Thinkpads Forum

Hi,
I have gradually tweaked my 2645 4EU 600X up to windows seven! and until last week had the hardware maxxed out with 575 RAM, the original 500mhz MMC-2, and a high speed hard drive Samsung HM160HC. But I was bogging down with 100% CPU usage all the time, so I reduced the graphic display bells and whistles (aero and all that junk) and finally broke down and installed a (gasp) 700 mhz CPU! (using arctic silver in place of the old, old pad). It's so much cooler and rarely bumps up to 100 CPU, even when playing a movie!
BUT, my CPU speed remains constant at 548 mhz (listing Family 6 Model 8 Stepping 3)
Why don't I get my 700 mhz? Can I or should I do anything about that?

Is Speedstep installed, does that even work on your CPU and/or motherboard?

There continues to be some slight disagreement about what exactly is required to get SpeedStep to work on a 600X, but I would guess that in your case it is related to one or more of the following:
- you are not plugged into an AC adapter
- your motherboard may not support SpeedStep, even if everything else has been done right (as RealBalckStuff suggests)
- your CPU is starting up in low-speed mode and has not been modified through a hardware hack to force it to start in high-speed mode
- you are using a generic battery instead of an original IBM battery, and so your 600X is refusing to send proper signals to the CPU to make it start up in high speed mode
- Windows 7 may not even support SpeedStep on the 600X series (though I think that this is unlikely if you've gotten so far as to get Win 7 to run on a 600X at all!)

Good luck!

Phil.

Hi
no, I dug deep into that topic, It's a PIII coppermine CPU with 100fsb, 256k L2 cache. Intel's speedstep installs but won't activate, and neither speedswitchxp nor xp speedstep install at all.
CPU-Z calls my cpu a 550 MHZ Pentium III E model. Maybe that's a clue about what Windows thinks of it..,
Is it possible my bad tp600 battery(s) prevent speedstep from operating off the maximum performance even though I am always plugged in?
Is it possible the "battery miser" could correct this somehow?
Phil: I'll try another battery. I am using a (failed) generic replacement. Thanks!

As far as I can find there is no BIOS or software overclocking for the Intel MMC2.
Did I miss a boot up screen that allows mod? Is it possible I can refresh the BIOS to recognize the chip as 700mhz?
I tried reinstalling windows driver for the processor.
One forum upgrade discussion says update the BIOS. But for some reason I also can't get WIn7 to allow the downloaded BIOS updater to run for some reason, but I have the floppy disk creator around here somewhere. the tp600x has ITET55WW, dated Dec 99, but the Lenovo site says ITET55WW Oct 2001 (v 1.11), could it be different? I COULD USE HELP WITH AN EMAIL OF THIS FLOPPY DRIVE-BASED SOFTWARE INSTALLER because this computer won't recognize the Lenovo site as a valid win32 file(!?)

My plan next is to create the floppy and reinstall the last known BIOS just in case this "refreshes" Thanks for jumping on this gang!
UPDATE: In the boot bios menu I activated CPU s/n and got 700 mhz intel stepping CPU identified. Then (after bluescreen which it recovered from), thanks to Phil's wmbios thread, I installed intel's processor frequency ID (forced XP sp2 compat) and it says I've got a 500mhz type E. This leads me back to the bios update... seems BIOS knows that's I've got but win7 doesn't.
After BIOS (or if I give up on making the floppy) I'll break out my XP installed hard drive and boot from that, to see where the OS vs hardware issue shows up (I've got LINUX, XP and Win7 drives and just pop 'em out (after removing the from cover)
I'll keep y'all posted...

Ok,
I proceeded on two fronts at once; created the floppy updater on a normal XP machine, and this required I use a at-least semi functional battery. I "refreshed" the bios (still dated Nov. 1999 - gosh that was a long time a go) and stuck in my 5 min life OEM tp 600x battery: VOILA!
697 MHZ in Win 7!
So is it faster? funny thing is, It "felt" faster the moment I stuck in the orig. battery even before reboot, so maybe we are stepping. I'll two-step around for a bit and see what affects/doesn't affect this. Got any software rec's on how to measure function speed regardless of "reported" mhz, like wintest?
Thanks for seeing me through that
Mike

Hey That's great, Mike. Congrats on getting it working (if only briefly!).

I'm no longer up on what the best software is to test your CPU speed and get accurate results, and I've certainly not used any under Win7.

