did load 2-3 thinkpad programs from lenovo... the hard drive airbag protection, thinkpad access connections (to be able to turn off bluetooth and wifi, but wifi can be turned off in windows 7 through the mobility keyword) and the tablet button program that loads up when pressing the tablet button... funny thing though is bluetooth sometimes shows up and sometimes doesnt in the wireless access connections... to be able to be turned off... but i know windows 7 has a enable/disable function for allowing windows to turn it off to save power... and i have it enabled... but the light for bluetooth always stays on...

so only those 2 complaints... volume buttons and the bluetooth not showing up...well 1 more... cannot dim through tablet button program... have to manually fn and the button that dims or brights up the screen...so in port tablet mode you have to rotate the screen up and do it manually then rotate back...

ANYONE KNOW HOW TO GET THE VOLUME BUTTONS AND THE SCREEN BRIGHTNESS WORKING THROUGH THE TABLET FUNCTION...AND OR KNOW WHY MY BLUETOOTH DOESNT ALWAYS SHOW UP IN THE ACCESS CONNECTIONS THINKPAD PROGRAM TO BE TURNED OFF OR ON... (it does show up in the system tray) OR HOW TO TURN OFF BLUETOOTH FOR POWER SAVING THROUGH WINDOWS 7 OS?

thanks again everyone...

[Tasurinchi]

No experience with X41T, but in my T43p Lenovo's System Update downloaded and updated the drivers automatically (the same for wifi, video & audio). I think architecture-wise the X41s & T43s are similar... So give it a try...

Cheers

[loyukfai]

Display brightness through software manipulation doesn't work, guess it's a driver issue and I doubt if Lenovo is going to fix it.

As for BT, try loading defaults in BIOS and see if it helps.

I let System Update grabbed most of the Lenovo utilities (and avoided some) and the volume buttons work afterwards. However, I noticed that SU is not pulling in some newer versions and I had to download and install them manually.

Cheers.