Wc15159595, I just bought a used Thinkpad T60 which looks to be about the same as yours (T2500 CoreDuo, ATI X1400 graphics). A few years back I owned a nearly identical laptop and had Snow Leopard running flawlessly on it. As far as installing Lion on this laptop goes, there are a couple things you'll need to do.
First and foremost, you're going to need to get a 64 bit processor. Although Lion can boot into a 32 bit kernel and use 32 bit kexts, large parts of the OS are 64 bit, so at a minimum you're going to require a Core2Duo. I picked up a T7200 2.0GHz Core2Duo to replace the T2500 2.0GHz CoreDuo for like $20 on Ebay. The highest processor your T60 will accomodate is a T7600 2.33GHz Core2Duo, but since the T7600 costs roughly 5 times the price of the T7200 and it's barely even 14% faster, it didn't really seem worthwhile to spend the extra cash for an extra 330 MHz in clock speed. The best upgrade you could possibly do to improve performance would of course be to get an SSD. Also, it's worth noting that the T60/T60P motherboard chipset only supports a maximum of 3GB of RAM, regardless of whether you have a 32 or 64 bit processor.
Thinkpad T60 Drivers Xp
The T61 Thinkpads support up to 8GB because they use the next generation Intel chipsets after the ones used in the T60 series. That being said, running 2x2GB sticks in parallel will give you the best performance As for the ATI X1400 graphics, when I had my last Thinkpad, all I had to do on Snow Leopard was add the PNPDevIDs to the ATIRadeonX1000.kext to get working QE/CI. I don't know about resolution change because my old Thinkpad only had a 1024x768 screen. I have another laptop with a Radeon X1300 GPU and HAVE to use Dong's RadeonHD.kext for proper resolution. It's my understanding though that you can inject your screen's EDID information into the ATI Framebuffer and not use RadeonHD but I have no experience with this yet.
One more thing! If you're going for full functionality and want to actually be able to use Wifi on your Thinkpad, you're going to need to replace the Intel 3945ABG Centrino card with one that works on OSX.
May 04, 2011 My Lenovo ThinkPad T60 running Mac OS X 10.6.6 and working Intel 3945 WiFi. Note: The Wireless can successfully connect to a 802.11b and 802.11g wireless networks, however this driver.
Lenovo T60 Drivers
Now there is a caveat here: All Thinkpads have a 'whitelist' built into the BIOS that will prevent the laptop from booting up if there is a non-whitelisted Wifi card installed, and no. There are no Whitelisted cards that work on OSX, not properly anyway. There are some very old open source Intel wifi drivers available for OSX but they haven't been updated since Leopard, do NOT work on Lion or above and only supported unencrypted Wireless B connection. You can check out the project called.
As I said, the drivers are very old and no work has been done on them since 2009 which was about the last time I owned a Thinkpad. In order to upgrade the card to one that is supported under OSX, you're going to need to flash a modified BIOS with the whitelist removed. Now, it's very important to note that the 15' widescreen T60/T60P/T61 laptops all use a different bios from the 14.1' non-widescreen T6x series Thinkpads.
Flashing the wrong BIOS, while technically should be impossible due to version checks, will brick your Thinkpad so make sure you do your homework and get the right one for your computer. It should not be difficult at all to find a modded T60 bios with the whitelist removed AFAIK, the latest BIOS revision for the 15' T60 Widescreen was ver.
1.19 7iuj17us, and the latest version for the NON-widescreen 14.1' T60 was Ver. 2.2779uj34us so it should be pretty easy to find what you need and not screw it up. I should be receiving my Laptop and CPU upgrade within the next couple of days. I'm thinking about making a video record of everything I do along the way, starting with the BIOS mod, Airport card upgrade, CPU upgrade, etc. I'm planning on swapping the HDD out for an 80GB SSD and then replacing the optical drive with a SATA drive caddy and putting a larger hard drive in. If by some miracle I'm able to get Mountain Lion installed on this beast at some point, I'd like to set it up as a Fusion drive, but in case I can't go any higher than 10.6.8 I'm okay with that too. I'm going to start with 10.6.3, upgrade to 10.6.8.
Then on a separate partition I'm going to try installing Lion, in case I break something along the way, I'll be able to get into a functional Snow Leopard install and fix things, or borrow kexts from 10.6.8 if I run into issues. When Lion first came out, I had to borrow things like network drivers and graphics drivers from Snow Leopard to get up and running. Then if can get Lion working 100% I'll wipe the Snow Leopard install and take a crack at Mountain Lion. EDIT: I am running 10.7.5 successfully by modifying the ATIRadeonX1000.kext and ATI1600Controller.kext, both plist devID edits as well as binary hex edits, and then using EVOenabler for injection.
No need to use RadeonHD anymore, with EVOEnabler the Wormy framebuffer is utilized. Unfortunately, no such luck on Mountain Lion. Looks like 10.7.5 is as high as it will go.
I'm not sure if this is covered elsewhere in the forum, but it turns out that certain late generation speeds (despite the false advertising on the Lenovo website). Turns out that the ThinkPad's chipset DOES support SATA II (3.0 Gb/s), BUT the 'brilliant' Lenovo engineers decided to cripple the system at SATA I (1.5 Gb/s), to provide backward compatibility with UltraBay drives.
So, the bus actually runs at the much slower 1.5 Gb/s (SATA I), NOT 3.0 Gb/s (SATA II). Of course, on the Lenovo website, they've done an excellent job of obscuring this annoying little fact. For instance, the explicitly states 'SATA 3.0 Gb/s' for the drive specifications.
Yet, they make no mention anywhere that the drive will actually operate at 1.5 Gb/s, the slower SATA I speed, because of the UltraBay compatibility restriction. Pretty sneaky of Lenovo.
I'm surprised they aren't being sued over this. Anyone interested in a class action with me?? And this is not the first time i've had to send a computer back to Lenovo because of false/misleading advertising. So, if you upgraded your ThinkPad and are not getting the rated speeds for your SSD. Blame Lenovo.
Btw, Thank You to RAMGUY for drawing my attention to this. It has not been uncommon for some NB's to have the speed for memory and HDD limited to preserve battery life. Perhaps, but in this particular case, aggressive power management is not the issue effecting the T-series ThinkPads. The SATA I limitation is caused by the UltraBay SATA-to-PATA conversion component, as discussed. From an engineering perspective, the selection of that particular component was a poor choice. Lenovo's engineers corrected their mistake in later models, albeit a bit too late for those of us who got stuck with T61 machines.
Thank you Techcafe for bringing the SATA-I restriction and GU Latency issue to my attention. How are your new Thinkpads working out? I was wondering if you could instruct me and others how to go about trading in our faulty T61's for the corrected models. Such as providing names, e-mails, phone numbers of people who understand the problem and would be willing to help.
First, I would like to say Attaboy! And a big thank you, Techcafe. Second, Lenovo warrants these machines (except for the batteries ) for three years. I wonder if the warranty can be invoked as a justification. That being said, i'm pretty p/o'ed even though I have a hard drive and not an SSD. I spent extra for a 7200 rpm replacement for the original 5400 rpm drive that came with my machine. So I too would be very, very interested in a 'make good' process.
Has this been discussed on the Lenovo forums? Also, not to defend Lenovo, but my T61 Thinkpad has an IBM logo on to the right of the keyboard. Thanks, x509.