Thinkpads Forum

I trust many of the postings here and felt it prudent to 'ask' advice once again.
I have an X200 Tablet (7449-9EU); L9400 running Vista Biz bios 3.15 4gb stock 160gb hdd, etc... BTW – I love the machine.

I've decided to dump some $ into her...

Items under review:
FIRST: SSD - I have a price range of whatever ($200-700), but am torn... I've read too much so either I get a 256gb SSD and clone the stock to it (all three partitions) and have some room to spare, or I remove personal stuff from the HDD (to either the SD or soon to have CF/Express) and go with a smaller OS only drive... Although the money isn't 'the' deciding factor - it can limit some of the other upgrades. The stock HDD is about 70% full. At minimum 40gb of that is personal junk… I’ve lived off of SD & CF cards before and am not opposed to it again, if it makes sense (and cents). I am going to do this in the very near future – it’s a matter of what size and which brand/model. Most of what I’ve read gives high marks to the Intels, certain OCZs and Corsair’s – and a few others.

Typically access (daily) the following software:
Adobe CS4 (create lots of pdfs, some dreamweaver, some photo manipulation, also have lightroom)
Office (standard stuff - limited use of access, heavy use of compounded excel spreadsheets, some 25,000 lines deep).
Google stuff (mostly web based - not to machine dependent)
Evernote (live by it)
G Data (full suite - running non stop)

Nothing to much - would just like a faster machine.

NEXT: Or part of #1 - buy a UDMA express/54 CF, as some of my stuff is photo based and one of the digi's is still CF based, so I have lots of big fast CF Cards (this is likely to happen no matter what, as toting around a UDMA external USB reader isn't so much fun).

THIRD: I'm on Vista Biz (32 bit) and wanting to upgrade to Win 7. Guessing since I have a 64 bit processor, the 64 bit version might benefit with the correct software (adobe especially, as some of the larger PDFs can take a while). This one is a matter of time (and which version), as I worry about issues with the screen/digitizer.

FOURTH: I’m skeptical on this one – as I have 4 gigs now, but the move to 8 gigs of ram (2X4gb).

What I would like to request is opinions of the likely benefit from each (and even perhaps suggested item to upgrade to). I am going to get an SSD (and likely a CF/expresscard) this next week. As to the Win7 – have no idea if this will improve the machine, nor which flavor to upgrade to. As to the Ram – just how much do I need? Don’t mind spending the $150-200 on it, just wonder if it will really improve performance noticeably?

Thanx! B.

I don't recommend you to upgrade from Vista to 7 if there is an option not to upgrade.
However, you will need a 64-bit OS (be it Vista or 7) in order to use 8GB of RAM; with a 32-bit OS you will only see the same 3.15GB you see now.
AFAIK more RAM will be a huge benefit for Photoshop.

Things change and the old recipes aren't neccearily valid today as they used to be. For example, back when computers used small IDE 4200 rpm drives, upgrading memory was top priority because it prevented the operating system from using virtual memory which was SLOW AS HELL. Processors of the time (say, a Pentium III) had comparatively fast buses (like 100 or 133 MHz) so upgrading RAM made a lot of sense to unlock the latent potential of the architecture crippled by the slow virtual memory subsystem.

Doing simple math, for a modern computer to be capable of handling effectively a data load of 8GB it would requiere an internal bus of 8.5 GHz (8192 / 128 = 64 * 133 = 8512) . Needless to say, we're very, very far from that, most modern computers have quad pumped buses (which despite the marketing, doesn't equate to 4 times the frequency) of between 1066 and 1333 MHz.

In plain terms, to throw 8GB of RAM into an X200 (OR ANY CURRENT COMPUTER) is to waste money. Even 4GB is a waste. It won't make anything to run faster because the architecture is already at 100% for loads over like 512MB / 1GB. Sure, there is a lot of space in RAM to keep things, but now the problem will be that the processor will keep waiting for the buses to transfer all that information. Think of it like a really big SD, like those new and cheap 64GB ones. Sure, lots of space, but they are so [censored] slow that it is not practical.

I think the only real upgrade you can do to it is to buy an SSD.

mikemex wrote:In plain terms, to throw 8GB of RAM into an X200 (OR ANY CURRENT COMPUTER) is to waste money. Even 4GB is a waste.

