Thinkpads Forum

Could not find a Frankenpad sub-forum here so I am placing my question in this one. I adore the keyboard that is installed on my TR4050e Frankenpad (T40 body and R50e motherboard) and since I am on a short break from school I am wondering if swapping out the R50e motherboard for an R52 be might be an easy and reasonable decision? Parts are rather cheap now and I think I could squeeze this conversion in on the budget I am currently on.

While using it yesterday evening for an extended time period I've found a rather nice looking word processor in linux and did some web browsing. I've often seen the phrase "glorified typewriter" in this forum and it seems my Frankie could have a new role. I then thought about how the RAM limit on the R50e is 1gb(?). Not sure if web browsing fluidity may increase between the Intel Extreme graphics of the R50e and the Intel GMA 900 graphics of the R52? I do remember my sister playing a 3D WOW-type game on her R52 for extended periods of time which was quite surprising.

The con that really stands out in my mind about the R52 is the annoying beep when using a non-IBM certified HDD. The plus is the possibility of 2gb of RAM and somewhat more relatively speedier hardware. I remember seeing a fix for the start-up beep which would make the swap even more attractive to me. Current linux OS is Crunchbang. Any advice?

The first thing that you need to check is whether your R50e has a docking station port opening on the bottom of the base. If not, you may as well scrap the project altogether.

I'm pretty certain that the RAM limit on all of these machines - just like on R40 before them - is 2GB and not 1GB.

There is a modded BIOS that will kill the "2010 error" on boot. Even the latest IBM BIOS has the option of continuing boot after the error message, and you can shut the volume off so it doesn't beep at you...

RAM is cheap, as are CPUs apart from the PM780. If you can get it done in an inexpensive manner, I'd say go for it.

Good luck.

ajkula66 wrote:The first thing that you need to check is whether your R50e has a docking station port opening on the bottom of the base.

Docking station port is there.

ajkula66 wrote:I'm pretty certain that the RAM limit on all of these machines - just like on R40 before them - is 2GB and not 1GB.

Really??? I have a small box of assorted RAM. Time to test them out

ajkula66 wrote:There is a modded BIOS that will kill the "2010 error" on boot. Even the latest IBM BIOS has the option of continuing boot after the error message, and you can shut the volume off so it doesn't beep at you...

lol sheesh I remember that beep all too well! I just might have that modded BIOS in my DVD-data backup set. The thing is that it will be a pain looking for it! The digital needle in a digital haystack >.<

ajkula66 wrote: I'd say go for it.

Thanks!

If you don't need 1394/Firewire, you could also put a T43 mobo with Intel graphics in it.
Same conditions as R52 apply.

Regarding a linux distribution, I think you've already made a great choice. Crunchbang is a very lightweight distro with arguably the best community of any linux distribution. You can always find help there, no matter what kind of trouble you run into... even if you're running another flavour of Debian.

I'm not a big fan of the openbox / tint2 combination (I used Crunchbang when it had XFCE / tint2), so I prefer to run Debian LXDE, which is just as light on system resources. It's basically the same thing, with a different taskbar. I can't think of any other distributions as fully-featured and light as those two. Maybe Slackware with fluxbox, but I would only use that for personal use/entertainment, since I wouldn't want to get stuck in 'dependency hell' with a production machine.

Hope you enjoy your Xmas project!