Thinkpads Forum

I'm just wondering if Turbo Memory is like a nand card that can be easily removed from the X61s or disabled through BIOS or Windows Vista? Or is it soldered into the motherboard?

Did anyone removed\disabled it and glad they did? I see that most users are happy not to have it as it lowers real-life application performance. I'm unsure if it's something to have it if you do or if you're better off to take it out.


**Just a liitle background on what I'm trying to do; I got Vista 64 with 4GB ram. I will be mostly running MS Office, occassional new games, and IE but will do occassional large size video files writing and transfers. I'm concern about the slow write speed reported in TM.

Turbo memory is a physical card that fits on the motherboard. It fits in the same slot as WWAN cards, which is why you can't configure any machine with both turbo memory and WWAN. It can be disabled using the turbo memory configuration menu within Vista, although there are reports that this method may be buggy (see old article here). It also may be physically removed if you open up your machine; it is not soldered on. However, before doing that you may want to wait for Vista SP1 to be released to the public, I remember seeing somewhere that the service pack attempts to improve the Vista implementation of this feature.

However, given that you already have 4 GB of RAM, I doubt it's giving you much benefit. But as some updated drivers for it have been released since most of the initial negative reports came out it's probably not hurting either. But later if you want WWAN you'd need to pull it out...

In Vista simply:
Press Windows key.
Type "turbo" and press enter.
Uncheck Enable Windows ReadyBoost and Enable Windows ReadyDrive.
After restart is Turbo memory off.