Souping up my Thinkpad T30
My T30 suffers from the dead memory slot problem. I never bothered to try to get it fixed because I bought it second hand and the warranty issues would be a nightmare. Plus the hassle of backing everything up and not being with a laptop for a couple of weeks wasn’t worth it.
The old fix was to either put some sort of spacers on the motherboard if the second slot hadn’t fried yet, or if it had replace the motherboard. There was a chance the slot would fry again. Now it looks like there’s a new revision of the motherboard that doesn’t need spacers, so you memory slots will happily work ’til the end of time, maybe. Another bonus is it comes with the latest bios and apparently support 1GB memory slots. Having 2 gigs of memory in this thing would definitely be a good thingTM.
I also found out that you can upgrade the hard disks on these things to something bigger and faster. I currently have my eye on a Hitachi Travelstar 7K100. 100GB of 7200 rpm goodness! The total cost of upgrades would be under £400 + motherboard replacement costs (if I can’t wrangle it for free). That would definitely stave off the T43p urges I’ve been having recently!
