'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe

On the one hand...



But on the other hand, the upgraded heatsink is proving to be problematic. The old GPU heatsink was held down by a small bracket that not only clamps the heatsink, but also braces the mouse buttons on the keyboard. This bracket doesn't fit with the new heatsink in place - the heat block is too thick.

Also, the fan in the new heatsink makes a very annoying buzzing noise.

It's a shame really as it does do a very good job of cooling the GPU, but I think I'm better off with the original heatsink. The upgraded CPU is staying - a significant performance increase for all of £8.98 (including surprisingly quick postage) is not to be sneezed at.

Speaking of performance increase, as with all such upgrades it's the numbers that are important. So I've thrown PassMark PerformanceTest 8 at the laptop, and the results are in! Interestingly since the upgrade to Windows 7 performance has dropped slightly and the before score was only 233.9... but the after score is 259.2. The difference is more significant in other areas: CPU performance and 2D graphics both increased by around 20%, and memory got a 8% increase as well. Overall I think this was worth doing even if I am just about to take the laptop apart again to drop the old heatsink back in.

Oh, and Arctic Silver's ArctiClean is excellent for cleaning old thermal grease and pads - it merrily dissolves the stuff without any effort needed. Much better than isopropyl alcohol which doesn't seem to shift Arctic Silver 5 at all.

It's been a while since I last posted a status update on the laptop. I'd finally gotten enough of the IBM Lenovo utilities installed that it was approximately functional, but ended up running into a serious stability issue with the wifi software (to the point where the wifi card refused to enable its radio). Since I rather want working wifi, I spent an evening churning through drivers until I found a combination that works.

Step 1 is to totally ignore the supported versions listed in the release notes. They're full of lies and claim that my laptop (an R50p with an Intel 2915ABG wifi card) is supported when the installer thinks otherwise (except when they claim my laptop is unsupported and then install anyway). Fortunately Lenovo are nicer than most and provide download links for older versions, and so after trying multiple ones I eventually ended up with:

Access Connections v6.26.79
Hotkey Features Integration v3.81.0100 (later versions refuse to install)
Power Manager v6.68 (but see below...)
Protip: binary search is the way to do this, as O(log n) is much faster than O(n).

That combination all installed and seemed to mostly behave - importantly, I could now enable the wifi radio again! However that's not the end of the story, because now that I had the power management tools installed I fired that up to put together a better power scheme than the default, and in the process apparently crashed the embedded controller. And wouldn't you know, but the embedded controller is responsible for such things as making the keyboard work. And the mouse. And the display. And, most annoyingly, the power button. The only way to reset it is to remove the battery.

Some searching threw up a known bug where the embedded controller hangs if queried for detailed battery status - I suspect that the power management tools triggered this, as I'm using a significantly newer and shinier version than what was available when I was running XP on the laptop. So, next task is to try older versions of that until I find one that no longer triggers the crash.


On the hardware side of things, the improved heatsink turned up and is waiting to be installed. However the processor upgrade did not appear - the online tracking shows that it never made it from China to Europe and the random eBay seller was not particularly helpful when I initially prodded them over it. I can't be bothered to dispute the transaction for all of £10, so I'll probably try again with a hopefully slightly-less-shady eBay seller.

Well, I've just done the CPU transplant on the frankenlaptop and the results are in!

First off, overall system performance. For this I used PassMark PerformanceTest 8 as it's the benchmark behind the numbers site that pleaseremove keeps on referring to. With the original Pentium M Banias 1.6GHz processor, Aether scored a PassMark of 245.5. After switching to the Pentium M Dothan 1.5GHz - remember, although this has a slower clock speed it's a more recent model - the new PassMark was 248.5.

Which means more-or-less that the two processors are equal in performance. Taking clock speed into account the Dothan core is about 8% faster, which fits with what the Internets suggest. Interestingly digging into the numbers by far the biggest impact was with memory performance where the Dothan is on average 15% faster, and in some cases twice as fast - memory latency has halved.

I don't know what the impact on battery life will be, but hopefully it'll improve. The replacement processor both runs at a slightly lower clock speed, and is made on a smaller process (usually shrinking the process size reduces power consumption). Anyway, a replacement battery is the next item on the to-do list...

With the CCFL tube replaced, it's time to start putting the laptop back together!

( Onwards! )

And now for the important question: will it blendwork? There's now enough put back together that if I plug the laptop in I can boot into the BIOS - wait, the power button is on the keyboard. Okay, there's almost enough put back together and I can balance the keyboard on top for testing. Here goes...

Right, well the repair I've got in mind for project frankenlaptop is to replace the failing CCFL backlight tube in the R50p panel (which is otherwise fully functional) with the working tube from the R50e panel (that's the one with the stuck pixels). This is definitely not an easy repair - I have to dismantle two LCD panels, extract a long, thin, and above all fragile glass tube from both, fit the tube back to one panel, and then most importantly put it back together. And while I have instructions for removing the panel, I don't have anything further - IBM consider the panel a single replacement unit.

I fully expect that at least one screen (and, by extension, laptop) will not survive this. Anyway, onwards with more delayed photos!

( Onwards! )