New A20m

[NyLan]

Hello guys,

I'm new here, this is my first post

I used to have several ThinkPads, most of them branded from Lenovo ( T420, T430, T440, T450, X260, Carbon X1, T470 ). Currently still owning and using 3x T470, one for my wife, two for me. ( One with Windows 10, the other one with Linux )
BUT I decided to buy an A20M. It was cheap and I want to use it with WIndows98SE, but it came installed in German... I would like to reinstall it in English so I searched for a recovery CD.

Even if the A20M was released with both Windows 2000 and Windows 98 SE, for some reason I can only find the Windows 2000 Recovery CD.
Do you know if I can use a recovery CD from A21M ? This one is easy to find

[Neil]

Hey there NyLan, welcome! Years ago, when I played around with Pentium II and III ThinkPads, I never used Win98 recovery media. Only installed from an OEM Win98SE CD, but whew!, there were a lot of drivers to search out and install. Anyway, I would think the A21M recovery disks will install just fine. You may have to install a few drivers, but they are easy to find. https://thinkpads.com/support/Thinkpad- ... /A20m.html
At least you will have all the IBM tools pre-installed, although stuff like driver manager won't work anymore. Still, worth a try, if it works, great! If not, try something else.

[NyLan]

Hi Neil,

Cool, that's my plans. I downloaded the A21M recovery CD and will check if some drivers are missing. If it's not working at all, I'll try to reinstall from scratch. I've recently setup a Pentium 233Mmx and a PIII 933 but seems there lot of drivers to install manually on IBM laptops

I'm just waiting to replace the HDD for a mSata SSD. Should receive everything tomorrow. Geek weekend ahead

[NyLan]

Good news, I replaced the HDD with a mSata SSD and the A21M recovery Cd is working fine, it's probably the same recovery Cd for both A20m and A21m. It taking so much time to complete, and I had to do it twice due to an error when checking integrity. Either the cd player is a bit faulty, or it was not used since a while. Looks good now.
I'm trying to find a battery for it now, but it's so expensive. almost the price I paid for the hole computer...

[NyLan]

Some news and questions about my A20m

I've noticed that it was long to boot and figured out after few hours that it's better to disable the Lan card if it's not used. Seems to be by design, Windows wating for dhcp or whatever during boot... This slows down the loading process for almost 1 minute !
I've created my own recovery CD using Ghost. 8 Min to Restore the computer instead of 2 hours with the official recovery CD
I have 2 questions :

1. Regarding CPU. It's a PIII 700Mhz but it's running on 550Mhz on both Windows and MS-DOS. Tried to change some setting in the bios, put all to performance, tried to disable Intel speedstep, etc... Remains on 550Mhz.
2. Regarding Suspend mode. Whatever I do under Windows or Bios, the option to suspend the computer is always on. And the Hibernation file is always here. Is there something I'm missing with old ThinkPads ? I don't have this issue with all my retro computers. ( mainly desktops )

Thanks !

[NyLan]

CPU Speed detected 700Mhz in Bios :


Settings in Bios.

[RealBlackStuff]

And it will stay at 550MHz until you have a working battery.
Don't know about Suspend.

[NyLan]

aaaah I was not sure about this. Still waiting to receive the new battery. Probably 1 week.

[NyLan]

You were right
Just received the brand new battery ( from 2018 ), it's now working at 700Mhz