I wish I had more to offer to help you guys out, because sometimes I feel like I'm leeching from all of your banks of knowledge.

If you even need environmental guidance, feel free to ask!

Anyways, I have an old IBM ThinkPad T60 that I really like, and I want to upgrade it to last a bit longer. It currently has 1 gig of RAM and runs Windows XP.

Do I upgrade the motherboard? Do I add more RAM? Let me know what you guys think.

I'm not overly computer savy. But if it will take more ram. Start there.

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RAM would be a good start; the bump to 4GB would do wonders. After that, you could upgrade to a SSD. Then you're maxed (not sure if the laptop will support more than 4GB, idk if it's 64 bit or not), but that should give you at least another year or two of usability.

How big is the current hard drive?

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Max your RAM out. That model caps at 4GB, (2x2GB sticks), probably run you about $50. I'm going to guess it doesn't support SSDs, but if it does, that's a good option too. (If I had to bet, I don't think it will. )

Upgrading the mobo in a notebook is usually impossible, if not ill advised.

I appreciate it, this is one area I'm going to study up on to see if I can get a better hang on it. Squanto, good to hear from you, man. How's the birthday hangover?

anybody want to link me to the appropriate RAM? i assume the stuff is plug and play...

it's like 120 gb i think...but I don't have much on it. let me know if a bigger hard drive will benefit how it runs...

what is SSD? and I don't know how to check if it's 64 bit.

Ssd is a solid state drive. Basically a hard drvI've with no moving parts. Grabs data faster than a standard hard drive.

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And a larger hard drive shouldn't make a huge diff if it isn't jammed ... Unless its a ssd. But I would clEan up cache and cookies. Some of that crap will slow a computer up.

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ah...the computer just got re-imaged on friday, so cache and cookies and whatever shouldn't be an issue, right?

From a quick google, it looks like the T60 accepts zif drives, so SSD would be an option.

A SSD is basically a hard drive made out of RAM. Cookies and cache are probably fine. Install Defraggler, it's a defrag program that works better than Windows' own defrag program. Not really necessary right now, but will be useful in the future.

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Isn't also normally more expensive than new notebooks anyways?

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how correct is this? I can't get an SSD and I can only put in 3GB of RAM?

That model apparently has a chipset restriction that will only support 3GB. That explains that.

http://support.lenovo.com/en_US/detail. ... MIGR-62487

I'm almost positive that you have the right drive type for a SSD; however, do you think you could take the HD out and snap a picture of the connector?

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I wouldn't even waste any money on it Pat. The 1 gig of ram is gonna run xp just fine. If you're not playing games, and just surfing, watching videos, and downloading tunes and stuff, leave it be. The most I might suggest is bump the ram up to 2 gigs if it's painfully slow. Try and find someone with a left over stick from when they upgraded theirs, and give them $10 or so.

it has a little lag when watching youtube videos. i just want to get it up to speed. i have office 2007 and whatever so i want it to last at least until 2014

1 gig will run XP, yeah, but today's web browsers pretty much take it for granted that RAM isn't a premium, and will gobble it up at will. Add a couple running programs, and you're swapping files like Mitt Romney swaps major political positions.

I may actually have some extra RAM I'd send you for free; let me check on lunch.

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Firefox on my old PC ran up like 450K out of a gig of RAM or something ridiculous like that, it was honestly ridiculous on that computer.

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450k is nothing...did you mean 450Mb?

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Naw, Not in that terms. I meant processes. When you pull up Task Manager and it has the processes.

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