Long time no see and a "new" T400 for silly old me...

[ajkula66]

Hello my fellow ThinkPadders! It's been quite a while since I've last posted here...but I've been quite busy with other aspects of life. Some great, some not so good...anyway

My trusty old X200s decided to blow a planar on me about two weeks ago. I was kinda sorry to see it go after all the trans-Atlantic travels that the two of us have done together over the past few years but I'm way too old and tired to go into a board swap on it, although there's one in the local ads readily available. Re-pasting is about as far as I'll go these days. Sounds *really* weird coming from me, I know.

Yet I can't be carrying my "main" T520 everywhere, that's out of the question AND I'm not all that keen on doing too much on my phone either so...

I ended up picking a higher-end T400 (2767-DF3) for funny money. Badly worn lid but pristine on the inside. A 9-cell Panasonic battery with less than 350 cycles which just gave me a *huge* grin once I saw the details in the Power Manager.

Although I can't really recall when I last owned a T400 it was definitely quite some time ago. So how does this "new" old ThinkPad feels to silly old me almost 15 years after the *00 generation was introduced as the latest and greatest from our friends at Lenovo ?

Well, although my eyes haven't seen an IPS screen in a couple of years I still deem the LED WXGA+ panel of my new friend to be downright awful. Maybe not as bad as I seem to remember those, but still...ugh.

Other than that, the machine itself is surpringly spry for such an old cat, running W7 64 Enterprise. When evaluating this statement, please do remember that web and Office is all that gets thrown at it on regular basis.

The T9600 is showing its age, though. Open up a bunch of tabs - I'm used to 50+ on my T520 - and it gets bogged down. I currently have Opera on it which is not optimal for such an old system IME, but have yet to find a viable alternative that has the same functionality as the aforementioned browser.

For light travel in a backpack, this oldtimer will do just fine.

On a completely different note...once a ThinkPad junkie, always a ThinkPad junkie. While I was searching for a system to replace my X200s I came across a top-shelf W520 with 2960XM and all that jazz and could feel my mouth watering. It's still out there for a laughable amount of money given the specs but I really don't see the need for it at the moment. Then again...one can never have too many ThinkPads, can they ? An early Christmas gift to myself ? Ahem...

To be continued...

Stay well, everyone.

[olex126]

All I had to read was "silly old me" to know who posted, even before I checked out the signature

Sorry to hear about the 200s going south George, the x201s you sold me a few years ago is still going strong and a perfect light throw-in-the-backpack-and-take-off machine. Good luck with your "new" replacement.

Can understand your reluctance in planar replacement, have several older units here with the same problem, even have the replacement planars available....just seem to have lost some of the "gumption" to "git 'er done!"

Missed your musings, glad to read your post and know that you're still around and kicking (although maybe not as high as before?!?)

Regards.

Dave

[TPFanatic]

Remember Turbo Memory that Wintel was marketing in the *61-*00 era? Those tiny MPCIE cards that gave you an extra 1GB or 2GB of Virtual Memory.

Nowadays so long as you flash a whitelist removed BIOS first on your T400, you can get

1. an MPCIE to NVME adapter on Aliexpress:

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

2. any cheap 2230 NVME SSD on eBay or a recycling center

They usually come in sizes of 128GB, 256GB, 512GB, 1TB, etc.. they are popular for "Steam Decks" but are also very commonly just recycled out of recycled consumer laptops and they are very VERY cheap.

I have a set of modded NVME drivers for XP and Vista, Lenovo offers NVME drivers for 7, I presume 8+ has them readily available from Microsoft. Essentially just install one of these and tell Windows to use it as swap-space instead of your primary drive and you have a better implementation of Turbo Memory.

It works quite well on my T60 using Firefox 115 ESR , currently 13 tabs open, 2.69 GB of physical memory used with currently 3.56 GB of virtual memory in-use. I only experience slow downs on badly programmed websites.

It'll be even more fun to see if my R60e with 1GB of physical memory can get fast with one of these "NVME Turbo Memories" as addendum to its Seagate 250GB spinner.

[kfzhu1229]

I got two T61 14.1" widescreen models that are similar enough to the T400. First one I got is just in far too poor of physical shape for me to do much for it, along with the graphics hanging on by a thread, the only thing good on it was the WXGA+ (CCFL) panel being in good condition and seem to have reasonable display quality by plain TN standards
Much later I picked up another in thrift store for 15 Canadian dollars this time in absolutely pristine shape (Also WXGA+ panel). I did try to use it a few times before I had to go, with my FSB mod (with a Core 2 duo P8800 so the bumpgate NVS 140M won't overheat to death) and my collection of 4GB RAM sticks that thing ran well enough. The 128MB VRAM on NVS140M is a bottleneck though for what otherwise would be a smoother experience. Pretty comfortable machine to use, although I still prefer my Compaq 6910p just because that thing has the same dimensions but a non-protruding 6 cell battery and evenly thin bezels (which is not easy on these machines since the 14.1" WXGA/WXGA+ panels have a thick left bezel and a thin right bezel).

Also lucky me I had the urge to CHECK the battery cell (6 cell Samsung) voltages BEFORE plugging the battery and charger in, and I found quite the cell imbalance that would've surely triggered a permenant failure flag, I quickly charged the low cells back up to match the 3.2V of the other cells, and then the battery charges and works fine thereafter. Has its wear count, but works well enough for a machine that isn't quite my daily.

If you frequently travel with that machine and brings a charger anyway, if it were possible you could certainly use a plain 33 battery with rebuilt 4 cells for that thing that doesn't stick out in order to shed some weight. From my experience with the ThinkPad 22 battery on the X60, rebuilding with Samsung INR18650-35E for example gives more or less the full 37Wh of designed capacity available to use (ThinkPad BMS stops discharge at a much higher voltage than what the cell is rated for, so you won't get 3500mah, but you'll get a very, very long battery lifespan). But then again I'm pretty certain you're gonna need a friend to do it since I sure learnt by now this sure needs plenty of patience and plenty of handcrafting skills in order to do it just right.