Thinkpads Forum

Hi recently picked up a thinkpad 600. And I have a few questions.

1. It has 288 mb of ram. Would I be able to buy a 1g stick of sodimm ram and put that it.

2. It has a 6gb HDD would I be able to replace it? It uses IDE right?

Thanks any help that I can get

Check out this thread as it will have a lot of information in it.

I think you are maxed on RAM. I know the 600E/600X support more (544MB and 576MB respectively), but if I remember correctly, the 600 had a lower limit.

As for the HDD, it is a standard 2.5" IDE drive, so it is easy to upgrade.

Welcome to the forum!! You are asking quite a bit from an older but goodie lappy. Just a few posts down a similar question was asked about upgrades for this series of laptops look here. Find the model type (2645-???) on the underside or in the bios to be positively sure which one you have. To enter the bios hold down F1 while booting. Once you have the model type, then you can see what your limits are.

edit: vin_commando beat me to the button.

lets see it is a 2645 45u
Can some one post a link to me on a good hard drive for it. And a
link for how to replace it

Admin edit: removed S/N since it's not really needed

Your 600 system can accept either 9.5mm or 12.7mm high laptop drives that are of the "parallel ATA" (aka, PATA or IDE) interface. There's a small wedge or spacer on the hard drive cover that can be removed for the thicker 12.7mm high drives. You can download a copy of the Hardware Maintenance Manual from here:

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... WIK-3SYPX2

This document shows you everything you need to know about taking apart (and putting back together) your 600 system.

Sources for hard drives can either be here in the Marketplace forum, online at places like Newegg or eBay or your local brick-and-mortar computer store.

and one last note on hard drives: The 600 should handle any drive up to 138GB in size with no problems at all. Larger drives might work, or might be made to work.

Around the time that drives got to 20GB or so, they started putting fluid drive bearings in them, so they got a lot quieter.

whizkid wrote:Around the time that drives got to 20GB or so, they started putting fluid drive bearings in them, so they got a lot quieter.

So that is why my old 12GB drives are so much louder

Learn something new every day.

so would this one work. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6822146200

Not sure. I haven't tried such a large drive in any 600 series. It might work perfectly; it might work but only let you use 138GB; it might work with full capacity with some kind of BIOS-patching tool like the old days (and only with some OSes); or it might not work at all.

You could save $10 and possibly a lot of hassle by getting a 120GB drive. I'm a happy customer of Newegg, though.

You might have to partition the drive in order to fit the (assumed) 137GB limitation, but the interface and size are correct. Note that although you will have copious amounts of disk space, your limitations are still the relatively slow CPU speed (300Mhz PII) and memory (416MB maximum I think).

maybe ill try this one. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6822148128

also i have 288 mb of ram. how would i get 418 mb

I know it is slow, But it runs xp fine and dandy so Im happy. Is truly is a great laptop

You can get to 416MB this way: 32MB is firmly soldered onto the motherboard and can't be expanded (disabled, yes, but not increased) and add in two low density PC100 256MB modules. One of the modules will only register 128MB due to the memory architecture of the system. So, that"s 32 + 128 + 256 = 416MB. It may be possible to get to 544MB by using a PC66 or PC100 single bank 256MB module but I believe that they are fairly rare.

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.ph ... 531#352531
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.ph ... 581#421581

Hhhmmm.... I'm wondering what would happen if the onboard memory is disabled via the BIOS edit and two regular dual bank PC100 256MB modules are installed?? I can't remember if I did that before. I guess I'll have to dig out my 2645-45U and give it a try.

Ray I believe you did try that a while back and it still only read 128mb. I did a minimal search but came up with too many results.

I probably did and I must have forgotten about it (ya know, a senior moment ). I also searched for a few minutes last night to see if I said anything about it but didn't find anything. I'm in the middle of a T23 project but I'll see if I can pull out the 600 and give it a try.