Operation "Pimp My ThinkPad 570e" complete!

[MsGeek-CatseyeLabs]

My friend Tom Reed received his tricked-out ThinkPad 570e today, safe and sound. I guess getting the machine professionally packaged at my local UPS Store and sending it to him inside a nicely padded laptop bag was a good idea. I sweated a little...sending something from Los Angeles, CA to Orlando, FL is not something to be taken lightly.

The base machine had 64MB RAM, (nothing in the slot) a 3.2GB hard drive, and no Optical Drive. (I mistakenly thought it didn't have a dock) I ordered a UltraDock (I think that's what the basic media dock was called) for him which included an LG CD-ROM, and he bought a 256MB SO-DIMM from Crucial.Com, a 30GB Toshiba Hard Drive, and a Panasonic Slotloader Combo drive. It's a little powerhouse now after all the upgrades.

You might remember the little bit of trouble I had installing the OS. Maybe a BIOS upgrade would have meant I could have formatted the 30GB as one big partition, maybe not. Remember, my 600e has the newest BIOS for that machine, thanks to IBM's off-lease refurbers, and it still needed the OSes to be below the 8GB barrier to boot the machine.

Anyway, he's a happy camper and so am I. I got some nice parts for my trouble, including the second UltraDock (which now has a Toshiba CD-ROM inside) and a couple more 30GB Toshiba Hard Drives, one of which is in my headless wonder 570. The 570 now also has the dock. This way I will have an easier time installing operating systems on this and the other two 570s. Which reminds me...I have got to reinstall Debian on the thing.

Thanks for the help regarding a few issues with this project, guys. !Viva la ThinkPad por Siempre!

Take care,
Michelle