Thinkpads Forum

I had fun upgrading my three R61e, looking to do it to a R500 next. Two questions...

One, is anything (modded bios, etc) needed to make a Core2 Extreme 1066mhz CPU work properly?

Two, if I took a no trackpad palmrest from a R61e, could i fit it on the R500?

Thank you in advance!

No and no.

The R500 generation moved the headphone and microphone jacks to the front of the laptop and there may be differences in where the screws go between the palmrests so if you don't want to use the touchpad in the R500, your best option is to turn it off in the BIOS or in the OS. It's set shallower in the palmrest than the older smaller touchpads anyway so it should be, paradoxically, less noticeable in use than the previous gen.

The R500's touchpad is sucky anyway since it's a piece of crap ALPS.

TPFanatic wrote:The R500 generation moved the headphone and microphone jacks to the front of the laptop and there may be differences in where the screws go between the palmrests so if you don't want to use the touchpad in the R500, your best option is to turn it off in the BIOS or in the OS. It's set shallower in the palmrest than the older smaller touchpads anyway so it should be, paradoxically, less noticeable in use than the previous gen.

The R500's touchpad is sucky anyway since it's a piece of crap ALPS.

Cool to know if it can be turned off in bios. Wish I could do that for my T420.

I see some people have installed 45W CPU's in R500 and T500's, but I wanted it to run fairly cool, so I bought a P9600 instead. Half the price of a p9700 and near identical on benchmarks...

excal32 wrote:Cool to know if it can be turned off in bios. Wish I could do that for my T420.

The touchpad can be turned off on Windows and Linux.

On Windows:

axur-delmeria wrote:

excal32 wrote:Cool to know if it can be turned off in bios. Wish I could do that for my T420.

The touchpad can be turned off on Windows and Linux.

I actually had to uninstall Ultranav drivers as I use my T420 for lots of music recording work and the Ultranav as well as Bluetooth drivers caused an unusual amount of interrupts. Had to uninstall both to restore reliable audio quality...

Sorry for the dumb question, anyone know if there's any issues running 16gb 2x8gb RAM in a R500? Waiting on my X9100 to show up from China

excal32 wrote:Wish I could do that for my T420.

Disconnect the touchpad's cable from the motherboard.

excal32 wrote:Sorry for the dumb question, anyone know if there's any issues running 16gb 2x8gb RAM in a R500? Waiting on my X9100 to show up from China

I believe it's been tried and 8GB is the max for the GM45 chipset. See: http://forum.notebookreview.com/threads ... 825/page-2

Just tried my only ddr3 8gb module in a few T400's, they also use the Intel GM45. They all beeped and wouldn't boot.

Thanks all, i'll grab a 2x4gb for it