T30 talk

[thinkpadinside]

Hi guys. I have a small issue with my laptop. My screen went dim, but I got an inverterboard and got the backlight working again. However there is still another small issue. When I adjust the angle of the LCD, the display sometimes flickers, which is causing me panic. Is it normal, or is it the LCD panel or video cable? Also, would upgrading the 4200rpm hard drive to a SSD speed up performance in windows 7 (my current os). Thanks in advance!

[rkawakami]

With movement of the lid affecting the video display, I'd vote for either a loose connection in one of the ends of the video cable (where it plugs into the motherboard or to the back of the LCD panel) or a break in the cable somewhere along its length. Cheap attempt at repair would be to re-seat both ends of the cable and closely inspecting it, particularly around the area where it exits the base of the system and enters the lid. This is if the image on the display is being disturbed and not the backlight flickering off and on. If it's the case of the light flashing, then I look at the ribbon cable connection to the motherboard, the inverter's connection to the cable, the connector from the backlight that's attached to the inverter and the lid switch (if the system has been set to not do anything when the lid is closed; i.e., don't go into standby or hibernate).

As for the SSD, I'm not sure if an SSD would perform any better than a 7200RPM hard drive if you're thinking about data throughput figures. Certainly the cost differential would favor the standard magnetic hard drive over the solid-state drive, given that we're talking about the same storage capacity between them. Going with the SSD would definitely make sense if you are operating in a high-vibration environment. However, you may be better off spending the "extra" money elsewhere. Like expanding the system's memory if you're not already at the maximum of 2GB.

[ajkula66]

SSD would be a waste of money, since you'll always have the bottlenecks of CPU that has only 512MB cache, and GPU that is 16MB.

Having said that, the last "maxed-out" T30 that I had owned felt quite fast with 2GB RAM and a 7200rpm drive, although the CPU was stock 2.0

A configuration like that will run Windows 7, even though graphic and gaming scores will be extremely low, but no one in their right mind attempts any serious gaming on a T30 to begin with...