Restored 'DIN Grey' German IBM Thinkpad 750c

[solidpro]

HI Everyone

Some of you may be aware there were grey variants of early thinkpads. It seems there isn't one clear answer as to why but when you look at the HMM, they seem to generally refer to the grey ones as 'German'. So some think it's due to some kind of standardisation in West Germany in the 1990s where notebooks HAD to be grey. Grey models included:

IBM ThinkPad 700 and 700C
IBM ThinkPad 720 and 720C
IBM ThinkPad 750, 750P, 750Cs, 750Ce
IBM ThinkPad Dock I
IBM ThinkPad 300 Monochrome

So I picked up a non-functioning IBM Thinkpad 750c on ebay a few weeks back. It wasn't listed as grey but I could see there was a difference in the shell. For some reason, at some point someone has replaced the keyboard with a black one, which is a bit of a shame but does at least show up the contrast in the colour schemes.

It came to me with a password locked hard drive, corroding hibernation battery and a dead LCD. The repairs were as follows:

• Test the machine worked using an external LCD, which it did

• Repair the non functioning LCD, which was actually related to both leaking surface mount capacitors on two power boards to the CCFL lamps as well as the fact the CCFL lamps themselves didn't work

• Remove the HDD caddy. As far as I know there is no way to remove the password on these older IBM hard drives, so it was replaced with a period model IBM drive, with Dos 6.22 and Windows 3.11 reinstalled from floppy

• Remove the leaking hibernation battery from underneath the floppy bay and clean the green corrosion

So, another machine restored! Enjoy the pics!

[solidpro]

Just wanted to report that with the very kind donation of another user on here, we think this Thinkpad has been reunited with it's original keyboard.

The thinking is that the keyboard was pulled from some 'parts bin' at an IBM repair centre in the UK and this grey 750c is very rare and unusual in the UK, and even more so with a replacement keyboard.

The grey keyboard also had a fault with it's trackpoint and IBM would have just replaced the whole thing, so the whole thing seems to add up.

Anyway, I got the keyboard (back), replaced the trackpoint with the one in the black keyboard and..... it works!



Except the LCD has now died since my original post in Feb. Probably caps.

[ThinkDan]

Looks much better now. Puzzled that it is a grey keyboard with UK layout - no German accent characters as I would expect from a German layout. Obviously keycaps can be swapped around to revert QWERTZ to QWERTY, but where are the accents, e.g. Ö and Ä in place of the UK : and @ just to the left of [Enter]?

A German 750CSs on thinkwiki.de, accented keys are just visible:

[Bondi]

Great job restoring the laptop! And it was really good luck to find the matching keyboard.
FYI it's actually sometimes possible to save a pasworded HDD. I removed the password from my IBM 850 MB hdd that came in a 755cd.
I used Victoria software (https://hdd.by/victoria/), not sure which version it was, but it worked in Win98. One has to connect the HDD as secondary drive to a real IDE controller(USB will not work). To remove the password you have to enter the master password which is 32 spaces by default for IBM/Hitachi drives. If the person that set the password was not a paranoid he did not change it. If so, all data on the hdd will be erased, but the drive will be usable.

[fatkatsupra1]

Absolutely stunning! Congrats on the keyboard and good luck replacing the LCD!

[Kocane]

Did you get the LCD fixed? The backlight of the display on my 750c is shot, and I'm wondering how hard it may be to do something about.

[astral]

Failed backlight on the TP750s is usually bad/leaking capacitors on the LCD and its inverter board. Recap and it will probably work again.

[Kocane]

Failed backlight on the TP750s is usually bad/leaking capacitors on the LCD and its inverter board. Recap and it will probably work again.

Thanks bud', I'll look into this.