Home | Reviews | GUIpedia | Forum | Fun500
Brandon | Thinkpad T42The IBM Thinkpad series was one of the most important laptops in the timeline of laptops. The T4x (T40,T41,T42,T43) laptops with their ATi GPUs would often fail. The soldering on between the GPU and mobo would weaken and crack and the laptop would randomly freeze or fail to boot. My dad works for a large ceramics company(http://vesuvius.com/), and in the mid 2000s after a Windows 2000 laptop failed they got him a new T42 which he used until it failed due to the graphics card failure. After sending in the hard drive of the laptop the rest of it was set on a shelf until it was going to be throw away, and I took it. My new project is to rebuild this thinkpad, it came with a 9 cell battery+ an ultrabay(optical bay) battery, 3 different AC adapters two of which are support DC-DC from a car. The specs are: 1.8GHz Pentium M, 1.5GB RAM (1GB+512MB), ATi Radeon 9600, Combo Drive, Intel wireless, and a 1400x1050 LCD. All that's missing is a working motherboard (mine has a bad GPU) and a HDD (was removed when the laptop failed). So I ordered a new base and motherboard from ebay for $60, and have bid on a 1600x1200 LCD. Hopefully I win the LCD, everything hooks up and I'll install a 5GB hdd I have laying around to mess with Ubuntu. Don't worry, I'll post pics and stuff as I progress. | 2010-10-21 | 1:47 PM |
Brandon | Re:Thinkpad T42Well I got it up and running. The case and motherboard combo that I purchased came with the case damaged so I contacted the seller and got a refund. Other than that the system has went together pretty well. I ordered two dual CF to IDE adapters and installed one. In the one slot I installed a 4GB 133X Kingston CF, not exactly the fastest card, but I've had it a while and never really have had a good use for it because FAT16 only goes upto 2GB, and I couldn't bring myself to only use half of the drive. So on that CF I installed WinXP and although the HDD status light was on a lot when I installed drivers, it seemed like it will be fast enough for GUI testing and the occasional Windows game. In the second IDE slot I install a new 466X CF from ebay, and installed Linux Mint. It's not as fast as my Intel SSD, but it's plenty faster than the old 12GB hdd I did hae installed, and it makes a lot less noise. Anyone want to buy a 12" Gateway netbook? PS: This IBM has a huge screen, and the keyboard feels like you'd expect on a thinkpad. | 2010-11-12 | 7:40 PM |
2021 Brandon Cornell