Thinkpads Forum

I have a ThinkPad 600 2645-51U that I love dearly, but it's suffering from extreme old age. The machine is in great shape, but slow. I'm fairly okay with the 288M RAM limit, but the 266MHz CPU has got to go...I know I could find a PII/400 MMC-1 module if I looked around, but the price doesn't seem to be worth it.

Is it possible to obtain a 600X 500MHz "bottom chassis" with the motherboard/CPU/CPU heatsink and fan/video adapter on eBay or the like, then use my existing 600's keyboard/LCD and other misc. components? If so, what kind of success do people have with this sort of update? I'm guessing it'd a good evening worth of work, but that's not a problem.

This seems like a good update to me, cause it would get me a faster CPU and the ability to install more than 256M of RAM.

It should work just fine, unless your 600 was only a 12" LCD.

The 13.3" LCD's and keyboards are interchangeable.

Great. Thanks. Next question (I should have asked this earlier)...Is there any way to tell which ones are SpeedStep motherboards and which ones aren't? I'm guessing most of the 500MHz ones aren't.

Only the 650Mhz 600x's were speedstep. The 450 and 500Mhz machines were not..

HEMI wrote:Is there any way to tell which ones are SpeedStep motherboards and which ones aren't?

Given the type number, you can look up the original specs by plugging that number into the search box at this IBM site:

http://www.ibm.com/help/us/en/help/

Entering 2645-9FU (my 650Mhz 600X) in the search box will show a list of hits on the next page. Usually the first link leads you to a brief description of the hardware specs. Note that you should obtain the type number directly from the BIOS screen if at all possible. (Of course, you can also get the processor speed there as well.) If somebody has swapped motherboards, the type number on the bottom of the laptop may not longer be correct.

HEMI wrote:Is there any way to tell which ones are SpeedStep motherboards and which ones aren't? I'm guessing most of the 500MHz ones aren't.

There is a bit of confusion about this topic and I am not sure that anyone has a 100% definitive answer. It is certain that all the models that shipped with a PIII 650MHz are SpeedStep-enabled models:
2645-5Fx
2645-9Fx
2645-9Wx
2645-9Zx
...there may be others in this list.

Some people, though, appear to have had some success getting SpeedStep to work with some models that shipped with non-SpeedStep PIII 500MHz CPUs. No one has come up with a definitive list of these other models, nor does there appear to be agreement on whether SpeedStep is actually working in these other cases or not. It seems possible to me that some models with PIII 500MHz CPUs actually used motherboards manufactured to be compatible with PIII 650MHz. One model number in pariticular is given different status in the "T Book" which lists the specs of all the different models, but I've never seen evidence about this model one way or the other:
2645-8Px

There may be other models as well, but I haven't seen good records of successful reports with others that gave enough detail to confirm anything.

Phil.

Great. Thanks a lot. I'll keep my eye on this 600X bottom chassis setup on eBay and we'll see how it goes.