Upgrading my Thinkpad R60

[Koen001]

I'm from Belgium so my English is not 100% perfect

My Thinkpad R60 is almost 3 years old. It still does the job so I don't want to buy a new one, but I would like it to be a bit faster.

Thinkpad R60 - 9461 - 54G

Intel T2400 Core Duo
2GB DDRII 667mhz (upgraded a year ago)
80GB 5400rpm SATA 8mb

I have ordered the " 2.5 Notebook HDD 160GB SATA 16MB 7200rpm WESTERN DIGITAL (WD1600BEKT) " to replace the existing 5400rpm drive. I realise that the drive will produce more heat and a bit more noise but I've read some reviews and it seems that this drive is very quite.

I would like to upgrade the CPU as well. I can only install CPU's with FSB 667mhz. I've installed the latest BIOS but it doesn't state the supported CPU's. I've looked arround and I think that the Intel T7400 Core 2 Duo 667mhz will be a good choice. How do I now for sure that the CPU will work?

[ZaZ]

Welcome to the forums.

The hard drive, unless you've got a specific need to do very CPU intensive tasks, is a much better upgrade than the CPU. Office and Internet type stuff don't really push the CPU enough to where you'd notice a difference. I've had Seagate and Hitachi 7200RPM drives in both my R60s. I never noticed any extra heat or noise from either. The extra thickness of the R series does have its advantages. I think the hard drive noise issue is a bit hit or miss. You can have two drives of the same make/model, one is noisy while the other is not. I'd say try it out, if it's too noisy, exchange it for a different one.

You should be able to upgrade to any Merom Core 2 Duo including the T7600 with the appropriate bios update, which it seems you've done. I know on some of the T60s you can't upgrade unless you've got a rev 3 motherboard. I don't know if this applies to the R60 too. Perhaps someone smarter than I can answer that one. You can use CPU-Z to check to see which revision your mother board is. Good Luck.

[archer6]

Greetings & Welcome to the Forum!
You have chosen a very good hard drive, I am currently using one like it and find it fast, cool & quiet. As far as other upgrades, I would suggest you take it one step at a time to see if you truly need to upgrade the CPU. After the hard drive upgrade if you are still looking for more speed I would go up to 3GB of ram. This is easier and less expensive than upgrading the CPU. You may find with just the hard drive & ram you no longer need to consider changing the CPU. The T2400 is an excellent processor that runs cool & trouble free. You may want to stay with it.
.
Cheers...

[Koen001]

Thanks for the feedback! I use my laptop mostly for programming. Visual Studio, Oracle Server, MySQL server, IntelliJ, TomCat server. If all the services are loaded and I'm programming in Visual Studio, the hard drive gets a hard time. The HD light keeps burning for a couple of minutes so maybe you're right that a CPU upgrade won't be such a good investment. I saw some reviews about the T7400 against the T2400 and when it comes to 3d rendering & games, the T7400 is much faster than the T2400 but I don't do that stuff.

[teladoy]

Hi I am wondering if you did change the processor I am getting ready for one I use OSX so need core2duo if you done it and have some recommendation please let me know.
Thank you

[ZaZ]

Yes it can be done, up to a T7600.

[teladoy]

fred what about some inside , bios , thermo gel and whatever is my first one need to know.
thank you