Thinkpads Forum

I've always wanted a proper old IBM-era IBM ThinkPad, but I'd prefer one that's still just about usable in 2013 - but preferably with Windows 98 on it, or an OS of similar vintage, so I can use my Game Boy Camera software - and I was happy to see a 600X on eBay a while back for not much money. Here it is, next to my X60:



Obviously it's an unfair comparison - 500mhz Pentium III versus 1.83ghz Core Duo - although I surmise a fully-expanded 600X would be a usable but very basic XP machine nowadays, right on the verge of total obsolescence. As you can see the speakers are positioned in just the right place to get clogged up with ground-in dirt. Try not to think of sweaty greasy hands. I'll have to clean them out. In that picture the 600X is running Crunchbang Linux from a live CD, although before I use it any more I need to flash the BIOS - which I can't do until I get hold of a working battery. EDIT: Since writing that I managed to patch the BIOS without a working battery, by copying the files onto the hard drive, booting with a Windows 98 boot disc, and running them from there. I've since put Windows 2000 Professional on the 600X and all seems in order.

Mine was made in Scotland:



Amazing to see a complex machine made in the UK. IBM moved its manufacturing out of Greenock in 2006 and the assembly buildings were demolished in 2009 after standing empty - with kit scattered about - for three years. There's a fascinating photo-essay here. It's a 500mhz Pentium III. The 600X was launched at the end of 1999 and was a transitional machine - as far as I can tell it was the last, or second-to-last, of the triple-digit ThinkPads. Next came the A/T/R/G/X-etc range. It was replaced by the T20. Mine has 192mb of memory (64mb internal + an official 128mb IBM stick, which has four chips per side) but the machine has an upper memory limit of 576mb, which is slightly higher than its contemporaries. Presumably it can address more memory but I assume the motherboard can't use sticks larger than 256mb each.

Compared to the X60 it's about an inch wider, but much the same depth when you include the X60's large battery. From the side it's flat rather than tapering:



The X60 is made of hard plastic, the 600X has the kind of rubber-feeling plastic you get on car dashboards. It has one of those new USB ports - will they take off? who can tell - and note that it uses two latches for the lid, one on each side, rather than a single latch on the leading edge. The lid is rigid, you can lift it by one corner and it doesn't bend:



Separate mic and line inputs, plus dual Cardbus slots, and a floppy disc port that had a cover over it which has broken off:



Around the back it has parallel and serial ports, hidden behind a cover, plus what I assume to be the docking connector. The logo is 3D, whereas the X60's logo is just a print:



No Windows key, despite being a 1999 machine:



It's as if IBM thought "no way are we putting a Windows logo on our machines. We invented the bloody things. They should put an IBM logo inside Windows."

My immediate plan is to get hold of a battery, flash the BIOS, then max out the memory. Probably reinstall Windows 98 SE, just to see if it works after following Lenovo's instructions. Then get hold of a Cardbus wireless adapter. The logical next step would be to get hold of a copy of Windows XP and install that, but I'm wary of paying for something that's going to be de-supported next year, so perhaps I'll stick in Lubuntu or similar.

It has a funky BIOS setup GUI that has a flying bird as a cursor. You set the order of boot devices by clicking on little icons. It's oddly cute for an IBM machine (from Scotland).

Welcom to the oldies club!

That 600 looks in very good shape for its age!

I love the comparison! Thinking about picking up an X6x or X2x0 series machine - nice to see how it compares in size to my old 600

Those 600 series machines are built VERY well. Mine was manufactured in Mexico...

Danny wrote: Those 600 series machines are built VERY well. Mine was manufactured in Mexico...

They are also bloody difficult to assemble (at least compared to more modern ThinkPads.)

One thing I'll credit Lenovo for: they have made assembly several orders of magnitude easier.

I've since written an (extraordinarily verbose) blog post about it, with an emphasis on trying out lightweight Linux installations:
http://women-and-dreams.blogspot.co.uk/ ... uropa.html

Although half-way through it turns into a look back at the dot-com boom, 'cause the 600X was launched in December 1999, right at the apex. VA Linux had just floated and if you could spout a convincing line of nonsense the world was your oyster for a very short time. And the 600X sold for just over $4,000! Yikes. Mine would have been even more expensive, because it had been upgraded with 192mb of memory (presumably a factory option). From what I remember memory prices had crashed at the time. I remember buying something like 1gb of memory for my overclocked Celeron 300A and being surprised at how cheap it was. But presumably the official IBM part was not cheap. The internal clock rolls over on 31 December 2079.

