trying to refurbish a couple of older T40's

[mchapman]

I just bought 2 T40's and I am trying to evaluate whether they are worthy of repairing. I bought both as-is for parts neither had a HHD or CD/DVD drive. I was able to get both of them to the bios screen and they both booted to a Linux live CD when I swapped my good T40's CD/DVD drive. Should I assume they are both in working order? In other words should I buy a CD/DVD and HHD for each and install XP?

[ajkula66]

Welcome to the forum!

All depends on how much you've spent...a working T40 can be had for $150-175 depending on the specs, probably even less nowadays.

You may want to download PC-Doctor and run all tests just to make sure that the machines are behaving. Also, boot that Linux CD and keep it running...surf the web for a few hours.

Good luck with your project.

[underclocker]

Welcome to the forum.

T4x's are prone to GPU failures (check the sticky threads at the top of this forum section). Those that are only beginning to go bad may only freeze up or show strange video symtoms some times. With a new T4x acquisition, I usually load up XP, then try the shake and flex (torque the machine a little while holding the left and right sides of the palmrest - I mean a little). Don't shake or twist too much, you don't want to cause any new problems. If it keeps running I then download and install the lovely program below. If it passes 30 minutes of that with a little shake and flex thrown in, it's good.

http://freestone-group.com/video-card-s ... y-test.htm

Then you still have to be careful not to spend too much to bring it up to complete. Note that some complete, working T4x machines sell on this forum and on eBay for under $200.

Good luck and enjoy the tweaking.

[sktn77a]

I would get a CD drive and 30-40Gb HDD for 1 of them - you could pick up both dirt cheap. You can then do a clean install of XP on it and see how well it works. If all goes well, swap over the HDD and CDRW to the other and test it for a while. If they both work, you can use 1 and keep the other for a backup of fit them both out with hardware.

[mchapman]

I bought one for $36 and the other for $68. The latter with a battery and power supply. I found a HDD for $32 and a disk drive for $16. I like your idea (sktn77a) I will load XP and see how it goes for the first one, then swap them out and test the second one.

I don't want to put more than $130 in either of them.

Thanks all- great advice and much food for thought