Thinkpads Forum

hi guys! i just found this forum after getting my first thinkpad. its a used 600e PII 366. it currently has 128 1 piece of ram and 32 onboard ram. my bios version is something like xxx35ww . the issue im having is no matter which ram pieces i put in either 2 x 128 or 2 x 64 etcetc... it doesnt get past the ibm start screen. these are all compatible memory which i checked in another 600e and they work fine. if i try any of then individually, itll work with no problems. any ideas to resolve this issue?

Do you have one bad memory socket? Did you try one piece of memory in either of the two sockets?

Make sure you upgrade to the latest BIOS before figuring something is wrong. If that doesn't work try cyborgs suggestion. If it's the memory socket then you're stuck with a limit of 288MB of RAM (256MB module + the 32MB on board. That's sufficient for Win98SE or Win2K. Only a few have had any luck running XP on a 600E. I didn't even try. It runs adequately w/98SE, but I don't think I'd put anything that will tax it more on.

ok guys... i figured out it was a bad socket.. i have 2 600e and they both ran XP fine. i even had the old bios versions 26ww and 36ww.. should i even bother with the XP updates from ibm? and what does the meter mizer do? i installed it but i still dont get a power meter in my taskbar.

If you can get Service Pack 1a installed you should proabably do that. I would hold off on Service Pack 2 though. If you don't connect to the Internet a lot I wouldn't bother with it at all. SP2 still causes a lot of headaches and changes a bunch of settings that will really slow an older machine down. You can go back and tweak it, and you'll have to! But you have to dig to find the tweaking info. You won't find much (if any) at MS. It looks to me like they rushed SP2 out before testing it very well.