My experiences with Linux were mixed, although to be fair the 600X is very old, the graphics card is basic, and the machine only just meets the minimum specifications of most modern Linux distributions, and I know for a fact that some of them work on more modern hardware. I have Xubuntu on my Asus Eee 701 (the original netbook, with a 4gb SSD) and it's a great fit. In general the distributions that worked had some irritating problems - they could shutdown but not turn off the machine - and it was difficult getting my tiny little USB wi-fi adapter working:


I've maxed out the memory with generic PC-100 256mb sticks, which cost £6.70 from Hong Kong for a pair. Here's how it looked when I got it, with the IBM 128mb memory stick and 64mb on the motherboard:


And here it is filled up:


The memory door is made of metal! And it's very dangerous, according to the sticker. I've found that some eBay sellers sell 256mb memory sticks with the official IBM part number (33L3069) in the description at an inflated price; the generic stuff works fine, and I assume the supposedly "official" sticks are just generic sticks anyway. The next obvious upgrade is a larger, quieter, faster hard drive.

Of the Linuxes, Debian either failed to find the CD or failed to find the wi-fi dongle, and crashed:


Ubuntu and Lubuntu had graphics problems:



Slitaz failed to find the graphics card at all and PCLinuxOS hung. Good old reliable old Puppy Linux worked just fine, both from the live CD and from the hard drive:


Of the trendy modern distributions, Peppermint OS Three, Xubuntu, and Linux Mint 12 installed and worked without a hitch, except for the shutdown issue mentioned above and the fact that it didn't automatically detect my tiny wi-fi dongle. With a bit of tweaking I managed to solve both of these problems with Linux Mint (version 12, with the LXDE desktop), although the shutdown issue was a kludge:


In the end I put XP3 back on it; the lightweight distributions weren't really any snappier, and I have no ideological or political alignment with the open source movement. If the dot.com boom taught me anything, it's that you would have to be mad to nail your colours to another man's flagpole.

For the brave, eBay.co.uk currently has a 360cs and a 340cse - both 486-era machines - in working order, in the "vintage" section. The 340cse has Windows 3.1! Both bento boxes, neither of them "famous" Thinkpads though. It was odd using a machine from 1999, like linking hands with those distant people from fourteen years ago. It's just modern enough to have left a trail on the internet, e.g. this page from 1999 on which a man describes the process of installing Debian on his ThinkPad 600E. If only we could communicate with the people of 1999, send them a sign or something.

I think any attempt to install modern software in a 14 years old laptop will be tough to put it nicely, regardless if Windows or Linux.

I managed to install Crunchbang and Xubuntu 8.04 in my 600's. They worked quite decently and with some tweaking they could be made a little faster. Browsing with Xubuntu+Chromium was also "decent" if you skipped site with flash content.

The 600X is an awesome machine.

This thread is awesome. Great pics.

I've spent the last hour reading your blog entry at: http://women-and-dreams.blogspot.co.uk/ ... uropa.html.

Jeebus. You can write pretty well. I love the line about if you don't upgrade your computer every year you are basically letting the Taliban win. Nice. Very nice. I laughed for a good minute after that. Oh and of course:

Overall the XP experience is like stepping back to the days of Internet Explorer 6. It's hard to remember now, but IE6 was current from 2001 right until 2006, five years, and it remained on corporate networks for a long time after that. Five years! Firefox is updated every other week. You know, as I write these words I have eleven tabs open. When I close Firefox it remembers the tabs I have open and some of them have been sitting there, waiting for me to read them, for weeks. Super-Eccentric Migrating Jupiters. The wreckage of an F-100 Super Sabre in the Mojave desert. An exhaustive guide to the locations used in The Ipcress File. An essay by Kevin Brownlow on the frame rates of old films. And that's just the stuff I can share with a family audience. Eleven tabs and Photoshop in the background and a couple of explorer windows and I'm tempted to play a little postage-stamped sized copy of an MST3K episode in the corner of the screen. And this is my primary monitor; I could also have a second monitor. My goal is nothing less than the total obliteration of the external world and of The Self, which I will achieve with an overdose of media, and that's not going to happen with a 500mhz Pentium III running XP3.

This is pure win. Especially the bolded part.

Your blog has a very high honor.

It is the only one I have ever bookmarked. Most blogs to me are, well, crap. Yours is actually very interesting.

Keep up the good work.

Ashley_Pomeroy wrote:Then get hold of a Cardbus wireless adapter.

To properly accessorize you'd also need a Cardbus USB 2.0 card (pretty easy to find) and a (much rarer) Cardbus Gig Ethernet card. I've got a TrendNet GigE card in the Latitude C840 on my desk at work (UXGA screen, mainly for letting remote support technicians in through Webex).

The 600x is one of the best if not the best made thinkpad ever.

With mine I took out the modem from the mini PCI slot, and replaced it with a wireless adapter, then run a wifi antenna. Then no need for the pcmcia wifi card sticking out of the side then.
I also found a low profile USB 2.0 pcmcia card to add faster usb. It sits flus on the side and looks very nice.

I would use my 600x more, but even with everything maxed out it still is too slow to keep up. Maybe I will swap a SSD into it. About all I have left to do to it.