Thinkpads Forum

Hi, Guys,

First I want to say that it's a real stroke of luck stumbling onto this group. There's a real wealth of knowledge and information here freely shared. Only thing is it's all bits and pieces scattered all over the forum. If anyone will gather the information together in a book and index it, I'll be first to buy a copy!

Got my hands on a used Thinkpad 600E which feels good (except the trackpoint has stopped responding to push-to-click). Replaced the BIOS battery, fired it up and found the OS to be XP Pro. Now I want to upgrade it incrementally so I can run Microsoft's Visual Web Developer and SQL Server without having to deal with too many timeouts (this is for a class I'm taking).

So my first project will be to upgrade from 160MB to the max.

I've been reading your archives and all the good stuff's there, but as I said, it's scattered all over and it's hard to absorb and coordinate all that info in one sitting, so I decided to ask three stupid questions (sorry for being repetitive):

1) It's agreed here that I can max out my 2645-4AU at 544MB, but can I do this without having to upgrade my processor (P2 366MHz) to a P3, or is it a package deal?

2) I read here somewhere that I'd have to update the BIOS before I can increase the memory. I've never done this before, so I followed a link someone posted here to this text file:

ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/pc/pccbbs/mo ... sdin36.txt

It says there that support for XP is first implemented in INET36WW. Now, my BIOS reports itself as INET24WW dated 05/24/99, but I'm pretty sure I'm running XP Pro now. Can anyone explain this?

3) If I screw up the BIOS update, can I undo and roll back to the previous version (the one I have now)?

Thanks in advance, guys, I look forward to hearing from the more experienced members here, and solicit your warnings about any potholes I may not be aware of.

Welcome to the forum!

You don't have to upgrade the CPU to max out RAM.

As for BIOS, a couple of things should be considered:

a) Your machine will be much more comfortable running Windows 2000 with its current CPU. Sure, you can install XP but it will run much slower.

b) BIOS updates are easy, but instructions MUST be followed or you'll brick your laptop.

Hope this helps.

Thanks for the info and the encouragement, George. So I'll go ahead with the BIOS update. There are two things I'm worried about:

(1) Guess INET36WW it is, then, right? (the latest listed in the text file). There's really no reason to choose one of the intermediate updates instead, like INET26WW (for example, known bugs/anecdotal problems).

(2) I don't understand this business about a slave controller. In this text file it says "the slave controller manages the Power Management functions of the system," but doesn't it also have something to do with the HDD? I intend to upgrade the installed 6GB HDD after this memory upgrade, and I wonder if the BIOS update might impact that.

And I agree with you about Windows 2000, George. Actually I've always liked it better than XP. However the Microsoft VWD software we're using in class requires not only XP, but XP Pro, so I'm stuck with it. In fact, it's a wonder VWD even runs this well on this Thinkpad, timing out only on the initial connect to the SQL database, since Microsoft says the minimum memory to run it is 192MB. I don't want to push my luck too far into finals week, though