IBM Thinkpad 600E bios mod for processor update

[Sharedoc]

el-sahef,

CAS-latency setting on th fly seems to crash the processor, I have noticed the same phenomenon. It seems to be be caused by the BX chipset.

[el-sahef]

Thank you for your reply.

This behaviour is the reason why I want to modify the BIOS. I can see the necessary bit in the built-in BIOS editor of the 770x but the change is not applied because the bit is write-protectet (I know that I have to power off directly after saving the change in the BIOS editor via F2, so this is not the problem). So the only way to modify the bit is to open the IBM-BIOS files in a BIOS editor, change the bit and flash this modded BIOS.

A user named Borg_number_one offered you to open and modify the 600e BIOS files so the PIII cache would be initialized via BIOS so no powerleap tool is requiered. He never posted the modified bios because he was not able to put in the initialisation code for the cache but do you know how he was able to open the IBM-BIOS files you sent him? I would e-mail him this question directly but his site is down and he seems currently inactive.

I am spending so much effort in this mod because I have a 16 chip 256mb module lying around here which works only stable with cas 3. If I could modify the BIOS I could increase my RAM to 512mb (without spending money on ebay) to 512mb which matches the PIII 918mhz of my 770x.

Any further information on this subject is very appreciated.

greetings
el-sahef

[Sharedoc]

BX chipset does not allow to change CAS on the fly. It needs to be done at the initialization time. You need to find the initialization code from the bios. There is some hope, because the port addresses can be fould from Intel BX chipset manuals. I think I still have copies of those documents if you need them.

[FrozenLord]

Hi

Thanks a lot for pointing out all the tricks to get a PIII running on the 600E.

I've done the BIOS mods on my TP 600E and everything's working so fine. I have been enabling the L2 Cache with Powerleap until now under Windows XP.
But now, I'd like to change over to Windows Vista or atleast give it a try. But this won't turn out to well without L2 Cache, so my question is whether there are any tweaks or workarounds (be it a modded BIOS, or a preloaded kernel patch or anything) that will allow me to use the L2 Cache on Vista, as I'm pretty certain, that Powerleap won't work under Vista.

Any help would be great
FrozenLord

[hashwood]

Thanks everyone for your contribution, this topic is very helpful and full of info.
Following sharedoc and the pictures found on http://www.katch.dsl.pipex.com/mtb/mods.htm I was able to do the SpeedStep mod and the FSB one.
I have a 2645 5BU with a 650PIII that now runs at 700 with 108 FSB. I disabled the internal RAM, because after the 108mod I had problems at windows boot.

Unfortunately I don't have a battery, but still after it's warm the CPU starts at 700 every time (since yesterday when I did the mod)

So far so good, maybe except of a little error that bugs me at about 40% of startups, 108 - "Timer bus test failure" . I can loose it by just restarting, but still this means something is wrong ?
Did I made the mods in the wrong way ?

Any ideas?

[hashwood]

FrozenLord:
I don't want to discourage you but Vista on TP600E is not something recommended. Don't forget the video card has only 2MB, not to mention the 512 RAM or the PIII.
If you want a new experience, you can try Ubuntu. TP600 is supported by Ubuntu, just search that you'll find drivers for any additional PCMCIA cards you might have. I tried it on the PII 400 (before the upgrade) and it looked real good, but it wasn’t as fast as XP, and I had problems installing the Belkin PCMCIA wireless. Maybe with PIII things are changed.

[Sharedoc]

Hashwood,

Booting problem is propably because you PIII processor is slightly overclocked and is nor booting correctly. Upping Vcore 0,05 or 0.1V could help.

[Sharedoc]

I have been trying to install Huawei E220 3G modem to my 600E still running under Windows 98 but there are no E220 drivers for 98 available by Huawei.

I have another laptop Fujitsu-Siemens Amilo SI 1520 that installs E220 under Windows XP without any problems.

After searching in the internet it seems that E220 has the drivers installed as an internal virtual CD where they are automatically loaded by XP.

But Windows 98 does no detect the virtual CD. It does detect E220 as Huawei but asks just for drivers

I found and downloaded the friver files from the internet for XP and Win2000. Unfortunetely they do not install in Win98. I wonder if there is any way to hack those drivers do that Win98 would install them?

[Sharedoc]

I did not find the way to make XP drivers work in Windows 98, so I gave up and installed Ubuntu Linux 7.10.

I managed to get Huawei E220 working in 600E under Ubuntu! Even with WDCMA speeds.

Now I just need to get L2 cache on and DeepSleep working.

Anyone solved this for Ubuntu?

[Sharedoc]

OK, L2 was easy to get working using

http://www2.maths.ox.ac.uk/~challet/module/module.html

[Sharedoc]

Hmm, it seems that Chantals linux module to enable SppedStep

http://www.wimsbios.com/phpBB2/topic4046-705.html

is no more available as download,I sent pm for him.

[Sharedoc]

W Marcus Miller's DeepSleep Linux utility is available

http://home.pacbell.net/wmarcusm/deepsleep/

but I could not get it installed. There is some problem with the Ubuntu kernel

sharedoc@sharedoc-laptop:~$ tar xvf dsleep_1_5.tar.gz
cpufreq.ccpuid.h
l2_cache.h
l2cacheon.c
Makefile
Module.symvers
msr.h
mtrr.h
pci.c
pci.h
printk.h
readme.txt
sharedoc@sharedoc-laptop:~$ make
make -C /usr/src/kernels/2.6.18-1.2798.fc6-i686 M=/home/sharedoc modules
make: *** /usr/src/kernels/2.6.18-1.2798.fc6-i686: No such file or directory. Stop.
make: *** [all] Error 2

Can anyone help?

[cp]

did you install the kernel SOURCES? get a 2.6 kernel and pass the path of the kernel sources as a parameter (i hope he included this feature..)

[Sharedoc]

Uhh, getting too difficult for me with almost no Linux knowledge...

[ivylw]

Learn a lot and thx a lot.