x40 upgrades

[mrjeep88]

Hi all I am new to the community and just go a thinkpad x40 it has the 1.2ghz pentium m and 1gig of ram and 40gig hard drive with all factory software installed and I am wondering if any hardware upgrades are possible as it is really slow I also have the ultrabase dock all the factory restore disks and manuals

[ZaZ]

Probably the best thing you can do from a performance perspective is upgrade the hard drive. The 1.8" drives in the X4x notebooks are really slow and clicky too. Unfortunately, it does not use a standard drive, which means upgrade options are limited. You can buy a SSD like this, which will fit,, but they're expensive. You might be better off if you can swing it, just selling it and getting a X60, which does use a standard drive. That will give you more options to upgrade and it's not much more for a X60 than a X40 drive.

[mrjeep88]

yeah I noticed the click the first time I used it and I did not know the x40 used a non standard drive thanks for that info. I really like the small design of the x40 though. I have been told that to upgrade the processor I have to change the motherboard also. I am only planing to use it to surf the web and check email anyway. I replaced a lcd in a friends other laptop and he gave me the x40 so I really don't have anything in it. It is much lighter and more mobile than my r40 so I might look into a different drive and possibly a different motherboard and processor

[ZaZ]

I would just say for close to amount of money you're going to have to sink into a X40, you can probably get a X60. I don't think a new CPU is going to make much of a difference. It's the slow drive that's the performance killer on the X40. Since the X60 uses a standard 2.5" SATA drive, it will get you access to bigger/faster hard drives and SSDs. Plus it's dual core machine. Some web based stuff like flash is going to chug on a single core, especially an ULV, but good luck either way.

[Tasurinchi]

You could also upgrade the RAM a little bit by buying a 1GB module, giving you 1.5 GB RAM total. But as ZaZ noted the bottleneck in these models is the hard drive.

If you only will use the notebook for web and emailing you may try installing a Linux Distro, I've used several of them in all my X4x machines and it's more responsive than XP. But if you want to have a bigger improvement in performance the main thing to do is changing the drive. Here you have to alternatives:

1) Buy a ZIF hard drive. See options in my old thread here
2) Go for an SSD. Check this (long) thread here

Hope this helps...

Cheers

[mrjeep88]

I have a c4k60-30 hitachi 30gig 4200rpm zif drive if this drive will work where can I find an adapter to make this work in a x40

[Raceboy]

There are several ways to upgrade your X40, but quickest and most noticeable is to max out the memory (with 1GB module) and to buy SSD.

Also you can buy a system board with faster CPU or even X41 system board on which you can perform true SATA mod but these options require both money and skill with soldering station.

I personally love my X41 (my wife uses it all the time) and I had maxed it out with 2GB stick (X41 takes it), SATA mod (80 GB SATA drive there now) and IPS panel from HP TC4400 (requires cable mod as it has reversed pinout on the LCD connector).

X60 on the other hand supports Aero on W7. X41 has Intel GMA915 which in theory could support Aero but there are no drivers that would.

[mrjeep88]

thanks I was thinking about a x41 mother board and processor but wasn't sure if it would fit in my case with my bat. Someone on ebay has a used x41 mother board and base with a 1.6ghz in it for $47.99