Thinkpad T61 - then and now

[Dawnbreaker]

Here's my baby! I bought it a year ago [it was used in some hospital in Holland/Denmark] and still works like a charm!
Quality of the photos is not so high, since I took them with my Nokia 6233 2mpx camera (great old-school phone btw), but I guess it's okay. So here it is:









I bought one of these keyboard tapes (bulgarian/cyrilic symbols) so I can easily type in my language when I need

[Latios]

He looks like he needs a little cleaning and straightening up of that sticker

[Dawnbreaker]

He looks like he needs a little cleaning and straightening up of that sticker

lol about the sticker.. I removed the windows vista one, hated it

*I just cleaned it from the inside, found lots of dust, but everything works perfectly & cooler now - temperatures dropped with 15-20C*

It's time to clean it from the outside

[A31]

Looks pretty nice!

[Dawnbreaker]

And here it is, year and a half later







Looking much, much better, right

[kony]

Cool stuff. What specs does it have?

[Dawnbreaker]

Cool stuff. What specs does it have?

The same as described in my signature.

[Temetka]

Nice looking T61 you have there. Back when I was in college a friend of mine got one when I was extolling the features of my T41p to him. He told me he got tired of me bragging about my laptop over his failing Toshiba. Walked into class one day, put the T61 in front of me and literally said, "You can shut up now." I did. He bought the widescreen model and I was very happy very him, and tad bit jealous as well.

You have a good laptop there, may it serve you well.

[Medessec]

lol. That's a pretty awesome story. It's kind of the same for me as well... I've long since had a slight interest and preference in Thinkpads, and in High School everyone laughed at it or shrugged it off as weird. But now that we're all in college, and the Dells, HP DV7s and Acer laptops that my friends got from their parents for college are failing, I'm actually getting messaged on Facebook and called up to send Thinkpads to them as replacements. The T61 seems to be a particularly popular model- my friends need me to make sure it's a post 08/08 model that passes decent QA before they use it for school.

Interesting that in the first pictures your T61 had a Slavic keyboard. But it looks a lot nicer in the second pictures... seems you know how to take proper care of your machine

[Dawnbreaker]

Thanks for your kind responses, guys.

It was great experience for me learning how to take care of my laptop. I bought it second hand back in 2011, it originally came with norwegian keyboard, so I bought one of these cheap tape-layouts you can stick up over every button. It wasn't pretty at all I must admit.

The machine wasn't so clean as we see on the first set of pictures, that's because I did not understand the real awesomeness of ThinkPad build-quality back then. I thought it was bulky second-hand laptop which could die any second, thats why maintaining wasn't my priority, UNTIL I found out thats one of the best machines around, and I'm not just holding a crappy, dirty plastic!
Since then I started regularly cleaning the palmrest, the display, lid, keyboard. And of course not only externaly, but internally - cleaning the cpu fan, heatsink, changing the thermal paste and so on.

Of course I did some upgrades throughout the years - replaced the old Merom CPU with a Penryn one, added 4 gigs of RAM, Installed a second hard drive through the ultrabay caddy and everything seems to run perfectly fine. I hope it would continue serving for another 2 or 3 years.

The only bad thing about my machine is the nvidia chip, its one of these pre-08/08 models.

[Cigarguy]

The only bad thing about my machine is the nvidia chip, its one of these pre-08/08 models.

I wouldn't loose any slept over it. I too have a pre-08/08 Nvidia T61. Kept my eyes on my local classifieds. Bought 2 other T61 as it's replacement for the day that it dies for less than $100 each. One had an Intel GPU while the other is dated Sept 08. Eventually all 3 will die.

[Dawnbreaker]

Got it carbonized!





Other pictures:
http://i.imgur.com/yONm7xL.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/zG2ZcjL.jpg

http://i.imgur.com/t9G74eM.jpg

[emeraldgirl08]

Looks very handsome

I also have a pre-08/08 model. So far it is one of my favorite ThinkPads!

[Tasurinchi]

Sooo nice!! Congrats!

[Temetka]

Looks nice all cleaned up. Not sure if I care for the vinyl wrapping much, but that's me and it is your machine. I hope it serves you well.