Buying a T400 off craigslist

So I found a T400 off craigslist with the following specs:

-P8400 Core 2 Duo @ 2.6ghz
-2 GBs of RAM
-160 GB HD
-9-cell battery in okay condition
-ATI Radeon 3470 switchable graphics
-Windows Vista Business Edition

for $425. It comes with the charger and nothing else.

My questions are...

-if I do a fresh install of Windows 7 64-bit edition on it, will the switchable graphics drivers work or does Lenovo provide all the drivers off their website?

-where is a good place to buy a replacement 9-cell battery?

-Is this a good deal?

-What are the specifications of the RAM? Will I be able to move my 4 GBs of RAM and my 320gb hard drive from my HP DM3z to the T400?

Thanks.

 

1. you can download all the drivers from the Lenovo website.

2. outlet.lenovo.com

3. 425 dollars is not bad if nothing is broken, any remaining warranty?

4. 1066 mhz ddr3 ram. not sure what your HP uses. HDD should be a direct swap.

 

There is no warranty.

Would the T400 accept DDR2 RAM as long as it is the right size and everything? I would think 4 GBs of RAM beats 2 GBs of RAM even if it is slower...

rep to you. thanks for the help so far.

 

DDR2 and DDR3 ram are not interchangeable. So the answer to your question is no it is not possible.

 

Okay. Thanks. Where is the cheapest place to get RAM you think?

 

ebay is usually the cheapest or craiglist maybe?

 

Switchable graphics drivers are available for Win7 x64 for the T400. However one caveat is that both GPUs switch on when you wake it up from sleep mode, which is a pretty heavy drain on the battery. You can avoid this by using hibernation instead of sleep mode... there is no real 'fix' and Lenovo has been really slow to release new drivers to address this issue.

Otherwise, that's a good price for the specs. I paid about $600 for mine(nearly identical) back in Feb.

 

This isn't something I've experienced in my laptop with the latest drivers.

 

What's the version number?

 

8.641. I'm on Win 7 64-bit.

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site.wss/MIGR-72858.html

If you use a newer version of Catalyst, there's a feature that will automatically switch to Intel graphics when unplugged.

 

Which version is that and where can it be found? I had a look at the current 10.7 where release notes state that:
The following notebooks are not supported in this release:
* Any notebook launched after this driver release
* Switchable Graphics enabled notebooks using Intel chipsets.

https://a248.e.akamai.net/f/674/9206/0/www2.ati.com/drivers/Catalyst_106_release_notes.pdf

 

Yeah... I'm using that version of the drivers as well, and I'm pretty sure I still have the 'both cards on' problem. I went ahead and brought it to work today and ran it through a standby cycle. After letting it sit for five minutes my consumption was an incredible 30W... o.0 After switching to discrete then back to integrated I dropped down to my normal 10-11W.