Thinkpads Forum

Tonight, I upgraded my ThinkPad 760E from a Pentium 120 to a Pentium 133. Despite a higher clock speed and a 66mhz bus speed as opposed to the 120's 60mhz bus speed, the only real difference I noticed is that the heat is 3 times as bad. Windows is still slow as anything imaginable, though I think this also is partly because of the mWave sound system. Well, i'm just posting this for anyone with a Pentium 120 based 760E, unless you really need those extra few megahertz and are willing to increase heat output by 100+ percent as well as lose battery life, keep the 120. If it weren't for the fact that it took over an hour just to change the CPU, I'd have put the 120 back in by now. The only reason I see fit for upgrading from 120 to 133 is so you can get a higher price when selling on eBay.

Nevermind folks, flipped my lid too soon, I removed my network card and the P133 started to have a good effect. The extra bus speed makes things more responsive, I can finally run PowerPoint decently on this machine.

Well, that's pretty interesting news, especially since I have a P120 in my (slow) 365x.

Two questions... first, where did you find/buy the new processor? Second, how did you verify that the bus speed did increase from 60 to 66? My experience with Pentium desktops is that they don't auto-switch bus speeds... but maybe some notebooks are different???

On some older model IBM laptops, IBM had the CPU on it's own proprietary board and there was a chip that controlled bus and clock speed. The Pentium 133 I put into my 760E was a chip I had from an old 760ED I used to own until it burnt out and I parted it.

Thanks for the info!

I toy with the idea of trying a processor upgrade in my 365x, and am interested in hearing the experience of others who have successfully upgraded processors in Thinkpads of similar vintage.

Make sure you read the hardware maintenece manual and the ThinkPad reference manual before trying to upgrade so you'll know if you can replace the CPU board or if you'll need to replace the whole system board and also so you know what exactly to do.