How fast can I make my T60p

[san]

I am considering selling off my trusty T60p 2.17 ghz UXGA flexview.
Its a shame really, since I have been upgrading and had it serviced with new parts the last year.
The lovely display is only 1 year old, new fans, new 9 cell battery, new DVD drive, Got the Atheros A/B/G, 2x2 gb ram, top of the line 7200 rpm Hitachi drive and so on..
However, I use demanding applications mostly for Photo editing etc. and I would like a bit more performance..
Thus, I am considering selling it and buy one of the new or newer 17-inch Macbook Pro.
Well, it will cost me unfortunately ..
So how much more performance can I squeeze from the T60p at a reasonale cost ?
Since the memory is already maxed out, as well as the harddrive , I though maybe drop in a core duo 2 2.4 ghz (T7700) to replace the old core duo T2600 ?
What about adding a Solid state drive as system drive and move the Hitachi harddisk to the ultrabay ?
Would these upgrades make a big difference in performance ? They will certainly be a lot cheaper than making the shift to MBP right now.
Any suggestions for a good performing SSD drive that wont cost me too much ? I think maybe 64 gb will be enough.

Any advice appreciated

PS: I use Windows 7 RC - I also have OSX 10.5.6 installed but find the lack of a good synaptics driver and poor battery time to be show stoppers.

[yak]

As far as I know, the T60/p can take up to T7600 which is a dual core 2.33GHz mobile CPU with 64bit capability. However, it may not be worth it since they are pretty expensive and you already have a 2.16GHz so you probably wouldn't gain much performance.

What about the ThinkPad W series? They don't have a Flexview screens but the MacBooks don't have them either.

[san]

Yes I've looked a bit at the w series.. probably nice machines too. However, I would rather run OSX than Windows, and with the IPS displays out of the equation the choice seems easy now. Besides, the 17" MBP , seems only wider than my T60p. Not heavier, not thicker, not deeper.

You are probably right that the cpu upgrade would only give me a slight performance increase and seemingly be rather costly.. now if I could get my hands on a T7600 equipped "bargain" laptop of any brand, it could make sense to just buy it and swap the CPU's out and pass it on .. oh well...
Any opinions on moving the Hitachi to the ultrabay and installing an X25-m SSD as the primary system drive ? Would it be worth it ? Or even throw out the Hitachi and putting in two SSD's. I guess at least Photoshop and Nikon's NX2 would benefit from having a seperate "scratch disk".

[richk]

Do you have a 7200 RPM disk? That would make a lot more difference than the CPU upgrade. I have never seen enough speed increase from a CPU swap to be worthwhile. If you are really using photoshop to deal with large pictures, your bottlenecks are probable "not enough memory" and "disk too slow". The SSD would address the disk part, but they are expensive and not very big. Photos would fill it up pretty fast. Even if you have a 7200RPM disk, make sure it is defragmented.

[Troels]

Upgrade to an SSD for sure if you have the money. Intel has just lowered the prices on their new range of SSDs by about 50%, so wait for these to appear in web stores.
I haven't made an upgrade to SSD personally, since i required storage space, and paying $700 for a 256 GB, which is still to small for me, is really just outrageous. So I went for a $130 Seagate Momentus 7200.4 500 GB. With a SSD you will benefit from the fact that the random read/times are much higher than a harddrive, and so is the I/O performance - which is more important than sequential RW times and burst rates.
The 7200.4 Seagate Momentus has a high sequential read/write time, but limited by I/O - actually the WD5000BEVT is faster for I/O, so in that case the performance in real life is perceived to be about the same despite it being 7200 vs. 5400 rpm.

What version of OSX86 are you using? I've had good luck with iPC myself, following this guide: http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=32&t=76892 ...

[yak]

He said in the first post that he has a "top of the line 7200 rpm Hitachi drive".

Moving the HDD to the UltraBay and using a speedy SSD as the main drive is a good idea IMHO. This should increase the overall system performance by quite a bit. However, it will have no impact on speed of calculations in Photoshop.