How to make your 1640 a beast, a pleasure to use and around for a while longer

How to get fast storage for C: and have a D: with a ridiculous amount of space - as well as not lose your DVD drive in the 1640:

I replaced the main hard drive with a Samsung 840 Pro Series with 256GB. Note: only use 80% of the drive with your partitions as just allocating the whole thing will cause mega slowness when it crosses 80GB AND the Samsung is smart enough to see you're not using the rest of the drive and will use that for wear leveling, etc. to keep it speedy. I'm getting sequential reads of 285MB/s, sequential writes of 272MB/s and random IOPS of 50708 on reads and 46440 on writes. This is on SATA II as our notebooks aren't capable of SATA III.

Next, I pulled the DVD drive and put in one of those hard drive caddies. This lets me put in a 12.7mm drive at maximum. The largest 2.5" with a height of 12.7mm or less is from Toshiba. Buy the Canvio 3.0 1.5TB and take the drive out of it. The new 2.0 TB Canvio is too big and will not fit. I've had this for about 9 months with no issues whatsoever. Reads/writes top out around 100MB/s, but that's more than enough for a secondary drive.

Now, for a DVD drive. Dell made one that uses eSATA that matches our 1640s perfectly. It is also slot load. Look on eBay or elsewhere for the N820P. I got mine as a refurb for less than $30.

I also added the StarTech USB 3.0 adapter in the ExpressCard slot. Got the 2 port one that is flush.

In testing an item for work, I found that this worked in the WWAN spot (as it uses the USB portion of the Mini-PCIe slot). You can throw a couple of 64GB MicroSDs in it and be good to go. MR15 (Dual Micro SDXC/SDHC/SD Cards to mPCIe Adapter)

Still on the original battery, but so much of my 1640 has been swapped out. Still with the original CPU, the T9550, battery. Went to 8GB of RAM, swapped board out for the 4670 from the 3650. Put AC5 on at that time as I had to change out the heatsink too. Swapped the 90w PSU for a 130w. I had the RGBLED screen, but it had that flicker issue that I found a lot did. Swapped the WLED 1080P 15.6" one in its place. Of course the keyboard and touchpad things have been replaced twice now. Only upgrade I'm looking at is the Intel card that has BT 4.0 as the BT 370 card isn't cutting it with my Samsung Galaxy Note II. I'll lose one of the antenna things for the WiFI, but 300Mbps vs 450Mbps over WiFi won't be terrible and probably will go unnoticed. The thing looks nearly new and is still a joy to use.

Oh, one last item - I use a Zalman ZM-NC2000 cooler at work and a ZM-NC3000U with power supply for the USB/fan purchased separately to better power the fan and USB hub. The thing doesn't get hot anywhere near how it did before. It was totally unacceptable, but now is awesome. Oh, for coolness enhancement - use ThrottleStop and lower the voltage. This helped for me, too, not to mention locking the speed at 2793 MHz AND run cooler at the same time.

Beyond that, a lot of hunting will get you Windows 8 drivers to keep your 1640/1645/1647 going. Mine turns 4 on May first and it is still my primary system.

Probably a lot more detail than needed, but I hope this gives some of you that love the 1640 some ideas to keep it going a little while longer.

Cheers,

Mark

 

That's really quite amazing what you've done to make the best of your 1640! (Or should I call it a 1644, given all upgrades and frankensteining?)

I have the L502x from a replacement due to overheating and throttling, but I really, really miss my 1645. It was thinner and easier to hold when moving about, and also had an ExpressCard slot which I'm now learning is much better than not having it (currently have some legacy devices that require parallel ports).

But what you've done to extend the life of the '40 is impressive. Even though it's just a Core2Duo, those processors are still more than enough for just about everything for non-niche audiences.

 

Wow...this is weird. I just stumbled upon this thread..I've done a lot of the stuff you've done because I have to give up my beast of a tower and go back to my trusty old 1647. I did the SSD swap with the new Samsung 640 EVO 250gb. Got the caddy on the way to replace the optical drive, moving the stock 500gb hdd to that..haven't decided if I wanna upgrade that as I have plenty of externals...hmmmmm...And I got the express-card usb 3.0 adapter on the way too. RGBLED still in amazing shape because I use my 30" dell ultrasharp. Dont use it much unless Im doing heavy productivity and multitasking for dual monitors..

Cool read though man. I've been doing a lot of research on eGPUs but it seems like a lot of work for little reward. I saw someone selling a vidock 3 on ebay w/ a card for $120. Thinking about it..

I wish I could upgrade mine to a quad core but I read even tho socket/chipset is compatible 1647s only work with dual cores and the quads only work on 1645s. Dunno about the 1640s tho. I have a i7 620m. The 640m is only $200 on ebay but paying $200 for a lock multi and only 133mhz upgrade isnt worth it, lol..

I got the bug, I wanna hack/mod the F outta this thing..Which there was more I could do.

 

Yep.. I did the same and have a samsung 830 and stock HDD in my DVD drive.
Also put AC5 on the CPU and GPU.

However... if only we could OC the CPU (i7 720qm in my case) .
My laptop is now super bottlenecked by CPU.

Oh.. it is unfortunate that XPS 16 only has SATA II.. SSD is bottlenecked by that too. Not to mention the crappy intel 5 series 6 SATA controller which throttles with CPU/bus speeds.