T61 upgrade from 2GB or RAM ?

Good day all, and happy New Year !

My T61 is approaching 5 years old this February ( can't beleive it's been that long already ! ), and I'm still running the factory specs ( 2GB of RAM, 160GB @ 7200RPM HDD, and the 2.4GHZ processor ). Within the past few months or so I've noticed that websites that hosts videos ( YouTube, HuLu, the naughty sites, etc. ) are starting to take FOREVER to load. They WILL load, but for some reason they are starting to bog the computer down. I do a disk defrag on a regualer basis ( once a week or there abouts ), and I have Microsoft Security Essentials constantly scanning for viruses. My question is, if I upgrade my RAM to say 6GB or something ( insted of the 2 that I have now ) will I notice a significant increase in performance ? Also, my 160GB memory is almost full ( only about 6gigs left ) should I also upgrade to an SSD or something ?

Thanks for the help !

Mike

 

My list of suggested upgrades would go along these lines:

1) Middleton's BIOS - $0

2) A good SSD (Samsung 830 or Crucial M4 would be my preferred choices) while keeping your current drive in the media bay via the adapter. $100-200 depending whether you choose 128GB or 256GB.

3) A RAM upgrade. I have 8GB in my T61-based FrankenPad running a 64-bit version of W7 Pro, but unless you run several VMs or have other high requirements, you should be OK with 4GB...at about $40 for 2x2GB DIMMs...

4) Lastly, if your machine is running a Merom CPU (T7700 or something along these lines) you may want to move along to a T9300/9500 which will run cooler, provide better battery life and help with video-intensive tasks. $60 for T9300 and $90 for T9500...

Happy upgrading.

 

With a near full drive you will see a detrimental effect on the hard drive's performance, especially if the OS uses your drive for Virtual Memory purposes. As ajkula66 says, a SSD drive is a good way to give your T61 a nice boost in performance and general usability, I have an Intel X25-M drive in mine and it goes really well - not that far behind to my T420 which is 3 generations ahead. Most current SSD's should be a lot faster than the X25-M I have but the T61 is SATA II restricted so don't pay over the odds for a SATA III drive, go for ones with a good price to capacity ratio (and critically reliability, Sandforce drives don't tend to play well with the T61 from experience).



Bumping up the RAM would be recommended so the OS won't need to cache on your drives as much. 2GB is cutting it on today's usage so doubling to at least 4GB should be sufficient. Brand new DDR2 RAM's are quite pricey nowadays compared to DDR3 so I would look for a second hand module if you can find one at a good price.

 

My apologies to OP for not reading his signature prior to posting...

You already have a Penryn (I was presuming a Merom) but going from T8300 to T9300 will make a noticeable difference when multitasking...the temps and battery usage will not get any better and might actually get a bit worse with this (well worth in my opinion) upgrade. I'd definitely do that one last, after everything else has been put in its place...

 

disable page file and add ram. In a 32bit OS the maximum the laptop can use is ~3GB, and if you run 64bit OS then you can get use of the max 8GB that you can put in (which is overpriced as usual).

Then if you got the funds, add SSD.

 

Thanks for all the help everyone !

Looks like all I can upgrade to is 3GB then ( since I do have the 32bit OS ). I'll be doing that, along with most likely going with the T9300 as well. I'm just amazed that this machine still looks new and is even running for an almost 5 year old laptop. My last laptop I kept that long ( a Toshiba Satellite notebook ) was completely falling apart at that age. Fans were shutting down randomly, keys from the keyboard were popping out, screen was getting dim, etc. Getting a Thinkpad was one of the best decisions I have yet to make