T61p : Batteries and hard drive upgrade

[eiffelt61p]

Hi

I have a ThinkPad T61p (6460D8G) with original Serial ATA 160Go Hard Drive under Vista.

I would like to upgrade to a 500Go Hard Drive instead of 160Go but Lenovo said to me it is impossible for this unit (not up to 160Go).
By reading this forum it seems to be possible.

Can you tell me witch HD works fine for this unit ? and what i have to do to work with : bios upgrade, ...

My second problem is about battery. I have a 6 Cell Lithium-Ion that i change twice by IBM Lenovo (under warranty). But the power suddenly go down and now Lenovo do not want to change it. Do you know a 9 Cell Lithium-Ion battery i can buy for T61p that works good and long  (the reference)

Thanks in advance

[jdhurst]

I have a T61p (8891-CTO). I don't know the specific differences between your's and mine, but they are both T61p. I have a 14-inch screen and discrete graphics.

I purchased a Seagate 500Gb 7200-rpm hard drive from my regular vendor (Hitachi not available at the time) and stuffed it in along with Windows 7 Pro. It works fine. My T61p came new from Lenovo with a 200Gb drive so I have no idea why Lenovo would say what they did.

I got a 9-cell battery from the same vendor with a new battery warranty. My Vista machine (same computer) told me it was not genuine Lenovo, but it fits exactly, works perfectly and gives me several hours of use. I tend to turn the brightness up and be connected by my USB internet stick all of which conspires to reduce battery. I just know I am happy with it.

... JDH

[diaz1023]

i can also confirm that using a 500 GB harddrive works. I have a seagate that has vista on it and i recently purchased a 500GB hitachi as well from fry's for my win 7 pro install. The original harddrive 160 GB has xp pro on it.

[eiffelt61p]

thank you very much. So i plan to buy a seagate momentus 500Gb 7200trm and put it as primary hard drive

thank you

[eiffelt61p]

T61p Upgrade is done

Now, the new system is based on
- WESTERN DIGITAL Scorpio Blue WD5000BEVT - 2,5" - 500 Go - 5400 tpm - 8 Mo - SATA (WD5000BEVT), instead of the 160Go 7200 genuine
- Memory upgrade from 2 GB to 3 GB with an additional 1GB PC2-5300 DDR2 667MHz SODIMM Memory
- a ebay 9 cells battery

Now the windows performance value is 5,6

• Processeur Intel(R) Core(TM)2 Duo CPU T9300 @ 2.50GHz 6,0
  Mémoire vive 3,00 Go 6,0
  Graphiques NVIDIA Quadro FX 570M 5,8
  Graphiques de jeu 1527 Mo total de mémoire vidéo disponible 6,1
  Primary Hard Drive 5,6

Primary hard drive is very silent and as fast as my 7200 before (actually 5400)