Thinkpads Forum

Hi folks, I have a 600E 2645-550 300MHz PII Cpu and after reading this forum decided to try a faster cpu.

I fitted a Celeron 433 from ebay and upon trying to boot the following happens:

top left of screen gives 425408 KB (onboard 32MB + 128MB + 256MB)
top right: IBM logo
Bottom left: Thinkpad logo

Then a single beep followed by nothing else (its as though its frozen)
If I put back the old cpu it works as normal. I have tried various combinations of memory but it makes no difference. I also removed the DVD writer I have added (just in case).

The only success so far has been adding memory and also the DVD writer (it is an NEC Optiarc 5540A dual layer writer and seems to work fine).

Has anyone seen this kind of thing before? and can I get it working. I can't get into the bios with the new cpu as it does not seem to get that far.

I am no expert, but i believe the problem is the Celeron Processor. I have read a few stories about 600E upgrades and not many of them had success with Celerons.

Your best bet would be to grab a 400mhz PII. Just a straight swap. You could also get adventurous and get a PIII processor and throw that in. You can get a 500mhz for about $25-$30. Any higher and they get expensive. I bought a 650 for $40, but its a speedstep (anything over 500 is), so still only runs at 500 unless you do the speedstep mod. Then anything over 650mhz is well over $50.

BTW, to get a PIII to work in your PII, you need to do a few things. Do a search on 600E & PIII. You will get an L2 Cache error (127 I think?)which can be disabled in the BIOS and then you will have to download a program to run at start-up to re-enable it. There is lots of detailed info about it in the upgrade thread that is a stickey at the top of this forum.

Part of the problem is that you are trying to upgrade a 2645-55x. The following models are much harder to upgrade:

IBM/Lenovo wrote:600E (2645-55x,A5x).

There is something different with the chipset or something, because the BIOS itself is different from the other 600Es:

IBM/Lenovo wrote:600E (2645 - 3xx, 4xx, 5Ax, 5Bx, 5Jx, 8xx, AAU, ABU, ALx, AMx, BAU, Cxx, Dxx, Exx, Fxx, Gxx, Ixx, JJ3, Mxx, Nxx, Pxx, RP1, RRx (except for RRA), Sxx, Uxx 2646 - All models)

I had a huge problem trying to uppgrade a 55U model...

I am currently bidding on a 500MHz PIII on ebay (UK), the price is around $8 at the moment (I'm the only bidder too). There is someone selling a 400 MHz PII but it's more than 4x the price of the PIII

I'll see what happens if I get the PIII, it's typical that I would get the type that is difficult to upgrade