??? 4GB is a waste? Maybe it's a waste if you're only web browsing, watching video, listening to music, etc. My laptop can definitely use more than 4GB. It currently has 6GB and I'm still running low sometimes. I do software development and run 1-2 virtual machines on VMWare.

Modern operating systems like Windows 7 will use any free memory to cache everything and reduce disk access. RAM is pretty cheap right now. 8GB is around $80.

brettmansdorf, You might as well upgrade to Windows 7 x64 if you're running low on memory. This way you can access all 4GB of it or if you want to buy more RAM.

If you see a lot of disk activity, then maybe it's also a good idea to go to SSD. There are a lot of SSD option now out and it's cheaper than it was a year ago.

aceo07 wrote:??? 4GB is a waste? Maybe it's a waste if you're only web browsing, watching video, listening to music, etc. My laptop can definitely use more than 4GB. It currently has 6GB and I'm still running low sometimes. I do software development and run 1-2 virtual machines on VMWare.

You're right in a way, but I'm quite sure you didn't get what I truly meant. Yes, you can run more applications but you can't run HEAVIER applications. For example, let's take photoshop. Suppose it can handle a picture of 8000x8000 comfortably with 1GB, so in theory with 8GB it should handle a picture about 20000x20000 just as well. But what happens is that even with more RAM, the machine will be considerably slower because even if there is more memory available, the bus to access it hasn't improved at all, so it will take quite a bit more time just to access it. Intuitively, it should be 8 times more but in reality it is almost exponential considering the overhead.

You don't notice it because the core load of many programs is almost constant. Say, like Super Pi. it doesn't really matter if you select to calculate it to one million, or to 32 million, the actual code being executed in each cycle is of equal size, so the time of execution is more or less linear. But when the core load of a program increases like with my example with PhotoShop, execution time increases more or less exponentially. That's why I claim that so much memory is a waste: with serious tasks like modeling very detailed 3D solids the computer will almost freeze and more RAM will do absolutely nothing to improve it becuase the bottleneck will not be the hard drive but the data bus.

I have 4G ram in my X200T and installed a 120G Intel ssd, plus a clean install of W7 HP 64. It runs NikonCapture2 (slows down pc's with great pleasure) pretty fast. Opening and closing files almost as fast as my i7 desktop.
Can only recommend putting in an ssd. Getting the necessary drivers and software was a breeze with System Update.

mikemex wrote:Doing simple math, for a modern computer to be capable of handling effectively a data load of 8GB it would requiere an internal bus of 8.5 GHz (8192 / 128 = 64 * 133 = 8512) . Needless to say, we're very, very far from that, most modern computers have quad pumped buses (which despite the marketing, doesn't equate to 4 times the frequency) of between 1066 and 1333 MHz.

I don't understand where is the sense in your math.
You're taking amount of RAM in gigabytes, then dividing it by the bus width in bits, then multiplying it by 133... what sense does it has? It seems for me like you just picked some numbers, did some mathematical operations on these and get some result and said "that's the frequency in GHz on which the bus should work".
It's like saying "we have 4 apples, 6 oranges and 123 potatoes here, so in order to fully use these we need 123/4*6=123/24=5.125 liters per second of processing power".

mikemex wrote:You're right in a way, but I'm quite sure you didn't get what I truly meant. Yes, you can run more applications but you can't run HEAVIER applications. For example, let's take photoshop. Suppose it can handle a picture of 8000x8000 comfortably with 1GB, so in theory with 8GB it should handle a picture about 20000x20000 just as well. But what happens is that even with more RAM, the machine will be considerably slower because even if there is more memory available, the bus to access it hasn't improved at all, so it will take quite a bit more time just to access it. Intuitively, it should be 8 times more but in reality it is almost exponential considering the overhead.

What overhead?
RAM has some speed, e.g. for DDR3-1333 it is 10667 megabytes per second. So, in order to read 1 gigabyte of data from RAM you need 1024/10667=0.096 seconds, and in order to read 5 gigabytes of data from RAM you need 0.47 seconds.

penartur wrote:I don't understand where is the sense in your math.
You're taking amount of RAM in gigabytes, then dividing it by the bus width in bits, then multiplying it by 133... what sense does it has? It seems for me like you just picked some numbers, did some mathematical operations on these and get some result and said "that's the frequency in GHz on which the bus should work".
It's like saying "we have 4 apples, 6 oranges and 123 potatoes here, so in order to fully use these we need 123/4*6=123/24=5.125 liters per second of processing power".

