options to increase A31p performance

[FrankK-F]

A31pguy's wish list overlaps with mine as well.

Three spindle machine. --- YES, definitely
Bluetooth -- YES
WiMax or WiFi G -- YES
USB 2.0 -- YES 2 ports
Firewire 800 mbps -- YES 1 port
Docking station with PCI slot + PCMCIA -- PLUS 'UltraBay'
Dual Layer DVD/HD DVD/Blu-Ray DVD + DVD-ROM/DVDR -- YES
CD-R/CD-RW -- YES

legacy serial port -- YES
USB ports
Touchpad .. NOT for me
Modem .. YES RJ11 PLUS RJ45
1000gb Ethernet -- OK - yes
SD card slot -- a fast PC-Card adaptor will do for me.
PCMCIA .. at least 2

Nice to haves:

Dual Core Processor -- this makes sense (for faster booting?), for image processing, CAD, and other hungry apps. Backgound ops are my candidates for multi-tasking.
24-bit Sound .. baubles -- for music / video editing?
RAID with striping -- if this means using 2 of the 3 spindles of the machine ..maybe. If the issue is I/O speed I'd prefer faster HDD (perhaps 120GB/7200); if the issue is data safety -- my weekly cloning strategy and rotating the clone into the primary position seems OK - as long as the HDD connectors hold up.
Two batteries -- a high capacity battery (4 solid hours of intensive use) would make more sense to me; the current Ultrabay battery approach also works for me.
ThinkLight with 2-3x of current LED output would be better on the black keyboard.
Display option beyond UXGA in a 15-16in display .. for image processing, CAD, multiple open apps.
TrackPoint .. for me it is a backup device and very handy when needed.
Memory beyond 2GB -- vs Virtual Memory on the HDD. With the declining cost of system board memory .. could someone address the Pros-Cons?


At this level of machine -- talking about small and light is probably not reality. The display defines footprint .. but weight reduction and cubic inches is fair game.

My usage is in desktop / engineering workstation territory -- have 2 A31p units -- with a jungle of cables to various external devices -- L200p monitor, iPAQ (PPC), Router, DSL Modem, USBHub, ZIP Drive, ORB-Drive, Printers (3x USB and 1x Parallel), Scanners (1x flatbed USB /1x film SCSI), PC-Card frame grabber, battery chargers (GPS iPAQ, digicam, cell phone), etc... It never ceases to amaze how these gadgets accumulate .. many of them keepers and indispensible.

Some wireless (radio or IR) technology to replace communications wiring with peripherals might be a winning solution; I've so many cables that I had to label both ends to manage the chaos.

Back to the A31p .. if there is a new genuine IBM A**p on the horizon .. I'll be in the market. However, the general question I keep asking is the value of hard-wired devices on the MoBo vs external devices (PC-Cards) to keep current with shifting technologies .. e.g BT, WiFi, FW-800, etc. With to total cost in these systems, carry-over of HDDs and peripherals is also an issue.

My view from the peanut gallery..

Frank K-F

[a31pguy]

Almost forgot:

and a better $$#$%#$%#$F$ GPU and CPU cooling fan(s)!!!!!

[slagmi]

I'd love to see IBM go the way of one model with an upgradable video board, but I don't see that happening.

IMO, if anyone at all will be offering a com/serial port at that point, IBM will.

OS support for legacy serial port? Would they dare not? My take is floppy disk will be supported so will serial. Floppy=Super I/O chip or similar. Serial will be available but the port will physically be there only if the manufacturer of the hardware wants to. Many will see it as a way to eliminate a cubic inch, a $ and support snafus involving customers with old serial devices, many of which will never work on the new OS anyways.

Longtooth in a year? I'd say 2. You've been around long enough to see the pattern, right? No reason to believe it's any different this time around. We don't have a 'real' beta yet. I can't name one vendor besides MS that has written any drivers. But yea, we'll all want or already have a new notebook by then, regardless. I won't jump right away. Personally, I didn't use XP in a 'live' environment until service pack 1 showed up. When it's time for a new notebook , I won't wait on Longhorn!

