T400 upgrades

[Castela]

I have an old T400 I pulled out of storage recently, put in an ssd and got the ram up to its max of 8. I'm wondering what else I can upgrade to make it as modern as possible. Or maybe I should just leave it like that to use for productivity and be done. From what I've found, it's not the most recent of those series, but still good. So, can the screen be upgraded? The motherboard? I'd love a Theseus' ship out of this thing.

[TPFanatic]

Best you can do is get the 2503 full dock, mpcie adapters, exprescard adapters, and build a workstation out of this. Run an optimized OS. Im using a T60 with USB 3 and NVME adapted through mpcie/expresscard.

[Gonzaleitor]

You should start by upgrading the wifi card, if you're not using an ethernet cable.

[axur-delmeria]

Screen is stuck at 1440x900, no known upgrades.

[T410]

Best you can do is get the 2503 full dock, mpcie adapters, exprescard adapters, and build a workstation out of this. Run an optimized OS. Im using a T60 with USB 3 and NVME adapted through mpcie/expresscard.

I wish I knew what you just said.

[TPFanatic]

No worries. I apologize for any misunderstanding.

Please see my T60 build thread from Oct 9 2024 for an instance of my activity: viewtopic.php?f=29&t=136816

Upgrades for T400 may include the use of a MPCIE to NVME adapter. For example:

https://www.google.com/search?q=mpcie+t ... aliexpress

These small devices can be purchased on aliexpress in the area of $2 USD each. These effectively allow the installation of a small 2230 NVME SSD into a MPCIE slot with sufficient physical space of an old ThinkPad.

Small 2230 NVMEs are very commonplace on the secondhand recycling market stateside, such as on United States eBay. I just purchased a lot of 10 for $7 each.

I have purchased a number of these MPCIE to NVME adapters and a number of 2230 NVME SSDs and found success at using the drives for auxiliary storage, network shared storage, RAID storage, and virtual memory. This is especially helpful on old models like T60 and T61 which use DDR2 as adding more DDR2 is not cost-effective. An expresscard-based solution exists furthermore, see:

https://www.google.com/search?q=express ... aliexpress

On a T61 for instance it is factually cheaper to pay $15 for a 2230 SSD and $2 for an adapter, and flash the Middleton's BIOS for free so the ThinkPad will permit installation in the otherwise-whitelisted MPCIE slot, than to spend $50 for 8GB of DDR2.

There is also the matter that I notice when I enable Bitlocker in my old ThinkPads, the ThinkPad goes through a long memtest. 8GB of DDR2 in my X61 takes a long time to test. 3GB of DDR2 in my T60 soars in comparison.

The "2503 Advanced Full-Size Dock" is hard to find and I have been unable to find one, or I would have purchased one. Otherwise the "2504 Mini Dock" is still viable for expansion.

I recommend running a lean and stable Operating System on such old ThinkPads as the T400. Lean and stable includes Windows 7, Windows XP, Windows 10 (debloated), Linux Mint, AntiX, Debian, among others. A non-debloated AKA bloated version of any Operating System will kill the experience of enjoying an old ThinkPad. There is no sense in enduring this struggle and wasting electricity for the sake of telemetry.