From: Robert F. Munzenrider (rfm_at_psu.edu)
Date: Tue Aug 03 1999 - 15:55:29 EDT
Upgrading a 701 CPU? There was a flurry of notes about same a year or so
ago. I seem to recall that the general opinion was that the upgrade wasn't
really worth it price/performance-wise. But still....
I have a 701 486/75, Win95, which is in fine shape (Nobody's ever attempted
to pick it up by the keyboard!); 40 megs RAM, a 4-gig hard drive (I've
already done some upgrading with portables.com & no complaints). My 701 is
fine for text-based work (word processing, etc), but it's so slooowww to
boot, and even slooowwwer to process graphic images. Last spring at a
conference I was attending I hooked it up to a projector so a guy could
show a PowerPoint presentation he had worked up. One of the slides
contained a rather complex map - a map of Pennsylvania overlayed with
networks of T1 & fibre-optic cables, with some nodes indicated, etc. It
took over a minute (maybe 2???) for my trusty little 701 to form the image.
I had never seen the presentation before, so my first thought was that my
701 had crashed.... The Norton Utilities benchmark programs rates my
701-486/75 as 7.6 times faster that a 386/SX-16 - WOW! PIII/500 mhz
systems rate in around 500 times faster.... I seem to recall that an AMD
K5/100 gets rated as something around 25 or 30? Slow by today's systems,
but better than a 7.6.
I am intrigued (& have been for a while) at the thought of blowing $300 for
the AMD K5/100 upgrade (or better yet, getting my school to pay for it!).
Cost effective? Perhaps, but in a sort of non-linear way. Street value of
a stock 701 is only around $300. You can buy new notebooks that are a LOT
faster for @ $1500 or so. But for me, if I could get decent performance
out of my machine for another year or two for only $300 (I don't use it
day-in/day-out) it might be worth it. -- Obviously, the weakest link in my
sloppy thinking is the assumption that the machine is gonna hold up for
another couple of years. Another tenuous aspect of my reasoning is what I
take to be "decent performance." Otherwise, most problematic components of
the 701 (IMHO) - the battery, external power supply, the TFT screen, and
the keyboard (if one isn't careful) seem fine. (The screen is 640x480
resolution, but that's ok with me.)
I better shut up before I talk myself out of considering spending $300 on
the machine....
Bob Munzenrider
Penn State Harrisburg
>--Hello, I've just purchased a used 701c "butterfly" Thinkpad. I was
>wondering if anyone had upgraded their processor from
>"www.portables.com"? They offer a AMD 5x86 upgrade that would bring the
>little butterfly up to the speed of a pentium 75mhz processor. This
>company seems to be really professional and knowledgeable, but I would
>just like some customer comments. If any of you have done this upgrade
>on the butterfly, could you tell me how the machine is? Is it worth the
>upgrade? Does all modern software work on the machine after the
>software? Is it reliable? Any heat problems? Do demanding
>applications (office97, winfax, netscape) crash more or less than
>before?
> I realize this machine is outdated, and expensive to get up to
>useable speeds, but I like the novelty of it, and the fact that it was
>one of the few laptops to win an "engineering?" award. I mean sure a
>Lotus with a V-8 has over 300ponies, but the old one with only 4
>cylinders and it's soft "whirrrrr" is much more novel. Anyhow, this is
>Keith from Honolulu, Hawaii saying greetings to everyone on the list.
>Thanks in advance for your responses.
>
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