very old thinkpad 600e cpu upgrade question

[paulatreides]

Hi everybody

recently some friend of mine gave me an old thinkpad 600e, wich uses a PII 300 mobile. Although i've got another laptop (Turion), I have to say that old piece of stuff looks like it could survive a nuclear attack (which can't be said about my acer turion :roll: )So, if you forgive the long introduction, here is my question: Could I upgrade it with a mmc2 PIII 500 I've seen on ebay? It's supposed to work perfectly on an 600x, wich is the next model, and shares a lot of components with my model. Does it worth considering all I want to do with it is working with office? Thank you all

 

[mitch074]

From my experience with IBM laptops, it is worth a try, but:
- first, make yourself comfortable with removing your present CPU: if you can't remove it easily, you won't be able to replace it anyway
- check that you won't need any special thermal compound to stick the cooler back on the cpu
- ensure that it is a 440BX chipset you have, otherwise getting a 500MHz cpu will be useless (if you have a ZX chip on your granny laptop, you're out)
- I would guess that the price of the replacement mmu would be quite small. Get it and try: if you can get the system to boot, you're a winner. If not, you've just set yourself a few bucks back... on a free laptop 😛

While IBM series usually follow very close hardware specifications, changing the cpu is not that easy.

 

[paulatreides]

Thank you very much!!

Indeed, It's a BX. I downloaded the hardware manual from lenovo support page, removing the CPU seems a bit tricky, but for 20 € (I'm spanish) you're right it well worth a try. will do.

 

[hella-d]

Ive Upgraded My IBM Thinkpad 600E, With No Problems (Except For The Case Is A Pain To Open), Upgraded CPU To An MMC-2 500MHz Pentium III, 512MB Of PC100 SD-RAM, And An 8X DVD-ROM

This Laptop Gets Used For Wireless Internet, E-Mail, Mobile DVD, And Light Retro Gaming (Quake II, Unreal, Etc.) And Works Wonderfully

 

[jayp2002]

Hella-D,
How did you upgrade the RAM to 512 MB? 1 stick of 512MB or 2 sticks of 256? I tried this myself and it isn't working. Just wanna make sure there isn't something I need to do before I buy a smaller module.

 

[BrWarrior247]

Hi, I have had a couple of IBM ThinkPad 600E's and I believe they are both LOW-DENSITY ram memory. What type does your 600E use? I have Type 2645-5BU ... do you think I could upgrade my CPU to the 500MHz?
please let me know!
BrWarrior

 

[Guest]

How do you tell if your chipset is Bx or ZX???