I want to upgrade a Thinkpad R51

[dacp]

I am new to the thinkpad and a novice with laptops. I have a thinkpad R15 1.6g with 512m ram and 30g hard drive. I just purchased 2g's of ram and plan to upgrade the hard drive to larger capacity. What can more can I do, is there a faster hard drive that I should look for can I upgrade the processor? Thanks for your time

[sjthinkpader]

Welcome to the forum.

The largest available HDD is the Western Digital WD3200BEVE, 320GB. It is very fast also.

[Harryc]

I've found the best processor upgrade for an R51 to be a 1.8Ghz Pentium M 745 Dothan. Intel part # SL7EN. You can search for SL7EN on EBay. This CPU is the perfect blend of performance, reasonable heat, and value ($$). If you start plopping 2.0GHz and higher CPU's in an R51 you might run into heat issues because the cooling fan in those was not designed for CPU's higher than 1.7Ghz. Now, every time I make a statement like that someone will come along and say they put a 2.1Ghz CPU in an R51 etc., so YMMV.

[dacp]

Thanks, and thanks for all the good information!
Just crossed my mnd, what about video adaptor/card, can that be upgraded?

[Harryc]

No, the Video processor (GPU) is soldered onto the motherboard.

[dacp]

Thanks

[underclocker]

For performance, Transcend offers SSD's that will work in the R51, up to 128GB. They are cool, fast and expensive;

http://www.transcendusa.com/Products/Mo ... 9&LangNo=0


To upgrade the video, you have to swap the motherboard. At that point, you'd be better off selling the R51 and buying a T42p.