Can a T61 w/ Vista 64Bit register 4Gb Ram?

Hi all!

...1st post here and already a question

I have purchased the T61 and will add 4GB of RAM and Vista Business 64Bit.
I just want to load it as much as I can and.....feel good about it!

However I heard people saying that the T61 will not register 4GB anyways ???


Can someone confirm?

Thanks!

 

That is not true. It will definitely recognize 4GB with 64-bit Vista. Click the clean install guide in my sig.

 

as mentioned before, a T61 bios will definitely accept 4gb of ram. However, a 32 bit OS will limit the ram utilization to approx 3.2GB.

If you install a 64 bit operating system it will work like a charm, good luck

 

Thank you very much to both of you for this answer.

 

Just to make sure other readers don't misunderstand this issue, you need a T61 (Santa Rosa) and a 64-bit OS to make the 4 Gb available to the OS. Pre-Santa Rosa TPs are limited to slightly over 3 Gb available whether the OS is 32 or 64 bit.

Slightly OT here, but you might want to consider one of the newer 7200 RPM drives also. You'll lose some battery time but these new drives put out far less heat than previous versions. I put in a Momentus 7200.2 160 Gb drive (the Hitachi 200 wasn't available at the time) and the Vista performance rating for drive transfer went from 4.4 on the OEM 5400 drive with x86 Vista to 5.2.

And IMHO, the T61 with Vista Enterprise x64 and 4 Gb of memory rocks.

mdarter

 

Yeah... I've got a Hitachi 7K200 and 4GB of OCZ sitting here just waiting for my T61 to arrive.

 

It will be interesting to see the performance impact when more 800 Mhz ram starts shipping and we can maximize the 800 Mhz FSB. I assume Santa Rosa will take advantage of it.

mdarter

 

No unfortunately you assumed wrong. 800mhz RAM is available now and it throttles down to 667mhz when installed on Santa Rosa. It might be possible that a BIOS or something could run the RAM at 800mhz. I'm not sure about that. Most people beleive that Santa Rosa will never run at 800mhz and that won't be an option until the next chipset.

 

That's why I said when *more* 800 Mhz starts shipping...

I knew it would take a BIOS upgrade, but wasn't aware the limitation was hard coded into the chipset. It's just multipliers and timing.

mdarter

 

I ordered the 7200RPM drive directly from Lenevo, was that a mistake?
I assumed they would ship a Hitachi or Seagate.

Is there any other drive with better performances that I could use?

 

That's totally fine but you probably paid more than you needed to.

 

You will get Hitachi or Seagate, but you won't get the newer perpendicular technology that is available. I wouldn't worry about it. You'll get a nice hard drive from Lenovo. If you do decide to buy one and swap it you can view the installation video (link in my sig) It's probably much easier than you might think.

 

ahhhhhhhhhhh that's right, I didn't even know that the perpendicular technology was available on laptops at all.

Now I'm torn between changing my order, which will delay it even more and keep that drive.
I don't think I paid much more as I used the 10% off coupon. It also keeps the drive under the Lenovo warranty which could be good (or maybe not since it's my first Lenovo).

 

You could always consider upgrading the drive a little later on. Then you could get the SATA bay adapter for your factory hard drive and use a better hard drive as your primary drive.

 

That's a good idea.

Does the T61 have SATA I or SATA II?

 

SATA II for the primary (obviously you need a SATA II HDD), but the ultrabay adapter is SATA I.

 

hey guyz vista 32 bit just can register 3.2 gd of ram man. i think that 2gb is good enough. i know that now buddy abuses there laptop like man. AutoCad, Winamp, Vlc movie player, AVG antivirus, firefox, onenote, and office at the same time all i can say is that it work very well. no problems hahahahahah and i just have 2gb ram and a 2.0ghz processor

i love my ThinkPad t61