Bus width? Where did you get that from? It's times not bits. 8192MB (8GB) is 64 times 128MB. I simply said that if a Pentium 3 handles 128MB fine with a 133 MHz data bus, to handle 64 times more memory a bus of 8.5 GHz is needed to have the same degree of fluidity.

But, things are not that way. Memory isn't like a faster hard drive, where you store lots of stuff and forget about it, it is work memory. So when a program actively works with more memory the overhead increases exponentially. Like I said, most people don't notice it because the actual data load of most programs is quite small. Video encoding, for example. It is easy to assume that just because it handles multigigabyte files it is a heavy task but it isn't. The actual data load is very small, so small a cheap phone can do it. It is simply repeated over and over to complete the entire file. Time increases linearly with file size.

However, complex programs such as spreadsheets and solid modeling do not follow the linear principle, because their data load increases directly with size. In those programs, more memory does nothing to speed things up because the bus becomes the limitation.

mikemex wrote:Bus width? Where did you get that from? It's times not bits. 8192MB (8GB) is 64 times 128MB. I simply said that if a Pentium 3 handles 128MB fine with a 133 MHz data bus, to handle 64 times more memory a bus of 8.5 GHz is needed to have the same degree of fluidity.

It was only my guess because you didn't explain all this in your first post.
Okay, Pentium 3 handles 128MB fine with a 133MHz data bus. It also handles 16MB fine with a 133MHz data bus. It also handles 512MB fine with a 133MHz data bus. Why are you dividing by 128, not by 512 and not by 32? Is there some reason that makes you believe that a person may utilize only 128MB with a 133MHz data bus? What data bus frequency has to do at all with memory capacity? The only thing that can be calculated from data bus frequency and memory capacity (and bus width) is how long will it take to read the entire RAM content or to fill up the entire RAM with some data. Your calculations make sense if you're trying to say "We need 8.5GHz bus frequency to read the entire 8GB of RAM in the same amount of time we're able to read 128MB of RAM on 133MHz bus", but still that doesn't mean one can't utilize their 8GB fully on 1333MHz bus or even on 133MHz bus.
And by the way, if you didn't notice, they use such amount of RAM on servers for a long time. Even on Pentium-3 servers. Maybe they're just crazy or stupid and want to throw their money away... or they just don't know that they won't use more than 128MB of RAM on Pentium 3, so there is no point in purchasing such insane amounts of RAM for such an insane price for their servers.

But, things are not that way. Memory isn't like a faster hard drive, where you store lots of stuff and forget about it, it is work memory. So when a program actively works with more memory the overhead increases exponentially.

And if the same memory won't fit into RAM and will be stored (=swapped) on HDD or even SSD, it will be faster?
You still haven't answered my question. What is that "overhead" you're talking about? Why it does increases exponentially? Why it depends of the process virtual memory, and not of the entire RAM installed into system? Why program, using the same amount of RAM, will work faster where there is not enough of RAM?

Like I said, most people don't notice it because the actual data load of most programs is quite small. Video encoding, for example. It is easy to assume that just because it handles multigigabyte files it is a heavy task but it isn't. The actual data load is very small, so small a cheap phone can do it. It is simply repeated over and over to complete the entire file. Time increases linearly with file size.

Yes, memory consumption of common video encoding algorithms does not depend on the file size, which means that increasing RAM size beyond a specific limit won't help these to work faster. Neither it will work slower though.

However, complex programs such as spreadsheets and solid modeling do not follow the linear principle, because their data load increases directly with size. In those programs, more memory does nothing to speed things up because the bus becomes the limitation.

