Just snagged this stunning T30.

[DaKKS]

Found this at a, sort of, flea market for 30 USD (200SEK) today. Just got home, hooked it up to my T42 adapter and it booted up fine.

Its missing a hardrive (had spare), caddy (had spare) and hdd cover (ordered off ebay) otherwise its in tip top nick. Its got a scratch on the top lid, but no other blemishes. Battery still seems to hold a charge, how much is still unclear. However the plastic tape that protects the glossy plastics (last pic) is still there on both the top cover and the inside of the LCD assembly and keyboard bezel. That's one OCD owner, i'm sure. That tape is the first that goes on my computers/phones.

Lenovo says:
P4-M 2.4GHz, 256MB RAM, 60GB HDD, 14.1 SXGA+(1400x1050) TFT LCD, 24x10x24x/8x CD-RW/DVD-ROM, 802.11b wireless/Modem(MPCI), Ethernet(LOM), UltraNav, Secure Chip(TCPA), Li-Ion battery, WinXP Pro (Can add that its has the Radeon 7500 GPU)







It needs a good internal clean though 'cause its hot like hell, (and not Pentium 4 Mobile hot like hell but dust everywhere hot as hell.) and the wifi really need to be replaced cause it only supports WEP. Does the No-1802 fix work on these too?

I'm currently installing XP, bumped up the ram to 1gb temporarily. Apparently it takes 2GB so that the next job. But eventually its going to run a flavour of Ubuntu.

[pianowizard]

At $30, this is a bargain. Pentium 4 was never very popular especially for laptops, and so despite the excellent build quality of the T30, it was not as widely admired as the T23 or the T4*. Making it worse, many units had RAM slot issues. But if I ever want to start collecting old Thinkpads again, I would like to get something like yours, with 2.4GHz Penium 4 (which was the fastest available for the T30), SXGA+, and a touchpad.

Back in 2008 I had a T30 but kept it only briefly because it only had XGA.

[ajkula66]

Fabulous-looking machine. Congrats!

T30 is one of my favourite ThinkPads...had it not been for the RAM slot debacle, it could've been "the new 600" for many devotees...

That being said, with an upgraded wireless card, newer HDD and 2GB of RAM it is still a viable daily driver as long as one's graphic performance requirements are low.

Enjoy! I'm certain that I'm not the only one who's envious here...

[dr_st]

Yeah, that's quite a steal at this price. Nice machine and near-mint condition.

[Tasurinchi]

Great deal! Enjoy it!

The T30 was a tank! I had one for about 4 years in my previous employer. Luckily I never got the RAM slot issue. That very T30 was the model that make me start admiring Thinkpads and was the starting point of my collection, unfortunately I lend it to my brother in law as he badly needed something reliable at that time.

[DaKKS]

Yeah, it feels like a great little machine. I just installed Lubuntu 12.10 on it and it runs pretty good. Writing on it as we speak. I actually wanted to run XP on it, but i had major driver issues and i'm lacking the recovery discs. So i just went with linux instead. I was half considering running Ubuntu to keep the GUI style i'm used to (Gnome Ubuntu 10.04LTS), but that might be a tad more than the Radeon can chew.

Quick update. Threw in a WDC 120Gb drive, 1.5GB ram (my other 1gb module is tied up in mt t42) and an Intel 2200GB wifi card. I also cleaned out the heatsink and applied arctic silver. Might've screwed up because it did little or no difference to the temps. Either way, its usable, but a bit too hot for my taste. Also, it still seems to have the crap memory cover i read so much about. So that has to be sorted too.

Overall, i have no major complaints. Its about as fragile as a block of titanium and the keyboard is pretty [censored] nice to write on (doesn't beat my R61 though, now that's a dream.) Some better gfx would be nice, but its a nice solid machine.

On a sidenote, is there a Thinkpad with no major issues? I mean the TR6X series had the gpu, as did the T4X. The T30 has its ram slots. The X20X has its inverters. Did IBM/Lenovo ever get their act together?

[ajkula66]

Did IBM/Lenovo ever get their act together?

I'm not aware of any known issues that plagued 600 series, but that's about it...

[DaKKS]

I'm not aware of any known issues that plagued 600 series, but that's about it...

They melt when exposed to the cutting fluid in milling machines... Other than that, i think we have a winner.