[a31pguy]

Interesting.

Cranking up the video ram and dac with the RAD utility yet?
If so how high?

Problems that I have found - the ATi FireGL is POWERPLAY equipped. So while running normally the GPU frequency is dynamic so is the RAM. Cranking it up to the rated specs at 270 Mhz for the GPU and 210 Mhz for the DDR VRAM yields minor improvements in the overall max fps but not the average fps. The average fps actually drops. Works great for about 5 minutes - then the heat causes artifiacts to appear.

Setting the the RAM and DAC speeds statically also cause massive heat buildup in the GPU and Memory - the thinkpad - even modifed is still a heat trap. I haven't modified the GPU to have a cooler with heat pipes to the CPU cooler yet. I have the parts to do it - but no time.

Reinstalling the drivers from scratch reset the graphics settings to POWERPLAY controlled. Average fps performance actually increased.
I suspect there is a threshold that increased the max fps and avg fps that is slightly lower than the rated spec of 270 mhz GPU and 210 mhz mem that can be used all the time. The range would be somewhere in the 180-270 mhz GPU and 150-210 mhz Mem area.

So far the lession learned - let POWERPLAY determine the graphics speed. When it needs it - it will pump up the speed. When it doesn't - it lowers it to cool the chips.

[jack NYC]

First let me say how thrilled I am to find this board and fantastic group of users!!
I have foolishly been considering dumping my A31P and now that I have read these posts I'm excited to upgrade and repair this wonderful computer.
If I could get some advice/input on my "issues" I would be so appreciative. I currenty run an AVID editing system on my Thinkpad and people marvel at my set up.
A couple of problems.
**1 My keyboard is Kaput. The spacebar fell off and the pointing device has locked up. I think I can replace it, i found the service manual but I can't seem to locate a keyboard. Anyone have any ideas?
**2 The idea of replacing my main drive with 7200 one is perfect. I am so happy to hear too that I can put 2gigs of memory in. I'm all over that. My big question is migrating the Main drive onto a new one. Any proven ideas for that? I still have that hidden partition on the current one.
Thanks so much in advance. I hope I can contribute to the board as well.
Jack

[a31pguy]

First let me say how thrilled I am to find this board and fantastic group of users!!
I have foolishly been considering dumping my A31P and now that I have read these posts I'm excited to upgrade and repair this wonderful computer.
If I could get some advice/input on my "issues" I would be so appreciative. I currenty run an AVID editing system on my Thinkpad and people marvel at my set up.
A couple of problems.
**1 My keyboard is Kaput. The spacebar fell off and the pointing device has locked up. I think I can replace it, i found the service manual but I can't seem to locate a keyboard. Anyone have any ideas?
**2 The idea of replacing my main drive with 7200 one is perfect. I am so happy to hear too that I can put 2gigs of memory in. I'm all over that. My big question is migrating the Main drive onto a new one. Any proven ideas for that? I still have that hidden partition on the current one.
Thanks so much in advance. I hope I can contribute to the board as well.
Jack

1) Ebay - there are seven on there last time I checked. "a31p keyboard" search.

2) Partition magic works for me the best. The other is Norton Ghost 9.0.
get the ultrabay hdd sled to make the duplicate of the current hard drive.

[jack NYC]

Yep, I just got what looks like a clean A31P keyboard for $10! Wish me luck, I hope I'm not listing my thinkpad in a week on Ebay as Parts!! LOL

I have the sled with my current 2nd HDD so I'll try one of those programs as soon as I can get my hands on the 7200 80 or 100 gig seagate.

Thanks again.

Jack

[JHEM]

Yep, I just got what looks like a clean A31P keyboard for $10! Wish me luck, I hope I'm not listing my thinkpad in a week on Ebay as Parts!! LOL

Are you positive that your A31p isn't still under warranty Jack?

