[ltp] Step up T60

[Helen Borrie]

Hi List,

As an inveterate conservationist, I've at last been inspired to upgrade my workhorse no-name laptop that I've been building up over the years since buying it as a barebones in 2003.  It's still quite respectable for most purposes and it's been a great platform for successive generations of Mandrake/Mandriva. 

But - old age catches up with laptops.  Though the 2.2 GHz Celeron still returns full clock speed, the **riveted-in** optical drive has died, USB is only 1.1 and, with 1 Gig RAM it is at its max.  The BIOS (Insyde Software 4) doesn't support USB boot except from floppy and my ADSL service isn't up to the task of downloading ISOs...all in all, its time has come....after watching the eBay offerings for weeks, I'm now the delighted owner of a T60.  (Yes, my dear little 2001-vintage TP 390E is still working beautifully as my development platform for Kylix 3 and Firebird over Mandrake 9!)

The T60 is a 2008-HK4 with the T5600 (1.8 GHz) Intel duocore, 15.4" display with Radeon X1300.  Currently it has 512MB RAM for which I've ordered 2 X 2GB 667 MHz low-density modules as replacement;  and an 80 GB 5400r HDD which I'll replace with an Hitachi 320 GB 7200r that I've currently got in an external SATA enclosure. 

I'm undecided about how to arrange the storage on this beast.  The outfit comes with OEM-installed WinXP 32-bit and a whole bunch of stuff I don't want, on a single partition.  I do need Windows though:  like many of us, I still live and work in parallel universes.  

The dual-boot plan is to get rid of the unwanted stuff on the 80GB drive, partition the 320 GB drive and image-copy the C partition into the boot partition of the bigger drive;  then do likewise with the Linux (Mandriva 2008:0) partition from the 160 GB Samsung PATA HDD that's currently on the no-name;  and fix up the MBR.

Another plan is to commission the vmware 5 for Linux that I've had sitting on the shelf in its shrinkwrap for some long while and run Windows, one or more Linuxen and maybe also Solaris, in vms.  The doubt I have about this is whether an OEM installation of WinXP (which is an official Lenovo downgrade from Vista, hence no disks) can be shuffled about like this.  I suspect not. Would that parallel universes were *really* parallel and we were not limited by That Universe and its embedded self-destruct capabilities!  I'd be glad to hear of the experiences of anyone who has tried this, successfully or not.

I'm also interested to know whether the i386 binary installers for Mandriva, Centos and Ubuntu (and maybe others) are happy on the T60 or whether I should go straight for a completely fresh x64.

Whichever way I go, I'm led to the next question:  adding more drives.  I understand that the optical drive caddy on this machine can be removed and replaced with a HDD caddy.  As the T60 is still on its way, I don't know whether the Ultrabay presents a "bus-neutral" interface to the caddies and the Lenovo site is *singularly* unhelpful. I see that both SATA and IDE caddies are available...I'm assuming (until better informed) that I'll need a PATA caddy if I want the option to recycle the existing PATA drive from the no-name box.   Does anyone know for sure whether the Ultrabay interface is bus-neutral? 

My final question (for now!) is about the two PCMCIA ports:  does anyone know whether both the Expresscard and the standard port can be operational simultaneously?  I'd like to think I could put a SATA host controller in the standard port and still have the option of a card-reader in the Ex-port. 

(From the Linux POV, I know that Mdk 9 was totally friendly about the Type 2 network and phone modem card I plugged into the TP 390E all those years ago:  it just works.  That old bus can take 2 Type 1 cards or one Type 2, AFAIR.)

Any insights would be much appreciated. 

Thanks,
Helen