I found a Thinkpad T60 on ebay

[beatrixmartin]

I found a Thinkpad T60 on ebay and want to use it for Browsing/Writing and maybe install linux on it.

But i have a few concerns:

How about the drivers? Is it difficult to get things (eg. WLAN) running?

and is it fast enough to run Firefox> Youtube,Reddit,... and libreoffice?

What is an apropriate price?

[TPFanatic]

Reddit will work. Video streams will be choppy. Youtube sucks. FreeTube might work a little better. Libreoffice will work great.

Check out lenovo's eol drivers portal or the drivers page at the top of this forum.

T60 works great with Windows XP, Vista, and 7.

What size T60 are you looking at? If it's a 15.4" wide, ignore it, there's better 15.4" Thinkpads. If it's 15" or 14" standard screen then it's worth something.

[axur-delmeria]

With Linux, drivers shouldn't be a problem, especially with newbie-friendly distros like Mint.

Debian used to have that problem, as it didn't include the proprietary (binary-only) bits of the drivers (non-free firmware to be specific) in its installer in order to adhere to its Social Contract. But with the recent release of Debian 12 "Bookworm", those bits have been included in the installer, as a result of the 2022 General Resolution about non-free firmware.

That said, I agree with TPFanatic's assessment regarding youtube performance. The T60's hardware does not have any video decode acceleration at all, so watching youtube videos on a browser can get choppy, especially at higher resolutions.

As for prices, it depends where you are. If you're in the US, these should be dirt cheap.

[ZaZ]

It'd probably help if you use an ad blocker and keep the resolution low for YouTube. I ran Linux on my similar generation R60e and don't recall YouTube being a problem, but that was probably before 1080p was widely used.

[Shredder11]

Regards YouTube, I had another go at getting this to work with my cheap Broadcom BCM970015 video card recently. This used to work perfectly up until late 2015, and then YouTube abandoned Adobe Flash as a streaming format. However recently I discovered a couple of things. PotPlayer does work with YouTube URLs and the Broadcom card, the only downside is that this player is on a YouTube blacklist and so YouTube throttles the cache buffering rate, making it almost useless. I have long wanted to find a way of getting Media Player Classic to work, and eventually I did get it to work by using a browser app to show me the separate video and audio URLs for the YouTube video, and then adding both URLs into WPC. This works fine and the Broadcom then plays 1080p no problem, although it seems to fail when higher 50/60fps videos are attempted; these used to play fine under Adobe Flash in 2015. The browser app I used to grab the URL info is 'Video DownloadHelper' and that is for FireFox or Chrome.

[TPFanatic]

Are you plugging the BCM970015 in the WLAN slot and networking over cable/USB WLAN? My understanding is that the WWAN slot is USB only and I can't imagine the BCM970015 is a USB device.

Does YouTube performance improve if you can force h264 decoding? I use a Firefox Extension "Enhancer For YouTube" for that.

I found my Z61m struggles with Blu Ray playback, a BCM970015 would probably help me there (better yet I just use a better laptop).

Also if you do wind up getting T60, do consider checking this thread and consider updating to a whitelist-removed BIOS:
https://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.p ... 63#p871763
https://forums.lenovo.com/t5/ThinkPad-T ... =1#4055682

And if you ever encounter this error: "PXE-E05: The LAN adapter's configuation is corrupted or has not been initialized. The Boot Agent cannot continue."

Download Intel's PREBOOT and follow my instructions:
https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en ... ivers.html

I downloaded Version 22.10 of PREBOOT and copied the BootUtil directory into a Bootable DOS Flash Drive created with Rufus.

Then navigated in DOS to C:\BOOTUTIL\DOS and ran BOOTUTIL -DEFCFG -ALL.