So I found my old T61...

I was pretty sure I had gave it to my brother in law; however, it turned up in my closet. Didn't like the thought of it as a paper-weight so I threw a copy of linux on it (couldn't find the recovery media and windows XP was acting posessed) and have been enjoying the results. It's a little noisy and hot, but god I can't remember the last time I had a laptop keyboard that was this comfortable to type on.

I've been poking around to see how I might get this old gal into shape again. I assume a solid state drive would probably solve most of the old heat and noise issues. Should I (or rather can I) try to replace anything else?

More importantly, am I simply dumping cash down the drain putting anything into this old laptop? haha

Questions, comments, suggestions, all welcome. Just mulling over this project.

 

There's no reason you couldn't use your T61 as a daily laptop, if what you do doesn't demand the latest and greatest.

Before doing anything, you should clean out the system throughly just to get rid of any dust and whatnot. You could also consider repasting the CPU with fresh thermal compound to help reduce CPU temps.

Installing a SSD will certainly make the system feel much faster and would be a worthy upgrade if you want to spend money on the system (SSDs are sitting around $0.70 to $0.90 per GB). I'd recommend a SSD from Curcial, Plextor, Intel, or Samsung, and if you're looking to save money go for a SATAII SSD (since the T61 can't take advantage of the full read/write speeds of SATAIII SSDs anyway).

Only reason that I can think of for dumping an older system like that is if you plan on running the T61 as a 24/7 server and electricity prices where you live are high. In that case, you could probably buy/build a more power efficient server instead.

If you need it, here's the T61 service manual from Lenovo: Hardware Maintenance Manual - ThinkPad R61, R61i, T61 14.1-inch widescreen

 

an SSD won't help much or at all with heat ans noise. sounds like it needs the dust cleaned out and some AS5. though an SSD is a good upgrade. what are it's specs?

 

Oh yes, T61 should do fine for most day to day work, except for gaming and such.

 

SSD would be a big step up but if things are still a bit hot then you could try swapping out the processor. Most T61's come with Merom based processors (T7xxx), they're OK but they can get a bit toasty and are not that efficient with HD video decoding.

If you are coming from a Merom based machine then using Middleton's BIOS here allows you to upgrade to the updated Penryn Core 2 Duo processors (T8xxx/T9xxx) which are more efficient and can be acquired quite cheaply on sites like eBay nowadays.

 

Oh it will definitely be getting a clean first and foremost!

Thanks for mentioning the bios trick. I do have the old Merom CPU (T7300). And very keen mention of the SATA II drives, I hadn't considered that either.

Full specs:
2 Gigs RAM
Core 2 Duo T7300 @ 2.00 GHz x2
NVIDIA Quadro NVS 140M
120 gig HDD

 

I'd agree with the comments above.

FWIW my T61 runs pretty cool under openSUSE, Vista and my preferred Kubuntu so I suspect your machine needs a good clean.

And if you do get a SSD, you can get an ultrabay HDD adapter which allows you to replace the DVD drive with extra storage.

 

yeah dude the newer core 2 duo are 45nm compared to merom which is 65nm. Because the newer chips have a smaller chip (core) they are a little faster and use a little less voltage and tend to run cooler. If for any reason you run vista or even 7 for that matter there a few tricks you can run to make it use less system resources. I got 7 ideling at 300-400mb ram with anti virus on pentium 4 with 1gb ram. it runs google chrome and Norton Ghost rather well, the same or similar can be down to vista.

4gb of ram an SSD and better CPU would knock it out of the park.