Living With My ThinkPad: Part Two
A comment from David on the first post of the Living with my ThinkPad series mentioned that I should upgrade my RAM on my ThinkPad and that I could load OS X onto my machine.
I jumped around online looking for the specifications of the RAM I would need, and my first stop was Kingston.com which has a great RAM search tool. I selected IBM and then found my machine. It said that I have one slot open which I could put upwards of one 1024MB DDR2-533 Module per slot. The prices listed at Kingston.com for the one gigabyte stick were from PC Connection, Kingston Technology, and Buy.com with Buy.com having the lowest price at $159.93 USD. I live in Canada though, so that makes things a little different and a little more difficult.
Browsing over to the site where I buy a fair bit of my technology, NCIX.com, I found that they had a variety of RAM sticks that say DDR2-533. I needed to make sure I limited it to SODIMM, which is the shorter stick that laptops take and I found I still had many choices.
Corsair brand at $139.15 CDN, Mushkin for $150.65 CDN, and an OCZ branded one gigabyte stick for $141.31.
No matter how I looked at it, getting my machine a new one gigabyte stick was out of my price range. So maybe grabbing a half-gigabyte would be better for me at this point. I could get Corsair Value RAM for only $73.78.
Dealing with RAM is one of those decisions, especially for a laptop that you have to really research and think hard about, as some sticks won’t work in some laptops, and there are so many different brands, types and all the different speeds.
I have not placed my order yet, as I am not fully confident that I have the right stick of RAM for my ThinkPad, and rather than making a mistake, I am going to go with David’s advice and join the ThinkPad forum, and ask them what types of RAM they have had success with in their T43’s.
Living With My ThinkPad will hopefully be an ongoing series where I talk about my problems, and enjoyment in having my laptop, which happens to be an IBM/Lenovo ThinkPad T43 with a 1.7GHz processor, 512MB Ram, 40GB hard drive, and an ATI X300 video card.
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