Thinkpads Forum

I know I know, there are probably a dozen of these types of threads, but wanted to get some advice/varying points of view.

First of all, I LOVE this laptop. Its so sturdy and small (especially for a PII). I've had people amazed at the quality from something as old as it is. Anyway, I bought my first TP600E in January for $50. It has a good battery, screen, everything. Since then I've installed a slimmed down version of XP and added a stick of 256 RAM. (and I've even bought 2 more) Now I'm looking at upgrading the processor to a PIII using the methods discussed <a href="http://www.wimsbios.com/phpBB2/topic4046.html">here.</a>

I don't have a soldering iron, and don't know if I'd be comfortable doing that anyway, but I've torn them apart and have no qualms about swapping out the CPU but I wanted some thoughts on the best way to approach this.

Should I go with a non-speedstep 500 PIII? Or should I go the 750mhz route and be happy with the 600mhz base speed? Has anyone upgraded, do you have any pieces of advice?

I use this laptop on a daily basis for my everyday work but am hoping to get a little more responsiveness out of it. I'm very happy with it in general, just want it to be able to handle Flash and run Abiword (for windows) a bit smoother. I just want to get rid of as much sluggishness as possible. I'll probably install Linux again (not sure on the distro, I've been through so many of them... but oddly enough XP runs better than any of them, I'm hoping the CPU upgrade helps.)

Any input is welcome... thanks.

I haven't tried the physical mod to the CPU, but I have a 750MHz running at 600MHz and it is a huge improvement over a 400MHz CPU. The one thing that you can do, to add to the speed is to try getting a faster HD, such as a 7200rpm drive. You can also add another 256mb stick for a total of 544mb of ram.

I think I am going to go those routes too. I don't need a large drive, I'm actually doing quite well with the 6GB thats in it (still have 2GB of space left and no real need to fill it), but I'm sure a 7200rpm would definitely improve things. And I'm trying to find some low density RAM for less than I paid for this one ($40/256mb). Its good to hear you're happy with the cpu upgrade. Did you find enabling the L2 cache difficult? Are you running Windows or Linux?

Thanks again.

http://www.katch.dsl.pipex.com/mtb/

All you need to know

OK, I've just acquired this 600E (I'm currently using it because the keyboard an sound are way better than my 390X) for my son for schoolwork, and I've got it running XP SP3 fairly solidly.

A) I've updated to SP2 on the 390X and gone to Lenovo's support site for current drivers, including the updated TrackPoint driver, and now the TrackPoint is fully functional in all software on that machine. For some reason, in throughout the course of getting this one up to dat, the "middle" button refuses to work when I use Mozilla Firefox, even after updating the driver. Any ideas? Also, for some reason, I still can't log in to this site in Firefox. Every other site is fine.

B)Without going into some of the more "interesting" CPU and cooler mods, how much more heat does one of these put out with a PIII CPU? Right now, I have a 366MHz PII, and a nice cool breeze coming out of the left side of the machine. My 450MHz PIII 390X, on the other hand, doesn't seem all that much faster, and it feels like I'm carrying a warm pan in my lap on the way to a potluck. When the fan kicks on, that's more like standing next to a heat vent. Is the frequency/size of the processor that much of a difference, or is the 600 chassis that much more efficient for cooling?

I don't remember the version number of my BIOS, but it sees my TravelStar 12GB HDD at 11.2, same as my 390X does.

Thanks,
Aaron

aarontring wrote:A) [...]and now the TrackPoint is fully functional in all software on that machine. For some reason, in throughout the course of getting this one up to dat, the "middle" button refuses to work when I use Mozilla Firefox, even after updating the driver. Any ideas?

I seem to recall having had this problem with Firefox for a while, but I don't remember how I fixed it. Make sure you are using the latest version of Firefox. Also, make sure that you have set your middle button to serve as a middle button (and not to scroll or whatever).

aarontring wrote:Also, for some reason, I still can't log in to this site in Firefox. Every other site is fine.

Make sure you have set Firefox to allow cookies from this site. I have several versions of Firefox, and as far as I know they can all log in to this site, so the issue is with your configuration somewhere.

Phil.

I've just swapped out the 366 that came with this TP600E and put in a 450. I've disabled the L2 cache and downloaded both the Powerleap Control Center and the Powerleap Cache tool. The Powerleap control center errors out during install with an error 113. I don't know what is going on here, and the Powerleap Cache tool gives me a BSD on boot. (I had to go into Safe Mode and disable it so I could load back in). Which one should I use, and is there an obvious problem here I'm overlooking?

Thanks.