Those programs may store all their data in the fast RAM instead of the slow HDD or SSD. And even if there is not RAM enough (following your advices), it will be constantly swapping, and in the result, it will read the same amount of data from RAM as in the case with enough RAM installed, plus an overhead on moving some data from RAM to swap on HDD/SSD and on moving some other data from swap back to RAM. No matter how fast your SSD will be (even if it is faster than RAM itself), with a modern OSes (which happens to use RAM as the primarily, well, random access memory, and SSD just as swap place for that memory) not enough RAM + SSD will work slower than enough RAM + SSD (and in most cases, slower than enough RAM + slow HDD, because data is to be read/written only once).
What do you mean by "the bus becomes the limitation"?
Okay, let's forget that all data from SSD goes through the RAM, let's assume that the bus becomes the limitation: even then, the SSD "bus" is only a stronger limitation than RAM bus.
For DDR3-1066 7-7-7, latency is 53ns and the peak transfer rate is 8533MB/s. Oh yes, and the bus speed is 533MHz.
For SATA2, the peak transfer rate is 300MB/s. If we will take a specific SSD into account, let's say, Intel X25-E Extreme, access time will be 75.000ns, and the peak transfer rate is up to 250MB/s for sequential read. E.g. for random 4K writes it is only 3300 IOPS, which is about half of thousand times slower than RAM.
If RAM bus is your limitation, then i can't imagine how you came to the thought of recommending an SSD.

Setting aside the RAM...

The SSD was my primary concern. Do I go with a less expensive 64GB SSD with a clean install (upgrade or not) and add the CF/SD expansions, do I go with a 160GB and ghost the existing (thereby saving all the thinkpad stuff and the backup), or go high end with a 256GB and not worry.

From what I've seen
64GB is about $100-$200, +35 express card CF
160GB is about $300-$450
256GB is about $450-$600

Seems like the 64gb size is getting lots of attention and bang for the buck.

And lastly - the Vista to Win7... Outside of Adobe, nothing seems to be geared towards 64 bit - so is it worthy to do a clean install of W7-64 or simply upgrade with the 32bit from Vista to W7?

Again - thanx.

New version SSDs (25 nm from older 34 nm) were just released by Micron (and soon Intel) at CES 2011. I'd expect the prices to drop soon just as they did when the 50 nm was replaced with the 34 nm.

I would do a fresh install on the SSD and play it safe. No point in taking chances.

If you haven't purchased a laptop yet, I'd wait until the refresh models start shipping. Then you can either get the newer model or save money on the older model.

brettmansdorf wrote:Setting aside the RAM...

The SSD was my primary concern. Do I go with a less expensive 64GB SSD with a clean install (upgrade or not) and add the CF/SD expansions, do I go with a 160GB and ghost the existing (thereby saving all the thinkpad stuff and the backup), or go high end with a 256GB and not worry.

From what I've seen
64GB is about $100-$200, +35 express card CF
160GB is about $300-$450
256GB is about $450-$600

Seems like the 64gb size is getting lots of attention and bang for the buck.

And lastly - the Vista to Win7... Outside of Adobe, nothing seems to be geared towards 64 bit - so is it worthy to do a clean install of W7-64 or simply upgrade with the 32bit from Vista to W7?

Again - thanx.

I think the speed of a ssd's read & writes is tied to it's size: the more memory chips it has access to, the faster it can read/write, so that might be a factor to consider in your purchase. Crosscheck user reviews on whichever drive you plan to purchase as the reliability of the drives may vary.
Finally, I would go with a clean install regardless of whether it is 64/160/256, just transfer the rest of the files afterward with an adapter or enclosure.

Brettmannsdorf, for what it is worth, I recently upgraded my x60T from Vista to Win7.

In general, things are faster and much more stable. Vista was very slow, and incredibly crash-prone in my configuration.

I got Win7pro, but I have a company machine (ie: the company paid, and they only use Pro).
I understand that you will need to go at least one step above the most basic Win7 to be able to access all the tablet functions.

Win7 is still Windows, but it (and the beautiful Lenovo hardware) have (barely) kept me in the windows ecology.

bb

Update...
Bought the F180 (corsair)... But haven't had the time (break) to load...
Bought Win 7 Ult X64... same...
Reviewing 8gb option - as I would like to keep this girl for a while and figure might as well max it out.

Will post 'review' once loaded (probably at end of week).
Thanx to all for the help.

I have X200T and I am about to do the same upgrades. I got SSD last year for my prior X61T and I actually killed it in 3 months. So I recommend regular backup. These drives work great when they work. When they don't you cannot even recover any data.

I got 8GB and W7Ux64 and I will be installing everything probably this weekend, once I archive all my data (just got my ultrabase and waiting for second hdd caddy to setup everything).