Thinkpads Forum

Hello Thinkpad people

I am now the happy owner of my first Thinkpad. It's a t400, uk model nm51ruk. A very serious machine!

The problem is that in the UK, AFAIK, it is not possible to specify cardbus instead of SD card reader when buying - you get what comes with the machine and this is the only machine available in the UK with the p9500 CPU , so I have the SD card reader.

I have a cardbus sound card which I need to plug in, so can anyone tell me if it is possible to remove the SD card reader to reveal the cardbus slot?

Here is the model on the IBM site:

http://www5.pc.ibm.com/uk/products.nsf/ ... eb_express

Thanks for any tips!

cheers

Matthew

There is already a thread about this:
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=67638

My T400 has a 7-in-1 card reader and an Express card slot.
There is no button to eject the card reader. However Windows shows "Ricoh R/RL/5C476(II) or Compatible CardBus Controller" in the device manager, which probably means the card reader is "glued" to the CardBus slot, just as you said.

Visit http://www.lenovoservicetraining.com/ and see if there is a video about removing the card reader.

Well, this tutorial shows how to disassemble the PC Card on R61/T61 (which are very similar to T500). It basically involves removing all the parts connected to the motherboard.
I suggest you go to a lenovo service and have it removed for you, sometimes such expenses can be a lot lower than the unforeseen ones after having your laptop stripped to bone.

http://www.lenovoservicetraining.com/io ... 61_HMM.pdf @ page 98.

wow - a really fast and well informed response on this forum! After a brief look at the service manual, I realised it might be pretty hairy... I think I'll have to invest in the expresscard adapter for my sound card (RME multiface) as it'll be £250 well spent since my machines never quite seem to end up the same as they started when I take them apart!

thanks for all the info

- matthew

Glad to help.
Well at least with ExpressCard you'll get faster bandwidth, lower latency and lower CPU consumption - just as if the card was plugged into a PCI-E slot.