Regarding the OEM vs. generic battery: if that is indeed what was causing the problem, then you might try finding a battery "refill" service with that 5minute battery instead of buying a generic battery. For a while, I used batteryrefill.com, and I was pretty satisfied with them at the time, but some folks -- especially in later years -- ran into all kinds of problems with them, so I can't recommend them any longer and don't know who to recommend now. A properly refilled battery should contain the necessary IBM circuit(s) that allow the SpeedStep commands to be sent correctly (at least in some cases!).

The other alternative is to get someone to solder a wire onto your MMC-2 board to force the CPU to always start up in high speed mode and then use some kind of "DeepSleep" software to control it. My soldering tools and skills are not nearly fine enough for such work, so I never attempted this, but I can point you to links if it interests you. I found that it was actually pretty rare that I really needed my 600X to run full throttle, and I also liked the idea of figuring out how to get my CPU to work while keeping my CPU and board in their original state.

Phil.

But Phil, it worked! I'm in! Me and my 600x are tooling in 7th.
I've had this 600x a long time and it's edited and burned dvd movies (I prefer the old Magix video editing), and loaded, read and translated Chinese character sets (from China!) then the monitor went bad, so I transplanted one from an "e" I've got around for parts.
When I got that win7 three licenses for $150, I couldn't resist and after I figured out how to get past the minimum RAM requirements, the hardware upgrade was sort of inevitable.
Now it's good to go! The fastest hard drive was I think was a breakthru for it, but I'd love to try an SSD and see if that helps it fly. I'm about to check out the old Margi dvd card to see if it's a work around for DVD playing, but I can run AVI /DIVX videos in their original size with no artifacts or sound delays.
The battery issue was apparently transitory. Once I booted with an OEM, it stays at 697 mhz regardless of how I hotswap batteries or just leave it out. I've got 5 or 6 and none of them are useable having refused to hold a sizeable charge for some time. I'm not concerned with it. There's a nifty external battery through the plug-in jack that's rechargeable in-line, and it will switch voltages for other little devices on a nice-curly cable, so I can keep it charged while I use the laptop. Much lighter that way. Unfortunately they went out of business, but I got a couple of spares real cheap.
My next fantasy project is to replace the little speakers under the keyboard and also to fiddle around with the minipc power cable in back for a booster fan, or maybe even a combo speaker and cooler stand.
Thanks again,
Mike
p.s. I can't figure out how to post my avatar on this site, could you instruct me? I see the "img" html command, but my image is here on my hard drive, not an http address.

Awesome. These 600 series machines just keep giving.

mdp wrote:p.s. I can't figure out how to post my avatar on this site, could you instruct me? I see the "img" html command, but my image is here on my hard drive, not an http address.

There is no way to upload your own avatar for this forum. Avatars are created automatically by the forum itself, except in the case of mods and admins, who can upload their own.

Phil.

Interesting, been debating trying windows 7 on my 600x. I've got mine running an 850mhz, and the speedstep works properly under windows xp. IF your saying a 700 runs it okay I would expect it would work.

What display driver is windows 7 running with? I have heard that there is no proper driver for the magicgraph chipset, that's whats been holding me back. I have thought of trying the driver in this post http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=97390 , but win7 can be picky about unsigned drivers and its an xp driver.

Oh BTW, when I fist put the 850 into my 600x I couldn't get it to work either and tried everything, I was very frustrated. I almost gave up, but a bios update ended up fixing whatever the problem was and it had worked fine since.

With mine if I boot off battery power it only boots at non speedstep speed. If I boot with the power adapter plugged in it will boot at full spped and I have to press function+F2 to get past bios. Otherwise everything works as it should. I believe this is due to my motherboard being a "non speedstep" model.

Wow!

How well dows it perform? Is it noticably slow? Do you have to wait for anything? Have you tried any Works or Office software?

How are those movies playing?

Well book, (may I call you book?)
Win 7 is just a better OS all around. So it's definitely faster in many respects. I think the memory management by Win7 keeps the up front application operation smoother. For example when I read your question I clicked on the MS WORD icon (I use Office XP) and the first time it took 15 seconds to open. When I close it, wait a bit and then reopen, the prefetch set up (or whatever) pulls it back up in 8 seconds. Now it's down to about 7 second to open.
I rarely lose access to a window when switching between applications. (of course I have the preview feature turned off.) I'll begin tinkering with Aero again and see how much it can handle...
Photoshop Elements takes about 2 minutes to open, (slightly less than it ever did in XP) and I can switch between Firefox, Word and Photoshop without any noticeable screen redraw or lag.
I don't really know the software for benchmark tests, so if you've got experience in that area let me know and I'll gladly carry out experiments on it (heh heh heh... )
The movies are good as long as I don't go for full screen. I'll have to check out the 16 bit setting and the margidvd card spoken of elswhere hasn't arrived yet.

