Thinkpad T41 Questions

Just got a Thinkpad T41. Loving it so far. Definitely feels solidly built. Have a few questions though.

1) My T41 came with only 256Mb of RAM. I plan on upgrading that since it occasionally feels pokey. Is there a recommended manufacturer?

2) I downloaded the battery maximizer. I set the screen to 3 and everything else to the lowest but my projected battery time is a little over three and half hours. Does this seem normal? Was hoping to get at least four hours on a full charge. On IBM's website it says up to five and a half hours for the six cell battery, which is what I have. I know they tend to be optimistic.

3) I plan on upgrading the DVD-ROM to at least a combo drive or hopefully a DVD burner. I found a few burners on ebay for $120 but they are only -R or -RAM. Most of the discs I burn are +R. Anyone have a solution for this?

4) There is a PCI device under Other Devices in the Device Manager that I cannot find a driver for. I spoke with IBM support. They sent me a driver for a Texas Instruments pci device, 1510 I believe. It installed the first time but one of the three partss for it said it wasn't working to I uninstalled it. Now it won't install the driver. Anyone know what this is for?

Thanks for reading, any help grealy appreciated.

 

Congrats, the T40 series is, in my humble opinion, the best notebook model series out there.

1) Crucial is such a great place to find and buy notebook memory, let's just direct you there: www.crucial.com

2) Have you drained the battery all the way down while using the T41? On the initial couple of uses of the notebook I find the battery meter can be relatively unaccurate, but after draining the battery all the way down the meter will become better gauged. It might actually be underestimating your battery life at the moment.

3) Hmm, well, if it doesn't fit what you need you might just want to go with the multi-burner IBM offers via it's site

http://www-132.ibm.com/webapp/wcs/stores/servlet/ProductDisplay?catalogId=-840&storeId=1&productId=8712119&langId=-1&dualCurrId=73

4) wish i could help on this, just don't know though.

 

If your notebook is new, call IBM and get your recovery disks, they are free for the 1st 30 days, then the price goes up to ~$30. You need to get all of IBM's thinkpad drivers and stuff installed to get rid of the unknown device cause there is no way of telling otherwise. Installing all the IBM drivers and software will also help with the power lasting longer as some of the drivers add the power saving modes for devices. You don't have to add the 3rd party junk like nortons and such, just the stuff that is related to the hardware in your notebook. One of the things that helped to increase my battery life was to go back to the original IBM release of the Radeon drivers and ATI software, that decreased my current draw by about 5% over having the omega or the drivers from ATI's download site.

Jack

"They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security" (Ben Franklin)
http://pbase.com/joneill

 

Thanks for the suggestions. I don't think I will be giving IBM $349 plus tax of my money for a 2x single format burner. No slight to DVD-RAM, but who uses that anyway? Most of the discs I burn are +R so having just a -R burner isn't going to work for me. I can buy an OEM 8x dual format dual layer drive for around $140. The trick will be to find one I can use the caddy and bezel off my DVD-ROM that fits. I put a NEC-5500A into my Presario. From what I remember, it looked just same except for the caddy and the bezel. Maybe I'll pop it out and have a look.