[ltp] CPUs that can work in a T61

Richard Neill linux-thinkpad@linux-thinkpad.org
Wed, 21 Nov 2012 06:24:53 +0000


On 19/11/12 20:04, rappard@dds.nl wrote:
>> Get a decent SSD for the buck - it's much much better. Or push 8GB of
>> DDR-2 - it's possible (but not cheap).
>
> Apologies for the semi-thread hijack: are you implying that it's
> possible to stick 8 GB in a T6*? I thought 4 GB was the max.
>
> [Obviously I would need to upgrade my T60 from XP to a 64-bit OS then,
> but that would be the next step.]

As I understand it, the T61s can take 8GB, but the T60s are limited to 
4GB (of which only 3GB is visible!). This is true even with an upgrade 
to a Core 2 duo (64-bit) CPU and OS.

But...one helpful thing... you can have swap to SSD, and it almost works 
well enough.

On rotating disk, the purpose of swap is simply so that your machine 
doesn't instantly kill processes when it runs out of RAM; swapping is 
really really slow.

On SSD, swapping is tolerable - especially for hogs like Firefox that 
never really need to access the memory again, they just seem to leak it. 
The nice thing about a 64-bit OS is that your processes can potentially 
address more than 4GB of memory, even if it's not actually there. So 3GB 
of accessible RAM + 8 GB of SSD-Swap results in a pretty reasonable system.

HTH

Best wishes,

Richard