Any old school Thinkpaders here?

[Matthew Blair]

Any old school IBM/Lenovo buffs out there? I know there's a handful of us hanging around.

I have a 3 year old consumer grade i5 Ideapad which I love and gets the job done, but I really have an itch for those older Thinkpads.

Specifically for me I favor the T60 and T61 line.

I have a T61 that I got for dirt cheap off eBay (25 bucks) as a former business laptop that was in remarkably good shape and was stripped of just about everything. I disassembled it piece by piece and upgraded everything I humanly could as a novice.

Upgraded CPU, wireless card, RAM, added Bluetooth, added a 256 gig SSD and a 1T in the ultrabay, upgraded the bios, swapped out the LCD, added the larger battery, added a card reader, and a few other things....all for under 200 bucks of parts from eBay.

It was a lot of fun to toy with and I get alot of pleasure in using it today. It's no i7, but damn if it doesn't have a lot of character and attitude.

 

[xandros9]

Not quite old school myself, but my main PC is a T400 I picked up used/refurbished three years ago or so as a replacement for an HP Mini netbook. What I loved most about it was that the cooling was superior, (quieter, etc) oddly enough.

Hasn't seen quite as much action, just the RAM being upgraded from 2 GB to 4, then 8.
it came with a 160 GB hard drive (which vanished and I still don't know where it went) which I immediately replaced with 120 GB SSD which I swapped out for a 200 GB hard drive a few months ago. (not sure if the space was worth it, but then again i don't know if it wasn't worth it.)
The CD/DVD drive has been swapped out for an extra battery, the main battery has gone from nearly 4 hours, to nearly 30 minutes or so. Thankfully the flexible bay battery still works kinda okay.
Picked up a dock, which was great.

The graphics capabilities show its age, but it works surprisingly well otherwise. Certainly doesn't run perfectly 100% of the time, but I'll just call it it's personality.

Thinking of replacing it with a ThinkPad Yoga or something Dell this summer, although none really offer my perfect PC.

 

[jmshub]

Love Lenovo's build quality. They are top notch laptops. Unfortunately, the Snapfish thing makes it hard to recommend Thinkpads to family and friends. I currently have a Dell laptop.

 

[xandros9]

Love Lenovo's build quality. They are top notch laptops. Unfortunately, the Snapfish thing makes it hard to recommend Thinkpads to family and friends. I currently have a Dell laptop.

FWIW, the ThinkPad line was clean of superfish, it was the consumer-grade, cheaper notebooks I believe that were afflicted.

 

[jmshub]

FWIW, the ThinkPad line was clean of superfish, it was the consumer-grade, cheaper notebooks I believe that were afflicted.

That is actually good to know. I thought it was every notebook that Lenovo sold.