Thinkpad G40 upgrades

[jrichards]

   I have a Thinkpad G40 (2384-33u) that's running slow when I go onto sites that have lots of pop ups. Video gets choppy at 360 p. I have Windows XP sp3 and have recently upgraded the BIOS through Lenovo support. I have 34.4 GB left on 40 GB HD.

   The plan in the immediate term is to increase RAM from stock 248 MGB to 512 MGB. Long term I am considering upgrading from stock 2.4 Mhz Pentium 4 CPU to 3.0 Mhz. Is the long term plan necesary or will increasing RAM be sufficient?

[ajkula66 Guru]

Welcome to the forum!

While RAM upgrade is a worthwhile one, you need at least 1GB to run XP comfortably. That machine will take up to 2GB and feel much younger.

Honestly, a CPU upgrade might not make that much of a difference. The biggest bottleneck on G40 is the Intel integrated graphics chipset, and there's nothing you can do about that.

Happy upgrading!

[jrichards]

Thank you for your response. I have the option of going up to 1 GB of RAM. As far as the issue with video is there anything that can be done?

[ajkula66 Guru]

Unless you have a spare G41 board with dedicted graphics, there's not much of anything that can be done regarding the graphics.

Good luck.

[jrichards]

Is the G41 graphics board compatable with G40?

[ajkula66 Guru]

You'd have to swap the entire motherboard, but yes, they are compatible.

If I were still playing around with G4x series, I'd just find a barebone G41 and swap the good parts from your G40 in...

That being said, it's still an old (albeit lovable)  platform and you might be better off just going for a new laptop if you need more powerful graphics...high-end T4x and even T6x machines are being sold for a song-and-dance nowadays, and they'll blow away any G41 in the graphics department...

Good luck.

[jrichards]

I thank you very much for your advice. I'll get a second 512MB chip and buy a new laptop.