Thinkpads Forum

I have been working to upgrade my TP 390e (stock PII 333) to a faster processor. Purchased a PIII 500 from eBay and installed it, without any problems and it boots fine, albeit slow with no apparent speed bump. Am running WinXP Pro and "My Computer" reports the processor as PIII 333 vs. PII 333. The bios still states 333 also. Have 384mb of RAM (1-256mb PC100, and 1-128mb PC133). I went thru every page of the bios, and there doesn't appear to be any way to change the speed. I hit the "reset" to defaults, and didn't work. I've also rebooted several times with no avail. Is there any other way to get this laptop to "acknowledge" the faster chip? I do have the latest bios installed according to IBM. Should I install the bios from another machine, like a 390X, or would that be considered to risky? Is there anyway to overclock somehow?

I've also looked for any XP specific updates for this laptop and haven't found any. Yes, all WinXP updates are complete also.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated and thanks!

If these notebooks act anything like their desktop counterparts...

This is purely a hardware issue.

The PII 333 is designed for a 66 MHz bus... it runs at 5 x that bus, for a processor speed of 333.

The PIII 500, however, is designed for a 100 MHz bus... it runs at 5 x that bus, for a processor speed of 500.

The problem is, your system is running at 66 MHz, so when the PIII 500 runs at 5 times that bus speed, it's 5 x 66 which still is 333. To run faster, you need a PIII that's designed with a higher "multiple"... such as a PIII 700, which will run at 7 x bus speed, which for your 66 MHz system would work out to 466 MHz.