T42 1.5 Upgrade Question

[Cigarguy]

You'll be fine with whatever paste you choose. I have about a dozen pastes kicking around and will use what's handiest at the time. The T4x series Thinkpad are a pleasure to work on. The X series are a little more involving as you have to take out the motherboard to get access to the HSF (heatsink fan). Doesn't help when I forgot to plug in the fan and wondered why my temps were skyrocketing and system crashing. On a plus side, for a time, it was dead quiet. Disassemble again, plug in fan, re-assemble and viola!

[Cigarguy]

Since you're new to this. As a learning experience may I suggest doing the following.

Before doing any work on it. Download and install HWMonitor. Open HWMonitor look at the "Core" temperatures at idle speed and maximum load. Write this down on a piece of paper (the horror, the travesty). Do the work. Use HWMonitor to observe the temps at idle and max load. On most Intel machine (laptop or desktop) you'll notice instability, even BSOD, when temps hits the 90 deg C mark. Some CPU will hit 100 deg C before going into thermal shutdown. Most of my laptops idle in the low 30 deg C with temps ranging from 70-90 deg C under load. By looking at the temp before and after you can get an idea of what happened. After a while, with experience, you'll know that something is wrong with 50 deg C idle temp after reapplying termal paste. And you'll be expecting the system to crash once you see temps soaring into the high 80s.

A couple more tools used by the overclocker is CPUZ (same company as HWMonitor) and Prime95. CPUZ is useful for checking memory size, timing, CPU specs, MB and BIOS specs. HWMontior is useful for monitoring voltages, temperatures and laptop battery capacity. I use HWMonitor to monitor my laptop battery capacity all the time. Prime95 is useful to get the CPU running at full load producing max temps. After reapplying thermal paste, I'll stress test the system for 8-24 hours. If it doesn't crash during this time I consider the system to be stable enough for everyday use. There are other tools that do the same thing as Prime95 and they work fine also. GPUZ does the same thing on the GPU size. Running both CPUZ and GPUZ at the same time is interesting and will produce some heat. A hot of heat actually. On laptops I myself don't bother with GPUZ.

[Callahan]

I did download HWMONITOR ... I already had CPUZ on the computer. I will install HWMONITOR shortly.
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[kfzhu1229]

Cigarguy, do you know there is battery maximizer and battery manager by IBM to monitor battery health, voltage, current, etc.?

[TPFanatic]

You can get the latest Battery Maximiser from this lenovo page: http://support.lenovo.com/us/en/downloads/migr-44226 I got custom battery charging thresholds on my r50 with it, the original version didn't seem to have custom thresholds.

[kfzhu1229]

You can get the latest Battery Maximiser from this lenovo page: http://support.lenovo.com/us/en/downloads/migr-44226 I got custom battery charging thresholds on my r50 with it, the original version didn't seem to have custom thresholds.

Yes but NO ONE KNOWS IBM ACTUALLY RELEASED POWER MANAGER?!! It is nowhere on the web but I got the archive for that from the IBMTOOLS folder from my original T43 hard drive. From what I have tested it works on T23 and later and A30 and later (R/X series should work just fine as well but I'm 100% certain it does NOT work on my T22). On T4x/R5x series the battery therehold and reconditioning options are also available. The software also works with Windows 10 but you have to rename the setup file to get it to install and you may also have to whitelist it so that Windows Defender doesn't remove it out of nowhere.
The newest version of power manager also SORT OF works on a T4x/R5x but the computer freezes every time the fan 3 mode kicks in for some reason.

[Callahan]

I have some follow-up questions to doing these upgrades on all three of my ThinkPads. First of all, I ordered a second Dothan 1.8 2MB processor from China. That will be to update the T42 1.5 Banias to a 1.8 Dothan.

I had ordered a 1.7 Banias processor ... which I will now put into the older T41 1.6 Banias that also has the fan problem. That will be good enough for the older computer.

Now let me ask ... if I understand 100% what has been said here. OK, the BIOS is the same for the Banias T42 1.5 notebook and also the Dothan T42 1.6 notebook. So in the T42 1.5 Banias, all I have to do is put the newer Dothan 1.8 processor inside, replacing the Banias 1.5 processor ... and it's now a Dothan notebook?

There is nothing else to do ... when I get it back together and start the T42 up ... I will have a T42 1.8 Dothan running? Is this correct ???

Now that brings me to my other question ... I have a Ghost backup for all three ThinkPads from last September. I maybe only do two a year now since there are no more updates for a regular XP setup.

So my backups were all done before all these processor upgrades ... especially changing the T42 1.5 Banias to a T42 1.8 Dothan.

So I'm wondering if the Ghost backups will still work OK on the "changed" machines? I'm thinking they should work OK. They are still the same machines with all the correct drivers and such ... just upgraded processors ... except for the one T42 going from a Banias to a Dothan machine.

I still would think all this should be OK ... but I'd like any opinions anyone may have.

Thanks,
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[Cigarguy]

LOL.

Assuming you've done everything right, yes everything will work out fine and pretty much as you suspect. You're way over thinking this which is a good thing and is something I would do too. Obviously work on and test one machine at a time.

[thinkpadcollection]

Why going to 1.8GHz? The 2GHz dothan is still good on price (model 755).

Cheers, thinkpadcollection

[jaspen-meyer]

XP, when run as a virtual machine, refuses to start when I change the 'hardware' (ram) configuration.

[Callahan]

I decided to balance with better speed than what I have currently and maybe less heat with the 1.8 processor. It should be the right mix ... I hope.
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[Cigarguy]

And if the 1.8 is not sufficient, then 2.0 won't cut it either. Any single core machine is going to struggle in this multi-core world. Regardless of what you got, someone will ask why didn't you get x?

[kfzhu1229]

And if the 1.8 is not sufficient, then 2.0 won't cut it either. Any single core machine is going to struggle in this multi-core world. Regardless of what you got, someone will ask why didn't you get x?

You know X series is not for everyone. I like how it is portable but you are very likely to end up with integrated GPU and sometimes also poor cooling system as my mom's X220i experienced

[thinkpadcollection]

Going from 1.5 to 1.8GHz is not that much, but going to 2.0GHz or 2.1GHz make sense. Banias 1.5GHz is 400fsb and TDP is 24W, while Dothan for all 400fsb speeds is 21W, 533fsb of all processors are 27W with PAE (requires R52 or T43 board to work in any chassis).

So thus better go with 2.0GHz dothan (755) for your T42, only 11 dollars from china/H.K.

My frankie R52 is built using T42 board with 9600 GPU, 755 cooled by all copper R52 long heatsink and 2GB. Runs decent.

Cheers, thinkpadcollection