questions on old ThinkPad T40p

[fjs08]

Cleaning out the house and happened onto an ole ThinkPad T40p.
Booted right up. Very slow.
Wonder what I can do with it, or to it, to improve it.
ThinkPad T40p
Win XP Professional
Service Pack 3
Pentium M
1600 MHz
1 GB Ram
Looks like a 60GB HD that is only 1/2 full
Any thoughts and/or recommendations would be appreciated.
One friend recommended I stay off the internet because of XP and the lack of security upgrades...thoughts??
Thx.
Frank

[TPFanatic]

If you do use the internet, an ad blocker, a script blocker, and staying smart should keep you from running into too much trouble.

You can try Palemoon (based on Firefox) or another "light" browser. It worked great for browsing the forum and some youtube on my R50p when it had only 1 GB ram a few months ago.

You can also move from Windows to Linux if the OS is feeling slow.

[ajkula66]

There's a lot that one can still do with a decade-old T40p, the real question here is: what amount of time and resources are you willing to put in?

While XP SP3 will undoubtedly be slow on 1GB RAM, I'd start with downloading a HDD test utility - my choice would be HD Tune - and testing the drive for errors.

If no errors are present, I'd proceed with the following actions:

1) Upgrade the RAM to 2GB. This machine will take 2x1GB DDR2100 or DDR2700 laptop RAM, you should be able to pick a DIMM for $10 or less nowadays.

2) Check the BIOS version and upgrade it if necessary. The last one for these systems is 3.23

3) Get a Dothan CPU - such as PM 735 or PM 745 - which should cost you $10 or less, open up the machine, and reapply thermal paste while swapping out the CPU. If you're uncertain about the correct procedure, click on the HMM link at the top of this page, download the proper one and follow the instructions.

I'm not going to go into "safe/unsafe" debate regarding XP, but would strongly suggest reading these two threads at the very least:

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=115548

http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=112531

Should you decide to move away from XP, there are many *nix distros that will run just fine on that machine.

Good luck.