[Thinkpad] upgrading ThinkPad T61p with non-Lenovo RAM and HDD

[Aryeh Goretsky (home)]

Hello,

Thank you for the reply!

I have retail boxed copies of Windows Vista and Office 2007 in their funny
plastic boxes ready to install, so the software licenses are a non-issue
for me.

Thanks for your feedback on the WD3200BEVT.

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky



At 10:00 AM 12/27/2007, you wrote:

>Message: 2
>Date: Wed, 26 Dec 2007 23:09:08 -0800
>From: "Michael Geary" <Mike at Geary.com>
>Subject: Re: [Thinkpad] upgrading ThinkPad T61p with non-Lenovo RAM
>         and HDD
>To: <thinkpad at stderr.org>
>Message-ID: <AFC98D82E2D04B31B879C749F37E035B at Padlet>
>Content-Type: text/plain;       charset="us-ascii"
>
> > From: Aryeh Goretsky (home)
> >
> > I have been thinking about purchasing a ThinkPad T61p for
> > myself.  Since this is for personal use, I would like to keep
> > the costs down by buying it with the least amount of memory
> > (1GB) and smallest capacity hard disk drive (80GB) and then
> > install 4GB of RAM and a larger disk drive (250GB+).  I will
> > also buy it with Windows Vista Home Basic, then do a clean
> > install of Vista Ultimate to the new hard disk drive using a
> > retail license of it.  This will save me about $500 or so, at
> > the cost of an evening or so of assembling everything.
>
>Do you already have the Vista Ultimate retail license? If not, I would
>suggest getting Vista Ultimate with the machine if that's the version you
>want. It should be cheaper, and you can still do a clean install by using
>the Vista Anytime Upgrade DVD (which may come with the machine or which you
>can get for $5 from compusa.com) and the ABR activation backup utility. That
>way you'll have a Vista installation that will never require activation.
>
> > On the hard disk drive side, I'm considering the Western
> > Digital WD3200BEVT, (320MB, 5400RPM, SATA) or the Seagate
> > ST9250827AS (250GB, 5400RPM, SATA).  I know there has been
> > some recent discussion of failure modes with the Western
> > Digital drives, but was wondering if anyone had any specific
> > experience with these two models?  Also, does the T61p
> > require custom firmware for its hard disk drive, like the
> > T43p, or do they work fine "out of the box."
>
>I've had a couple of the WD3200BEVT's for a few weeks. One is running in my
>X61 Tablet. It didn't require any special tricks to get it going - I just
>used Acronis True Image to back up the original drive and restore onto this
>one. It seems like a perfectly fine drive - very quiet - but of course I
>can't say anything about long-term reliability.
>
>-Mike