My T40 Cloning Experience

[MisterB]

I am writing this on a T40 that came to me by sheer chance. I was looking through a box of abandoned clothes one cold spring morning and noticed an IBM port replicator in the box and underneath the port replicator was a T40 laptop and power supply. When I got it home, it had Intuit corporation software on it and I tried the access IBM button and did a system restore and was delighted with my new laptop which, was of the same 2003 vintage that the Compaq laptop I had been using. In every comparison, the Pentium Mobil T40 beat the Athlon XP Compaq: Speed, looks, ruggedness, battery life and power consumption. I kept the T40 and the first thing I did with it was sell the Compaq on eBay. The bliss lasted about a year and then I had the dreaded GPU failure. I tried a reflow which worked but I melted another solder connection which disabled the ultrabay. I bought what looked like a decent T40p on eBay but it wasn't really in that good a condition and it had the southbridge USB 2 problem but the the GPU was fine and the long fan it had helped, I think, because this laptop had seen some heavy use and abuse. I ended up taking both laptops apart and puting the T40p motherboard in the T40 along with the long fan and buying a cardbus USB 2 adapter. It worked but there were also acpi issues--I couldn't recover from a suspend sometimes and had to hibernate instead of suspend.

Reading numerous threads on the GPU issue in this forum and on which models were least likely to fail, I decided to buy a T42P 15" that needed an OS because I wanted to try and clone an image of my T40 directly onto another compatible laptop and it didn't look like it would work with a T43 but more than likely with a T42. I ended up buying a 15" T42P that didn't have a hard drive from one seller and from another seller a 15" T42P with a fan error which came with another 15" T42 with a broken screen. The total cost was $110 with shipping. The first T42P was made in 2004 and had the dreaded GPU failure but I did the folded paper trick and got it stable enough to try it with a cloned image of my system partition on a 20gb drive. To my surprise, it worked fine and just needed to update drivers but I didn't have to reactivate windows Xp. A few days later the other two arrived and I hit the jackpot--The T42P with the fan error had an 80gb hard drive and a full 2gb of memory and it was made in August of 2005. It took me 10 minutes to remove the keyboards and palm rests and swap the fan and wifi cards and I had a fully functional 15" T42P.
I cloned the system again and this time I put all the drivers in the right folder which made the process go automatically. I swapped the 20gb and dislplay from the other T42P onto the T42 chassis and tested it out. No motherboard issues at all and it was made in 2/2005. It had the red epoxy dots around the GPU just like the 8/2005 T42P and I decided to put the T42 motherboard in my T40. It has worked flawlessly and now I have a stable and faster T40 as well as a 15" T42P. I put the display back on the other T42P and sold it for parts.

What amazes me about Thinkads is just how well they're put together and how modular the design is in both hardware and software. I can't think of another laptop that I can take apart and shift parts around this way, nor clone the system so easily form one laptop to another. After completely taking apart and putting back together my T40 several times, I can do it without consulting the hardware maintainence manual and the 15" T4Xs are actually easier to take apart than the 14" models.