Looking for a good model Thinkpad to redo

[tydallen]

Cant get away from the old IBM Keyboard. Im looking for an Ideal Thinkpad to redo.
Ideas please? At least 15' LCD

[burns334]

Cant get away from the old IBM Keyboard. Im looking for an Ideal Thinkpad to redo.
Ideas please? At least 15' LCD

Those 15 foot LCD's are getting rare. Joking aside there are many excellent deals on craigslist. Once they don't turn on they get sold for about $25 complete with charger.

[tydallen]

What model is ideal for a makeover?

[ajkula66]

What model is ideal for a makeover?

What exactly would you like to accomplish? You are looking to create:

An inexpensive daily driver? A showpiece? Something else?

[axur-delmeria]

You can wait for the "T50" planar board to come out, then buy a 15-inch T40/41/42/43 with a busted GPU.
With the 15-inch model, there's the opportunity to upgrade to an IPS screen.

[Medessec]

Indeed-if your life is missing the old-style IBM keyboard layout, then the one laptop that strikes home at the top of our heads would be the Thinkpad T43p 15". Preferably something like my T43p that I have: the UXGA IPS model with 2.13/2.26 GHz Pentium M, and ATI FireGL V3200.

Mine has 2GB RAM installed, and the 2.16 GHz P-M Dothan(the 2.23 is exceedingly rare) and it runs Windows 7 perfectly fine for most tasks. But anything beyond web browsing or typing up documents, even multitasking, causes age to catch up with the computer. The T43p struggles periodically with modern applications.

You'd even be just fine with a T43 15" with an SXGA and Radeon X300 or X600. Those are far more common. Try to avoid T43s with Intel GMA 900, you don't want to put yourself in that world of trouble. But if you're getting a T43 with the 15" screen, you might as well shoot for the stars.

The "T50" motherboard that the guys above are talking about is a new, modded motherboard apparently in the works to allow the use of Intel Core i-series processors and DDR3 in the T43 chassis. You could purchase a T43 chassis, and when this motherboard comes out, you can replace the old T43 motherboard with the T50 modded motherboard to secure yourself a fantastic Thinkpad with the old keyboard layout.

[systemBuilder]

Cant get away from the old IBM Keyboard. Im looking for an Ideal Thinkpad to redo.
Ideas please? At least 15' LCD

I don't like the 15" machines because they are bigger and clunkier and they don't fit into every backpack made, whereas the 14.1" laptops still have "wow" factor and they fit on airplanes better, especially today with 16:9 laptops shrinking the airplane seatback trays and also backpack widths.

I don't think you have to go with a T43p, the T42's have unlocked BIOSes and a faster memory bus for single transactions (DDR ram has a faster cycle time than DDR2), just make sure that whatever you get, make sure it's a Dothan CPU with a 2 MB L2 cache, that means 1.7 Ghz or higher (check for Dothan, there were Banias machines with 1.7 Ghz CPUs), or 1.8 Ghz or higher (guarantees a Dothan).

See the thread about web browsing for more details :
http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=111861

We prefer the SXGA+ T42, or a T42p (guarantees SXGA+). Those machines have ATI 9600/FireGL-T2 graphics (won't run shader-model 9.0c games or later, but they run everything earlier than about 2009), and the graphics are zippy. For a nice machine with 2 GB RAM and a decent disk (60GB or bigger) in good working order, expect to pay $110-$150. We are using our T42's with 1920x1200 24" external monitors and $10 port replicators. The downside is that they need PATA disks, or SATA disks in a caddy.

If you want to play video smoothly at higher resolutions (720p+), get a T6x, not a T4x.

[Adda]

I don't think you have to go with a T43p, the T42's have unlocked BIOSes and a faster memory bus for single transactions (DDR ram has a faster cycle time than DDR2)

Those machines have ATI 9600/FireGL-T2 graphics (won't run shader-model 9.0c games or later, but they run everything earlier than about 2009), and the graphics are zippy.

Do we really have to go through this BS again??