Thinkpads Forum

I own two IBM ThinkPad Docks not counting the X series or 570 Ultrabase in my ThinkPad list.

I have the Type: 2631 and the Type: 3547-003 Docks.

It would be nice if I could dock all my ThinkPads to this dock: Type: 3547-003. It has 3 PCI slots, 2 USB ports, 2 PCMCIAs, an IDE complete desktop CD Drive slot or even upgrade to SATA. the 770 floppy drive slot next to it, speakers and a SCSI slot and I think it can house a IDE HDD aswell. dont think theres a GPU slot tho, but the 600X dock that connects to this dock has the VGA port on it.

Current ThinkPads that ran on this dock was the IBM ThinkPad 760, 770 and 600. Would there be any chance to get any of the other ThinkPads to dock with this? even makeup a dock connector cable of some sort through USB and can lay any ThinkPad on the dock.

I say this was probably the best dock IBM made. Its big, but its not for portable.
and if I can get all my ThinkPads to dock with this, I was going to get a 1TB or 2TB and just keep all my data on it and any of my TPs can access it when its docked.

ThinkPad560X wrote:...and I think it can house a IDE HDD aswell. dont think theres a GPU slot tho, but the 600X dock that connects to this dock has the VGA port on it.

Yes, it can house a standard 3.5" EIDE ATA Hard Drive. Not sure of the maximum size: it is probably BIOS and OS dependent. I've used a 300GB drive in the standard IDE space with 600X's and 770Z's running Win98 and XP without any trouble. There is no separate "GPU" slot, but that is what you have all those PCI slots for. You can install a standard desktop PCI graphics card in there to produce a significant graphics upgrade on old 760, 770, an 600 series machines. You might run into more problems with your 760's than with your 600's and 770's. Choosing a compatible card is important, and configuring such cards can be a bit tricky. At one point, I was trying to keep a list of compatible video graphics cards here:
http://thinkpads.kiff.ca/selectadock3/g ... _cards.htm

ThinkPad560X wrote:Current ThinkPads that ran on this dock was the IBM ThinkPad 760, 770 and 600. Would there be any chance to get any of the other ThinkPads to dock with this? even makeup a dock connector cable of some sort through USB and can lay any ThinkPad on the dock.

Not speaking from direct experience trying this, but just speculating based on my knowledge of how the docks work. No, I'm pretty sure that you wouldn't be able to use these docks with ANY thinkpads other than the specific ones listed as compatible. There are BIOS-level hardware identifications and configurations that go on during boot-up when you have a thinkpad docked in one of these, and without a compatible BIOS, the dock won't work. And before you could even test any of that you would need to figure out how to map one docking port to another, which would be something that I've never seen done before. And the docks don't (can't) boot up on their own without a thinkpad attached.

Phil.