Did you check it here: http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... yle=lenovo

If it's still under warranty, most of them still are, a phone call to IBM will get you a replacement keyboard via overnight delivery.

Regards,

James

[jack NYC]

Below is what i originally wrote, just for grins I went on the link you gave me and it says I have a warranty until 2006!! I'm going to pursue this and see what happens, WOW
THANKS!!


No it's not but Thank you for looking out for me.
I bought it in May 2003 from the IBM Ebay Store as refurbished. It had something like a 60 minute warranty LOL. The cost savings at the time more than makes up for it. Once I get the keyboard fixed and now that I know that i can cram 2gigs of memory into it I think I'm going to be very happy. Not many laptops out there you can run high end video editing on with potential of 300+gigs of HD space etc. It's only a 1.6ghz processor so maybe even upgrading that is worth it. I'll see, I dont want to burn the thing out!

[jack NYC]

Can anyone weigh in on if I'm insane to try and locate, install, configure, and troubleshoot the Bluetooth Daughter card instead of getting an aftermarket PCMCIA card. I love the idea of built in just not sure this all worth it.
Thanks
Jack

[a31pguy]

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.ph ... =bluetooth

Among the pile of computer parts sitting here is a Compact Flash bluetooth, D-link USB bluetooth, and microsoft USB bluetooth. The one I use is the built-in the most and the others for devices to connect to it. It's not insane if you are planning to keep the laptop for a bit.

Above is a link to another posting about upgrading.

IBM Parts! http://www-132.ibm.com/content/home/sto ... _main.html

CDC BTH 12P3872 $81.00

ANTENNA 27L0685 $26.00

INVERTER 26P8133

Clearplate for A31p 46L5024 $14

(Sorry James - stole your postings!)

Hardware Manual
http://www-306.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... MIGR-39796

[fongj]

Below is what i originally wrote, just for grins I went on the link you gave me and it says I have a warranty until 2006!! I'm going to pursue this and see what happens, WOW
THANKS!!


No it's not but Thank you for looking out for me.
I bought it in May 2003 from the IBM Ebay Store as refurbished. It had something like a 60 minute warranty LOL. The cost savings at the time more than makes up for it. Once I get the keyboard fixed and now that I know that i can cram 2gigs of memory into it I think I'm going to be very happy. Not many laptops out there you can run high end video editing on with potential of 300+gigs of HD space etc. It's only a 1.6ghz processor so maybe even upgrading that is worth it. I'll see, I dont want to burn the thing out!

Wow! You are so lucky... I bought my refurbished A31p (2653-XX9, based off the 2653-H5U) around October 2002 (actually, I bought three, one for me, two for family members who paid me back) from IBM's "certified used" page, and the warranty was basically a guarantee against DOA. If I check my warranty, it says it expired July 2002. Last year the hard drive died on me twice, and very very bad times.

On that note, and on the topic of this thread, I just upgraded my RAM from two 256mb sticks to one 1gb stick and one 256mb stick, and startup is still slooooow. I can confidently point to the hard drive as the bottleneck. I have a 4200rpm 80gb Toshiba hard drive that I "upgraded" to at the beginning of this year after my 5400rpm 60gb Travelstar died. I can't wait until 7200rpm notebook drives make it big, and drop in price. Until then, I'll put my laptop to standby instead of a full shutdown, and hopefully the ram will help with the audio/video work that I sometimes do.

P.S. I'm scared to ask, but did I get a good deal paying $2000 in October 2002 for what I thought was a very "decked out" A31p? (http://www5.pc.ibm.com/us/products.nsf/ ... p/_2653h5u) I saw all the features/specs, and that retail price was supposed to be ~$3700, and decided to go for it.