I run mainly XP SP2, I have 7 on another drive in a dual-boot configuration. I can definitely say that XP outperforms 7 in every app that I actually use, albeit not by much. I can run any benchmark someone wants for a true comparison between the 2.

I am not a huge adopter of new games, easier to play them on the Xbox 360, Wii, or PS3. I don't reboot/shutdown my machine, and once an app is open, it generally stays open and minimized. For most of the games I play, they get higher fps in xp although it is not a huge difference between xp and 7. Audio and Video transcoding is a huge difference with XP being the winner. File compression in 7-zip and WinRAR is also faster in XP, again not by a huge margin.

Apps I use on a daily basis: VirtualDubMod, Lame, Pale Moon (Firefox) 3.6.14, Thunderbird 2, VNC, Filezilla, uTorrent, Paint Shop Pro 7, Ultraedit 12, LibreOffice (OpenOffice) 3.3

All apps are installed to both XP and 7, XP SP2 is tweaked to the MAX. XP performs better for me on a day2day basis.

Athlon II X3 450 3.2GHz (reports as Phenom with 4th core unlocked), 4GB DDR2, nVidia GeForce GT 240 1GB DDR3 (Fanless), Western Digital Caviar Black WD1002FAEX 1TB 7200 RPM 64MB Cache SATA, Asus M4A77D Motherboard (system is roughly 2 years old now, I upgrade rather then replace )

ok, ok, I'll redo one of my hard drives for XP again and alternate both. My reference for 7 is that it seems to overcome bottlenecks in apps and memory on a pIII better than XP did, and I ran XP on this machine for a long time, it's just subjective eval.
Now that I've clambered onto my little 700 mhz (gasp!) hillock, I'll revisit XP land...
to be continued....
see you on the other side!

what do I use these days, lets see....
Shuttle XPC I thinks it a BG...something
LPC 301 (fits in my CD drive)
TP 600x 2645 4EU, w/700 mhz intel MMC cpu, 575 MB RAM, 160GB Samsung HD, Win 7 home, Toshiba DVD-RW, ext. floppy drive
oh yes, and a Dell 8100 I found in the trash that outperforms all of them.
more to follow...

My 600x/850MHz, same ram and hdd - runs actually under Win7 - with SpeedStep.

Boottime is longer, all applications need more time to come up... but then it runs smoothly like under XP.

Bottlenecks are graphics and IDE-bus

Hello U.mac
Maybe an SSD drive would tweak it up a bit more. I noticed one can get a 2.5 to 1.8 ide card that accepts media cards. Maybe that's a cheap path to SSD. I am also thinking of trying the USB 3.0 pccards. but...

I must confess I finally actually left the PIII universe this week when my mom gave me her hand-me-down T42 (she's 80 and has moved to a Gateway 6810LX with maxxed out options, Intel Core2 Duo processor 1333 MHz, 8 GB of DDR2 800 MHz SDRAM
1 TB SATA. I went through hell trying to get her Nvidia gtx 120 to send audio through the hdmi port....). now I am just beginning to explore the T42.
I just took the samsung HDD from the 600x, inserted it into the t42 (1.4 GHZ) and VOILA! Win 7 added three drivers, found the wireless network from the built in card and asked me to revalidate and without a hitch my orig. log in, and all apps and files transferred in 6 minutes!

POST "BORN AGAIN" transfer of hard drive: see the T42 entry. Basically, trying to push the envelope on the limited ATI 7500 Radeon, I got stuck with blue screens! Especially after directX went from v9 to v11. HOWEVER: finding fellow ATI 7500 sufferers, I am now BSOD free for 48 hours with the substitution of the ATI 9000 standard win7 drivers. (see instructions on-line for this http://social.technet.microsoft.com/for ... 390dd059c/
...on to '42/7 enjoyment!

The IDE-bus from 600x is limited to real ~28MB/sec. A SSD may not transfer more MB/sec through this bottleneck - only the seektime is better.

We have to raise up the FSB to 133MHz or more...