Ibm T60 upgrade cpu, hard drive and OS

Ok, so my ibm thinkpad T60 has started acting up, which means that it sometimes reboots or the screen turns black but the computer is still turned on. The symtoms are described on the excellent forums at forums.thinkpads.com.

So as a consequence I decided to use some of my vacation to do something about this.
Before disassembling anything I went to the Lenovo website to get a Hardware Maintenance Manual.

The following steps need to be completed.
1) Update the BIOS from version 2.23 to version 2.27 using these instructions

2) Replace the cpu from a T2500 to a T7200 and use Arctic Silver as compound

3) Get the inside of the laptop cleaned doing the above (using a vaccumcleaner, some swaps and iso propyl alcohol)

4) Replace the existing harddrive (Hitachi Travelstar 7K100 HTS721080G9SA00, 80 GB) with an SSD (OCZ Vertex 2, 120 GB)

5) Upgrade Operating system from Windows XP to Windows 7.

Step 1) Went without any trouble at all. The BIOS was updated with the utility from inside windows.












Step 2) I sure am glad I had downloaded the Hardware Maintenance Manual (HMM). I think it is very good with the illustrations and tips. The tricky part is to remember where all the screws are to be fitted when the whole thing is to be assembled again.

I used a system where I placed the screws for each step in the HMM in small plastic bags with chapter number and page number (e.g 1040, page 67). So in chapter 1040 on page 67 in the HWM I could see where the screws in the bag were to be fitted on reassembly. This may be overdoing it. But it is not that often I take apart my laptop so I can remember where everything is placed.

First things first!
REMEMBER to unplug the laptop and remove the battery. Also take care that you're not staticly charged in anyway!

Ok, so I removed the palm rest and the keyboard and got a good look of the inside of the T60 (quite a bit of dust in there...)



Then I removed the copper cooling fan, and I found this to be a bit tricky. It seemed to be stuck, but careful rocking back and forth and up and down finally got it loose. Again check out the dust!




After removing the fan I took out the t2500 cpu to replace it with the t7200 cpu. While the laptop was disassembled Step 3) was put into action: Cleaning as the dust reveals itself :-)




After replacing the cpu, I put on the Arctic Silver compound and then it was just doing the reverse of what I had done when disassembling the t60 in order to assemble the t60 again. And by golly. It worked:
















Step 4) Replacing the hard drive.
This is pretty easy. Again refer to the HMM but there's only one screw holding the hard drive in place. When the "lid" is off the laptop there is a black plastic/rubber thingy for pulling out the hard drive. As always be careful when working with these somewhat delicate items.








When the drive has been pulled out you will discover that it has 2 rubber sides attatched to it.














Removing the rubber sides the original Hitachi drive sits in a metal cradle held by 4 screws. Unscrew these and take the hard drive out of the cradle.

Now the new Vertex SSD is put in the cradle. Doing so revealed that the Vertex drive was a tiny bit larger than the original Hitachi drive because of a rubber coating. So it was a tight fit in the cradle, but I managed to budge it in there.






A small comparason of the drives...













Here is a list of epuipment I used for the operation:

• Different size screwdrivers, both "straight" and Philips. A tip is to use high quality screwdrivers (which I didn't) since they will have a better grip on the screws.
• Plastic bags with built-in closing mechanism for the screws
• Swaps for cleaning the thermal compound of the cpu and for cleaning dust
• Isopropyl alcohol for cleaning (make sure you have ventilation in the room, and put on the lid when you don't use the alcohol)
• Arctic Silver in a syringe
• A small neodyme magnet (placed in front of the Arctic Silver) to pick up the screws from the T60 chassis.
• And last but not least at good vacuumcleaner (not depicted :-))

Step 5) Upgrading from Windows xp to Windows 7. This was by far the easiest part. Just set the Boot sequence in the BIOS to prioritize the optical drive, put in the Windows 7 DVD and it more or less installs it self.

And that concludes this article.