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Everything Steve says about upgrading seems upgrading accurate, but still.... I have a 2-year-old TP701 (Butterfly model) with a SLOWWW 486/75 processor. Evergreen Tech will install an AMD P5 chip (I forget the model specs) for $400. The AMD chip is rated at 133 mhz, but they say that the effective speed is equivalent to a Pentium 75. With Win95 & Office97 in my machine now, I'm "seeing" slow operating speed, especially when multi-tasking - even with 24 megs of RAM. I don't have $1500-2500 or more to buy a new system, but I might could maybe squeeze out $400 for the cpu upgrade. The 701 seems in fine shape & should have a couple more years of life in it. Maybe more with a cpu upgrade. Although my upgraded system would not be the latest/greatest/fastest around, would I pick up enough "Bang for the Buck" to make the upgrade worthwhile?? BobM Penn State Harrisburg ----------------------------------- > >Date: Thu, 16 Oct 1997 14:36:36 -0700 >From: Steve Parker <sparker@torgo.punk.net> >To: Rob Friedman <rhfriedm@law.harvard.edu> >CC: thinkpad@cs.utk.edu >Subject: Re: laptop upgrade? > >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 ====