Slovenian R50e

[sparta.rising]

Always keeping a hawk eye on my local craigslist I spotted a Thinkpad of unknown model without a motherboard for $10. I contacted the seller and went over. The woman was very nice and after chatting with her a bit she decided to just give it to me for free. She said her daughter's old roommate had left it and she had no idea what to do with it.

It was an R50e and aside from being a little dirty, looked fine from the outside. The battery showed no life and the power adapter had a European plug so it wasn't possible to test there. When I took it home and plugged it in, indeed it wouldn't power on, but the motherboard was obviously there. A little further investigating its missing the hard drive (but has the caddy!) so terms were probably just confused.

The R50e has onboard video so it couldn't be the GPU issue, so I poked around a little more. Popped out the one stick of RAM it had and placed in a known good stick and tada! the machine posted no problem. The battery is 3rd party, but I tested it in my T43 and it has 45Wh remaining! All and all not a bad find!

Only problem is that it has a slovenian keyboard, and while its usable I'd like to replace it with a English US. (See my marketplace post.)

Just thought I'd share

I know I've been warned by a few forum members to be weary of the R5xe models because they can have wonky configurations, what should I look out for on this? It has a Celeron M 1.4GHz that I'll probably get around to replacing eventually.

[Wentworth]

Geroge wanted A31p Slovenian keyboard... he loves his slovenian keyboards he probably will do a swap with you.

[sparta.rising]

Yup he bought it awhile ago

Unfortunately my luck with the R50e hasn't been quite as good as initially reported. While I was initially able to get it to boot without problem, it hasn't been starting recently. I can get an occasional boot, which leads me to believe it has a flacky board or other component. I haven't had much time to experiment with it because I've been busy with a few R51's and T40's (oh and life, that silly thing)

[RealBlackStuff]

Hammerhead repairs mobos for $75.- + shipping one way.
Cheaper than buying a new mobo.

This auction has expired, but you can always contact them to see if they still do it:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?Vi ... 0252109712