surprisingly "fun" makeover of SL500

[popsmoke]

My earlier posts were about the joy to be had from daily driving old T42s on XP. Alas, in the last year or so I have had to wean myself away from that. T42s -- well, you already know the issues, so I'll skip all that. As for Windows XP, the excellent Russian programmer behind Mypal68, and more recently Mypal74, seems to be fighting a losing battle against the 3rd party "software sentries" coming from Cloudflare, among others. These days I am using mainly T61s, easy to get parts, easy to service, and a close cousin to the defunct T42. Saw an Ebay ad from a seller who claimed to have an "almost new" SL500 in his closet, at a tempting price. I knew the SL500 is one of the most disliked models of all time, but it is supposed to be a step up from the T61, so I went for it. It is clunky, with an odd design, but the screen is excellent, keyboard too. Performance sucked. So I picked up a Kingston 500GB ssd, Intel T9900 chip, and upgraded 4GB DDR2-6400 ram. For software, I did a tri-boot, machine offers the user a boot into 8.1, or 10, or 11. Your choice. RESULT: one of the easiest upgrades ever. Remove two bottom panels and you're in. Thermal design is good (unlike the T400 series, for example) and although the can chip run hot, the system can keep up. Touches 80c and backs off nicely. (Unlike the T410's that endlessly try to self-destruct.) I did not use software benchmarks, but with over 20 assorted machines in my network, I have learned to despise the Youtube site, it runs 100s of algos in the background, counts the hairs in your nostrils, and demands many times the processing power of similar sites. All my T61s have trouble with Youtube, but the upgraded SL500 loaded the site almost effortlessly. Color me impressed. The haters could learn from this. I think.

[axur-delmeria]

Try installing the T61's processor into the SL500 and see if it's still fast.