Upgrading a 760E

[AlphaKilo470]

Well, earlier this year, you folks have heard in my post about me upgrading my 760E from a P120 to a P133. Well, now I have a new project that I feel like bloggin since I'm bored and have nothing to do. Earlier today, I accquired the bottom half of a ThinkPad 760XD sans CD, HD, battery, keyboard, so basically, it was just the lower shell and the system assembly. Once I get my full height 760E (the one I still have here is the thin version) back from the person I loaned it to, I'm going to attempt throwing the parts together. And since the screen on my 760E is SVGA, I'll have to reflash the BIOS with the wrong one.

Another thing I'll be doing is replacing the mWave with the ESS card.

Well, for anyone who's dreamed of upgrading their old 760, you might want to follow along with this to see if it will actually work, I'm going to be performing just about every upgrade a 760 owner could possibly dream of.

[AlphaKilo470]

To my dismay, the video card from the XD did not work with my display and the XD system board had a BIOS incompatible with my display, but I was able to replace the Pentium 133 with the Pentium MMX 166. I also removed the mWave and added the ESS AudioDrive card. As far as progress goes, I'm typing this post on my 760E, which is now equivalent in hardware to a 760XL. After removing the mWave and upgrading the CPU, this computer flies. The only problem I have now is that whenever I have the AC adaptor in, the screen flickers when ever I type or when I move the mouse over something that takes action when the cursor is over it, this problem is non-existant when running on the battery, however. I'm going to look into the problem tomorow.

[AlphaKilo470]

I've already found out why my screen was flickering. It appears to be electrical interference. When I powered up the computer in a different room in my house, the screen worked just fine.

Well, now, I no longer have two 760E's. I now have one 760E and one 760XL. And hopefully, this whole blog will be of help to at least one other 760 owner on this messageboard.

[AlphaKilo470]

Well, I got some more parts and a new update for this old thread.

I recived about two weeks ago some XGA screens and about a week ago, I recieved an XGA motherboard. The XGA board I already had was password locked. Well, with my new parts (may I mention the screen was still in the box and had the plastic cover, in other words brand new), I rebuilt my 760E/XL concoction and then built from the parts I had the FrankenPad 760XD. It has all the good features of a 760 with none of the bad.

Specs are as goes:
166mhz Pentium MMX 166 (from 760XD)
80mb RAM
ESS AudioDrive (from 760EL or XL. no more mWave trouble)
Enhanced 2mb Video w/ MPEG (from 760XD)
XGA TFT (brand new)
6gb HD
Windows ME (runs great with this config)

The only problem now is that I had to remove the fan from the video board since it would not fit with my DC board in place. Apparently, the 760XD/XL used a different DC board. The system gets warm, but it's still on par with any other 760 (hot as hell) and I've never had any trouble with it yet. Still, if anyone does have a 760XD/XL DC board, PM me.

I used the leftover parts to convert my thin 133mhz 760E to a full height 150mhz 760E w/ cd rom. The 133mhz Pentium gets the higher benchmarks due to the higher bus speed, but I found that on stuff that really doesn't push a big load on the CPU or bus, such as Office, actually ran slightly more responsive on the setup. However, a 150 vs. 133 may not yeild the same results in all setups, it depends on what else the system has hardware wise and software wise.