[fongj]

With my my RAM now upgraded to a 1gb stick and 256mb stick, I now see that the processor is the bottleneck when it comes to the video editing I wanted to speed up my A31p (1.7GHz) to do. My CPU resources were all used up way before all the RAM could be utilized... Now I'm considering the 2.6GHz processor upgrade.

I benchmarked with SiSoftware Sandra Professional 2005 today, and more than anything else, my processor specs were comparable to a Celeron 1.8GHz?!? Since there are A31p benchmark numbers using PC Wizard 2005 here: http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?t=10202, I will benchmark with PC Wizard 2005 and post/compare.

P.S. I know posting two consecutive posts is not encouraged in forums, but my last posts has been edited to death...

[jack NYC]

I"m in the same place as you fong, even trying to optimize for video rendering too. Just bumped my ram to 1.5 gig and bought a 2.4 ghz processor. I felt the extra cost for 2.6 was not worth it, got the 2.4 for $99 on ebay. I'm going to keep the 1.6 around for insurance, it's practically worthless on ebay.

[fongj]

Hey Jack,

Thanks for the response... even though my response is kinda late, better late than never to keep this thread going...

The past few days I did some rendering on my A31p, now 1.25gb RAM but still 1.7GHz. I was glad to see the RAM mostly utilized. Vegas 5.0 will at most use around 700mb of RAM during rendering. The rendering (8 minute slideshow type video, with lots of transitions, and some motion video) was fast. I was very surprised. The rendering in Preview quality took around 20 minutes and at "Good" quality take a bit more than an hour. That's faster than my Dell 400SC (server-quality computer) with 2.8GHz Pentium 4 Hyperthreading, with 768mb PC3200 ECC RAM running on at dual channel (same video takes 30 minutes for Preview quality, 3 hours for Good quality).

My friend who has a lot more experience with video rendering told me the processor is pretty much the main bottleneck. (He has a PowerMac G4 (or G5, not sure) with 2.something dual processor with more than 2gb RAM.) I'm glad to see that a processor upgrade can wait a while for my Thinkpad.

[WSpaceport]

I'm scared to ask, but did I get a good deal paying $2000 in October 2002 for what I thought was a very "decked out" A31p? (http://www5.pc.ibm.com/us/products.nsf/ ... p/_2653h5u) I saw all the features/specs, and that retail price was supposed to be ~$3700, and decided to go for it.

I don't know about you, but I just recently acquired one on eBay for $849 (+$25 to have a clean install of Win2K Pro):

Model 2653-H3U
P4 1.7 GHZ
40 GB HDD
1 GB RAM
DVD/CDRW
250mb zip drive
Battery (Hardly Used + Spare)
ThinkDock II port replicator, AC & laptop bag

One of the selling points (at least for me) is that the A31p is currently the only laptop being used by NASA aboard the Int'l Space Station and (upcoming) Return to Flight of space shuttle.

[fongj]

I'm scared to ask, but did I get a good deal paying $2000 in October 2002 for what I thought was a very "decked out" A31p? (http://www5.pc.ibm.com/us/products.nsf/ ... p/_2653h5u) I saw all the features/specs, and that retail price was supposed to be ~$3700, and decided to go for it.

I don't know about you, but I just recently acquired one on eBay for $849 (+$25 to have a clean install of Win2K Pro):

Model 2653-H3U
P4 1.7 GHZ
40 GB HDD
1 GB RAM
DVD/CDRW
250mb zip drive
Battery (Hardly Used + Spare)
ThinkDock II port replicator, AC & laptop bag

Okay, that's not too bad... Two years is a long time in terms of computer prices... I think I got a decent deal for what I got at the time.

One of the selling points (at least for me) is that the A31p is currently the only laptop being used by NASA aboard the Int'l Space Station and (upcoming) Return to Flight of space shuttle.

Wow, I didn't know that... That's pretty cool.. If anybody ever asks about my laptop, I'll be sure to mention that.

lol... Those astronauts are lucky to have the A31p, though, because they get the power, but don't have to feel the 8+ lbs weight... =P