usb, cdroms, and upgrading! Oh My!

[Cogman]

I have a an IBM Thinknotes 2675-61U on my hands, and it isnt a horride laptop (not the best but ok.) But is missing a few things that I think would make it fairly good.

The first is a good ole fashion Cd-Rom, To my surprise this thing has none. Well I was thinking the best road to take would be to get an external drive and call it good. I run into the problem that I dont know if this thing is using a usb v1.0 or v2.0 as the 2.0 runs at 480MB/S and the 1.0 run at a whooping 12MB/S.

That solves the first two problems, the last is upgrading this thing, Right now it has 64MB of ram, quite frankly not enough for playing the simplest of games, and even struggles and some easy tasks. I dont know where Im supposed to go in to get the old ram out and the new ram in, so if anyone knows it would really help.

Along the same lines my next problem is that I has a 9gb hard drive. not bad, but I would like to have a bigger harddrive.

And is there any way I could upgrade the CPU or Videocard? I know that I should be able to upgrade the ram and harddrive fairly easily, but the cpu or vidcard might be a diffrent tune all together. (ATI Rage 4 MB card, Yuck).

Anyways thanks for the help. And I hope that this does not fall too much into the tech-support aria.

 

[Cogman]

one other question, pc133 ram should be backwards compadibale right? just checking.

 

[niggles]

on the question of where to get at your RAM, there should only be two openings at the bottom of most IBM laptops. I'd suggest simply unscrewing both and checking. You've got a 50/50 chance to get it right, and no problem if you don't. The locking mechanism on the IBM is a bit fussy so be careful you don't seperate the locking system from the board. It's not secured very well in my opinion. Sorry, can't help with the RAM speed question. On the HDD question I would think you could simply upgrade it no problem. To be sure it's probably best to mail IBM directly or even phone them to ask them what it'll upgrade to. They're pretty helpful really.

Edit... ok, so I did some homework for you... Here's a pic of where the RAM is located on the IBM T21

 

[jschuk]

Hopefully the link works but here are the specifications.
Here is the maintenance manual (PDF).
The memory and HDD look easy to get to, pg. 62 for memory and pg. 71 for HDD. I have experienced problems getting high density PC133 ram to work in non-PC133 machines. 256MB PC133 ram should work fine provided it has 8 chips per side.
The CPU is not FRU'd out so it may be soldered to the board, but you could open it up and look. Just keep in mind that the machine is designed for a 600MHz CPU thermally and may run into overheating issues with a faster CPU. The video is integrated to the board. For a CD-rom, you may also want to consider a PCMCIA CD-Rom. They run at 24X (8X for USB1.1) and can get their power from the PCMCIA slot so you don't need to plug them into a AC socket. You should be able to put in any capacity HDD, just make sure it is 9.5mm in height.