Thinkpads Forum

Had a quick question that seems to be relevant here.

My consumer-grade gaming notebook(Asus G73) seems to be dying on me, surprise, surprise. Great hardware, but the hangups, crashes, and other hardware issues have made it perfectly clear that beast isn't much longer for the world. My X200's sitting in a closet pretty much unused due to a major drop a year or so ago that severely damaged it.

That leaves my only two choices for a reliable computer to my old ancient T21 that's still chugging along, or the T500 I've been using for a while. Unfortunately the T500 needs a fair amount of reconditioning. The display seems to have a very bad internal 'shadow' effect that's slowly taking over all the real estate and the battery barely lasts 30 minutes. Since times are hard and I'm shoring up my part-time job with a traveling PC tech service I've started(I've got a small yet stable client base right now, thankfully), I'm looking to 'shore up' my trusty T500 until I move out of state, go to school, and have an excuse to jump into a nicely configured W520 or similar.

I was hoping to find a T61p with a fried GPU and WUXGA display to swap in for starters, a decent 9-cell battery, and perhaps a minor CPU and RAM upgrade if budget allows(I've been able to find T9600s on Feebay for about $50 or so and two 4GB modules are pretty cheap nowadays as well).

Would it be feasible to bring this old workhorse up to spec for a few months and press it back into service? I've been using the G73 out on calls; powerful system but obviously a 17" gaming beast has its drawbacks as far as mobility and needing external power goes(though its battery life is better than my T-series at this point). A friend has also offered me his newer HP netbook for a pretty decent price(about $125), so I have that for an option as well. Any ideas?

I'd upgrade the T500 with a new screen, battery, memory to 4 GB, and a SSD and leave it at that. Screen and battery can be bought here at the market place for pretty cheap. A new to you LCD, from TuuS for example, would be the route I would take. 2x2GB of DDR 3 is pretty cheap these days. I picked up 2x2GB for $15 from the local classifieds from the numerous people who "feel" that they need 2x4GB to surf the web. The SSD is a luxury but a really nice luxury which you can transfer over to the W520 when you upgrade. The CPU, while sexy, will not provide the bang for buck.

A T500 upgrade to these specs are still very capable and will blow any netbook out of the water. Not great for gaming because of the GPU but still very capable. IMO, the best tool for gaming is a desktop PC.

Absolutely. Unless you need top performance, the C2D should offer performance aplenty. My R60e is perfectly fine as a daily driver. You might want to post over in the marketplace to see if anyone has an extra screen they'd sell you. The WSXGA+ are generally considered a bit better quality wise than the WUXGA.

T500 was one of Lenovo's finer moments IMO.

Leave the CPU alone, upgrade the RAM (cheap), source a nice WSXGA+ panel and a decent battery.

You'll be glad you did.

Thanks for the input, everyone.

The system stands as this: WSXGA+ display that's growing 'dirty' under the top glass layer, battery with 230 cycles and 25% life remaining, P8400 CPU, 4GB RAM, Lenovo-branded Samsung C800 256GB SSD(which is honestly quite slow for an SSD; the only firmware upgrade I've seen for it has a good chance of bricking it as it's meant for a Dell), and a 500GB 7200RPM HDD in the Ultrabay. This one has the switchable GPU, although I find myself gaming less and working/browsing/writing more these days.

Running virus/malware scans on hard drives pulled from client systems, streaming video from Netflix and doing other work seems to bottleneck the system sometimes; I'm definitely getting some slowdowns somewhere and my RAM usage is usually at 60-80% on a nearly constant basis. This isn't a dinosaur but even with the SSD this system doesn't feel as snappy as other Montevina systems I've used. Any input as to the bottleneck?

Sometime the best coarse of action is a clean fresh install of Windows without all the bloatware. If this was my machine that is exactly what I would do. The current specs of your system is pretty good.

Cigarguy wrote:Sometime the best coarse of action is a clean fresh install of Windows without all the bloatware. If this was my machine that is exactly what I would do. The current specs of your system is pretty good.

+1 and then some.

What OS are you running on it, BTW?

Running Win7 Ultimate x64. Did a re-OS about two months ago. Other than the typical drivers and some of the Lenovo software I do use I don't have much on this system; Office apps, Visual Studio, TPFC, browsers, music, documents, etc... I keep it pretty slimmed down. I'd consider a faster SSD but I plan on going to mSATA on my next system.

With 4GB RAM I'd be running a 32-bit OS unless I were planning to upgrade.

You may want to get rid of the SSD - I'm not keen on that generation of Samsungs - but YMMV. Crucial C300 which is a great SSD in my book can be had for a song nowadays, and there are still some NOS ones around.

Out of sheer curiosity, how many processes do you have running on a freshly booted machine?

ajkula66 wrote:With 4GB RAM I'd be running a 32-bit OS unless I were planning to upgrade.

You may want to get rid of the SSD - I'm not keen on that generation of Samsungs - but YMMV. Crucial C300 which is a great SSD in my book can be had for a song nowadays, and there are still some NOS ones around.

Out of sheer curiosity, how many processes do you have running on a freshly booted machine?

64-bit is not just about ability to address more memory.
The 64-bit processors have more registers which allow many applications to run more efficiently even without the additional memory.
There's other benefits too. For example, on UN*X systems, the standard date functions are limited to dates between 1901 and 2038 but on 64 bit systems that isn't an issue.

Also, at this point most software developers use and develop on 64-bit systems so weird bugs due to coders not being careful (such as bugs involving dates) are more likely to occur on 32-bit systems. I ran into that myself on a program I wrote for vertebrate museum specimen records. Specimens prior to 1901 were not correctly represented on 32-bit systems because I neglected to think about the date issue and code correctly for it.

FunkyRes wrote:64-bit is not just about ability to address more memory.
The 64-bit processors have more registers which allow many applications to run more efficiently even without the additional memory.

I don't think we are talking about the same thing here.

I've got two machines with 64-bit CPUs in constant use, one with a 32-bit preload and the other with a 64-bit preload, both W7 Pro.

The 32-bit OS runs more processes (as in 90 on fresh boot) without going over 2GB of RAM. Its 64-bit counterpart is at 3GB already with less than 70...

My point being, regardless of CPU's ability to run a 64-bit OS, when one has less-than-optimal amount of RAM at their disposal, they're likely better off with a 32-bit version of the same OS.

Since the machine in question can take 8GB, the easiest thing to do would be to upgrade the RAM and continue running the 64-bit OS.

Sorry it took me so long to reply.

From a fresh boot I've got 99 processes running with 36% physical memory used. That's at an idle desktop with nothing else running but what boots on startup. TPFC, some of the Lenovo software, antivirus, Skype, etc. I'm going to go through the startup folder and clean that up and see if it makes any difference.

LegendaryKA8 wrote:
From a fresh boot I've got 99 processes running with 36% physical memory used. That's at an idle desktop with nothing else running but what boots on startup. TPFC, some of the Lenovo software, antivirus, Skype, etc. I'm going to go through the startup folder and clean that up and see if it makes any difference.

That's a lot IMO...you could easily trim that down to 60...

What would the real world performance increase be in going from a T8600 to a T9900 cpu? Is it something I would notice in usual office appications, web, email, some Lightroom?

stuartf wrote:What would the real world performance increase be in going from a T8600 to a T9900 cpu? Is it something I would notice in usual office appications, web, email, some Lightroom?

Most likely no.

stuartf wrote:What would the real world performance increase be in going from a T8600 to a T9900 cpu? Is it something I would notice in usual office appications, web, email, some Lightroom?

Here, getting a SSD is like the best path to better performance.