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On Thu, 16 Oct 1997, Rob Friedman wrote: > I have a Thinkpad 755c 486/75 and am looking into an upgrade with a firm > called Portable Enhancements. > > Has anyone had any experience with upgrades and/or Portable Enhancements? > If so, did you feel it was worth it, or would you just as well suggest > buying another computer? > > Any help would be greatly appreciated. PEP used to continually post advertisements on this mailing list. They seem to have a habit of using useless benchmarks like Landmark to generate performance numbers for their CPU upgrades. If you are looking into CPU upgrades make them give you benchmark numbers from something reliable and trustworthy like Winbench before commiting to anything. I've looked at things like their hard drive upgrade pricing and thye seem to run about 2x the cost of the drive and they stick you with the cost of useless [at least to me] things like virus scanning the drives contents. If your upgrade [whatever it is] starts to cost $300-$500 or more you should really look into what is available in modern Pentium systems for $1500 or so. Your old unit has to be worth at least a few hundred dollars. Some friends of mine just picked up Sharp Widenotes [P133/256K L2 cache/16MB/1024x600 active display] for about $1500 and they even have built in 28.8 modems. PEP's pricing always seemed high to me, and they finally left this mailing list after several people constantly demanded real benchmark numbers every time they tried to foist their products upon us. BS benchmarks that fit entirely in L1 cache don't cut it. They will give you numbers that increase roughly linearly with CPU speed and that is far from the case in the real world. If any of PEP's sales drones are reading this feel free to provide honest benchmark comparisons of, say, the TP701 upgrade to a 5x86-100 you said was significantly faster than a stock unit. Using other systems speed increases as a comparison is not allowed, give us a nice honest TP701-50 or TP701-75 before and after. The dirty secret about that upgrade is that since that unit doesn't have a L2 cache you'd be hard pressed to get more than 30% out of it, and they charged roughly $500 for that privelege. You get very rapidly diminishing returns as the CPU's clock multiplier increases. The regular Pentium 200 [3x66.6] typically benchmarked at 5% faster than the Pentium 166 [2.5x66.6] and cost quite a bit more. Moving from 3x25 to 4x25 is insignificant. ============================================================================ ==== Steve Parker ==== San Luis Obispo, CA ==== Multi-OS & Multitasking ==== ============================================================================