Thinkpads Forum

Hi everyone,
I purchased a good deal on a refurbished T400. Despite a few set backs, I think it will end up being a good laptop for me.

I'm going to swap out the hard drive and memory for larger capacities. That's easy enough. It just has integrated graphics and a DVD-ROM drive, however. In the future, I may want to swap these out for a DVD R/W drive and possibly add the ATI graphics card.

I can see the DVD drive swap not being overly difficult, but I imagine the graphics card would be very difficult (or impossible?).

Does anyone have any experience with this? If so, where should I start?

I did a search on ebay, but did turn up any parts I was looking for (e.g. a DVD RW drive for a T400). Do these show up on occasion on ebay?

Some other questions:
-How difficult would it be to do without some sort of service manual?
-Are service manuals available? If so, where from?
-What other models would be compatible with the T400 for the DVD drive and graphics?

Thanks.

You can not upgrade just GPU...

You have to replace whole motherboard to do that...

Everything else that you want to replace can be done easily...

Some documents (with instructions) can be found here just enter your model and other info...

Also, I don't remember where, but I'm sure there are some how-to videos around...

Just remeber the screw sizes and what screw goes where. Thats all.
Even the old monolithe gave no more information. They used to scare buyers into going back to them for paltry services.
I just issued purchas e order for a T41 screw set+screw caps for nearly Rs.850.[Which I presume they should be ashamed of selling in the first place].I spent that money just for fun
as i have now 2 opened t41s here and iamrepenting for having spent nearly 1700 us $ to get
a low end T400 from canada without a LED panel.[ it has some hardware which xP refuses to
smell....] .
The chinese are not good at marking screws at the bottomofthe instrument which helps a lot
in learning what screw goes where. They have however cut down on the number of screws required significantly.The body is of industrial plastic and be very careful ..it gets broken by a
little tangential force on the components.