Is it possible to upgrade motherboard in A21p?

[cilkay]

Hello,

I have an A21p 2629-H1G in which I have 512M of RAM. My primary complaints about this machine are lack of disk space, which can be fixed easily, and lack of RAM, which cannot be fixed without a motherboard upgrade. The CPU is fast enough for the things I do.

I like this machine so much that I would be willing to spend some money upgrading the motherboard to something more modern in order to extend its life. Are there any motherboards from other ThinkPad models that would fit in this machine and be able to drive the 1600x1200 display?

[vanaya]

Welcome to the fourm!

Are you still running the original Windows 98 OS??
And is the original hard drive a 4200rpm or 5400rpm?? The original description from lenovo.com doesn't give speed of hdd.

[pianowizard]

If you don't already have one, getting a 7200rpm hard drive may be the easiest way to boost the laptop's performance.

UPDATE: I just looked up A21p in the tawbook. It appears that the original hard drive is 5400rpm, so upgrading to 7200rpm will give you a noticeable though not dramatic speed increase. How long ago did you install the operating system? Getting a new 7200rpm drive AND doing a clean install of Windows should help quite a bit.

[cilkay]

Hello,

Thank you for your responses.

The only time the machine ever ran Windows 98 was when it came from the factory. I have been running Linux on it since I bought it circa 2001. With only 512M of RAM, running a modern distro with KDE, PostgreSQL, Apache, and various development tools is not very viable. Before you suggest I opt for a "lightweight" desktop manager, I love KDE and have no interest in switching. Of the desktop managers that I have tested, which includes GNOME, XFce, ICEwm, and twm, the only ones that were appreciably lighter were ICEwm and twm, neither of which hold any appeal for me. I have tried to run Windows XP on it as well and even if I was willing to live with Windows, which I am not, there is still the issue of 512M being quite insufficient for a developer.

I am aware that installing a faster hard drive will improve performance and I am prepared to do that mostly because a 30GB disk drive is insufficient for my needs anyway but that does not address the issue of needing more RAM. The motherboard in that model only supports 512M so the only way to have more RAM is to do a complete motherboard swap with something else that would fit in the same case and be compatible with the TFT and keyboard. The question is, "Are there motherboards from other ThinkPads which would support more RAM that would fit in this case and that would be compatible with the peripherals?"

[fasterbybike]

If you don't already have one, getting a 7200rpm hard drive may be the easiest way to boost the laptop's performance.

UPDATE: I just looked up A21p in the tawbook. It appears that the original hard drive is 5400rpm, so upgrading to 7200rpm will give you a noticeable though not dramatic speed increase. How long ago did you install the operating system?

My A21p was fitted with a Travelstar 32GH which as average seek time of 12 ms.

A Hitachi 7K100 has a 10 ms read and 11 ms write latency so don't expect to see much improvement there. The larger cache will help of course.

[ajkula66]

No MB will fit that would accept more than 512 Mb of RAM. That is, in fact, the biggest limitation of otherwise highly interesting A2xP series...