Junior’s three-year old ThinkPad Z60M bought the farm yesterday, the hard drive is toast and it is flashing a BSOD with statements of pain like “UNMOUNTABLE_BOOT_VOLUME”
The drive was pretty cramped to begin with, so I figure it is time to rebuild the machine from scratch — it has a big screen, good speakers, an optical, and in these days of economizing, I am not in the mood to buy anything new. It has two gigs of RAM (I added a SIMM), the processor is a little wimpy, so it will need to remain an XP box for now.
Original description: Celeron M 360(1.4GHz), 256MB RAM, 40GB 5400rpm HD, 15.4in 1280×800 LCD, Intel 900, CDRW/DVD, Intel 802.11abg wireless, Modem, 1Gb Ethernet, UltraNav, Secure chip, IEEE 1394, 6c Li-Ion batt, WinXP Home
Having taken the RAM way up to 2 gigs, now the pimping needs to focus on the drive. I’m thinking a 7200 rpm SATA – but am worried about compatibility issues and overcoming the Celeron with too much RAM or drive. It’s all about weakest link.
Memo to Lenovo support — bundle all drivers for a specific ThinkPad into one mongo archive .rar file and be done with it. The onesie-twosie-download thing is horrific.
The processor actually is your last bottleneck for daily usage. Even a Celeron could benefit from a fast SSD, so a 7200rpm drive would be fine. I do believe the Z series used SATA drives, so you’re in luck there. I’m sure someone around the office has a spare drive they can ship up to ya…
I ordered up a half-a-terrabyte for $99. Not going SSD — too rich for my blood. But a classic 5400 HDD (I went slower for heat reasons). Thanks Tim.
Use System Update for getting the drivers you need in (mostly) one batch.
yeah, sure, but ….. I challenge you to get TVSU running on a fresh ThinkPad due to the .NET framework issue. I’m just saying — one whopping “all-in” archive would be a nice option.
David,
Great thought! The counter point will be the countless updates to the mega file as all the pieces are updated, and worse, that with a single mega file to download – it will take a lot longer to download when you just need the one file.
There are also some financial impacts – suppose IT infrastructure costs were based on GB of downloads…? It would then be in both the company and the customer best interest to just get the files that are absolutely needed.
So long as you stay on XP, the 5400 rpm drive should be fine, but the 7200 ones do offer a significant performance boost. I just traded out a 5400 for 7200 rpm on a T61p and was really impressed by the difference. It’s more an issue on Vista as Vista keeps hitting the drive updating all those widgets and that adds overhead.
Kudos on keeping the Z61 running strong..
Mark
I thought of the counterpoint part — archive management should be able to take care of incremental adds and edits to the “blob” — lesson learned though — I now have an X41 blob and a Z60M blob parked on the home mega disk.
hey guys, i have an X62 review unit. i’d love to radically improve its disk throuput. thoughts?
jim Forbes
Escondidio, CA
fighting off the marauding avocados on a day by day basis
Be sure that home mega disk is replicated somewhere…probably out in the cloud.
I’m picturing the a room that is fast morphing into the Churbuck Server Room. Play your cards right and it may someday heat the house for you. 😉