TP240X upgrade

[atypus]

I got a 240X (PIII, 500MHz, 192Mb Ram) and like to upgrade it. I know there's no way to upgrade the CPU. I am thinking to change the 12Gb harddisk to 40Gb but don't know if it makes big difference on the speed. Any advise ? Or any further advice on other possible upgrade, like Wi-Fi?

[slackerdeluxe]

Sounds similar to my setup (transplanted a 40GB drive from a powerbook and bought a mini-pci card from eBay).

Installing the drive was easy and I used some universal boot floppy (that I got off the Internet) which had various disk tools to format the drive as FAT32 (so that the Windows installer could later convert it to NTFS). I don't know if the drive is faster, but it is much quieter. I'd think that a 7200 RPM drive would be, but heat might be a concern(?).

Installing Win2K via floppy was a hassle (I found a boot floppy with drivers for my PCMCIA Ethernet card and connected to an other PC which had the i386 directory shared). My greatest challenge was enabling memory management so that the 32bit installer could run.

Wireless card was described as being compatible with the 240X in the auction description and included antennas. I replaced the modem with it so that I wouldn't have to swap out my 100baseT PCMCIA card. However I'm not so sure that it was really worth $50 as the range really isn't that good and I really had to dig around for client software and drivers. A PCMCIA wireless card would have been much cheaper and had better support.

My next experiments are to trim off the on board RAM and go up to 256 on a single DIMM and to run the wireless antennas through the display.

[atypus]

Thanks for the advice. But seems the limit of 240X Ram is 192Mb. Saw some articles mentioned about the change of the basic on board 64Mb RAM to 128Mb but seems only apply to 240 but not 240X. Can you share more about your plan to change the 192Mb to 256Mb, thanks !

Actually, I am able to manage to update from Win98 to XP via shared CD rom drive of my desktop (i installed a cheap router in my home). But I need to "de-mac" the screen to boost up the speed. Do you is there any method to speed up the machine ?

For the hard drive, seems I will probably buy a 5400rpm 40GB one... Really not sure if tp 240x can handle the 7200rpm drive.

[AlphaKilo470]

I'm sure that upgrading to a good 5400RPM hard drive will cause a good speed bump in your computer. When I was still using my 400mhz ThnkPad 600E, I originally had a 20gb 4200rpm drive and I did not realize how much of a performance bottleneck that thing was until I replaced it with a 40gb Hitachi 5k80 5400rpm drive.