Other upgrades to think about aside Hard drive/memory

[Artes]

Hello there,

My wife's T60 (2613 CTO) with an Intel 1.833 mhz processor, 1 gig of ram and 105ish megabyte hard drive are due for upgrades. The hard drive is running about 90% full so I will be adding 2 gig of Crucial ram and a 500 gig hard drive to restore some vigor once I've done a clean install of XP on the new hard drive.

I don't know if the motherboard can support a chip upgrade. If possible, is this something to consider or a waste of money that would be better used for another notebook? I might wait until after the memory and hard drive upgrade and see how her system and interior design layout software responds.

Thank you for the advice.

[ZaZ]

If you're looking a performance boost, I might suggest the Seagate Momentus XT. It's a hard drive with a flash drive attached. It can speed up common tasks and boot times quite a bit. The CPU is indeed upgradeable. For typical usage like office or internet, a better CPU won't make much of a difference. The hard drive and extra memory is more likely to make a difference unless you're really pushing the CPU.

[TravisD]

The CPU is replaceable, but it may not be economical. You have a T2400 or a T5600. A lot of people have upgraded to T7XXX series (like the T7400, T7500, T7600, but you are looking at maybe $200 for a new one (T7400 or T7500). A new T7600 will run you about $250. 667MHz FSB is the max, so anything above a T7600 is out.

I can't speak to the degree of improvement definitively, as I usually jump several generations, but I doubt it will transform your machine. You would be better off putting that money towards a solid state drive and Windows 7 if you really want a transformation. I have an Intel X25-M 80GB (about $200 these days) and the difference is night and day. They do have a cheaper one you might read up on that is the perfect size for a system drive. You can put a traditional HDD for storage in the bay instead of the CD/DVD drive and use thumb drives instead of DVD's for the most part. Do some reading on Anand Tech about SSD's. Not all are good. He took an interest in them and has done some really good articles on the technology. Stat here: http://www.anandtech.com/show/2829