Thinkpads Forum

It seems to be running MS-DOS, something I wouldn't know anything about.

It looks decent (sorry big photo). I was originally looking for a IBM Model M keyboard but I saw this gem. It has a crack here or two. I'm sure this battery was dead. I got lucky because it came with plug too! With the laptop bag it came with it has some into to programming (i want to say harddisks) and Quicken!

The only thing is that it boots up to some line command I assume and I wouldn't know what to type. I runk Chkdsk and some other disk utility to scan...
It has a PII processor at 233mhz and I think the harddrive is either 4gb or 4mb...

What I don't get is that it would have MS-DOS on it instead of 3.1 or win95...
But this thing is solid! I got a lil too excited at the pawn shop, the keyboard and screen look great. I wish I was born a decade or two earlier so I would be in "my prime" during the ninties.

Win98se or NT4 depending on how much RAM you can stuff in there and what apps or games you are going to use. Win 3.1 is fine for 486 or slow P1's, Win2k is better on machines with a larger RAM ceiling. Win95 doesn't have much going for it these days (except for the fact that it doesn't come with IE installed so its not too bloated for a very slow RAM starved machine), and people complain too much about ME.

Want a challange? Put Slackware Linux on it.

Thanks for the input guys. I'll try out Win3.1 and when I get confident on using Linux maybe I'll try out slackware on it.

If you get bored of Windows 3.1, try Windows NT 3.5!

If it were me, I'd go for Windows NT 4 personally. It's very quick and stable compared to 98, and it is quite a challenge to get everything working properly.

You can also run Windows 2000 on 32MB RAM, though I imagine it is quite a painful experience.

Another OS to consider might be FreeBSD, which I believe needs 24MB RAM as an absolute minimum. I'm not sure how feasible it would be to get a graphical environment working smoothly on it though. On my old 600 of a similar processor speed I run Openbox, which works quite well, but that machine has 256MB RAM.

Puppylinux maybe? Deppending on the RAM of course

The hardware maintenance manual for this model is posted on ThinkWiki.

Thinkwiki page:
http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Category:380Z

Hardware Maintenance Manual:
http://download.lenovo.com/ibmdl/pub/pc ... 38zhmm.pdf

The official ram maximum is 96 meg. I don't know if there's an unofficial max.

If you do decide to run linux, Puppy Linux, if I remember correctly, requires more ram than you've got (or can add, officially). Slackware and Debian usually run fairly well on older laptops if you minimize everything. I really like the LXDE version of Debian. You'd need to max out the ram to have a decent X-windows experience.

The other thing is that something has changed with the most recent releases of both Slackware and Debian. I have a 365x with a PI processor, and it won't run the newer versions of Slackware. I am stuck at Slackware 11 with it, which is okay, but no longer supported. My PIII runs the newer versions fine. Your PII may or may not run newer versions. If not, try an older version.

On the Windows side of things, I would highly recommend Windows 98SE. It'll run alright with 96MB of RAM, but if you have less I'd opt for something older.

With Windows 95, any version of NT except 2000(which will be too sluggish), and DOS, you'll get little reason to plug it in, open the lid, and press that power switch. With my older Thinkpads, I like to give them a bit of demonstrative flair. My 770X runs XP, even though the graphics hardware can't do very well with it, but I can use it to play flash games and browse the web, and I've also installed WMP9, so I can play music. I also have a Thinkpad 701, which runs Windows 98. Most people would highly recommend against this, but ya know what. If it can, why the heck not.

I've never had a 380, but the Pentium II in yours looks pretty beefy for something that old. It's unfortunate the rest of the hardware in that thing can't follow up on that... you could've ran 2000 and had a pretty nice vintage machine.

I installed Windows 95 as I was able to get my hands on it. From a prior experience I've had with debian I failed to install it successfully so I am not taking that chance. Win95 recognizes I have 48 MB of ram, its somewhat funny how quickly it gets to booting up though, I am fairly surprised compared to my P4 that had XP well that is before I put up programs on it. Whats weird is that my desktop is all boxed up. I'm guessing I'd need to get the video drivers because I only got maybe 8 inches of desktop screen while the rest is bordered out. When I tried to change the display settings, I couldn't move the cursor anywhere other then 800x640 I believe (its grayed out)

Ordered a cmos battery for it and a car bus port for an ethernet cable because I know I would want that eventually for this pc. I'll get the drivers for it and see if it'll fix this.

With 95-it'll be a bit of a task, but I think you got a good OS. Windows 95 is also at home even with just 48MB of RAM, so the quick boot times will come naturally as long as you have a decent Hard Drive and any Pentium processor. If you're planning to hook it up to the internet and see if you can make it a novelty machine to use, you've got your work cut out tracking down drivers and software.

I put Win 95 on those older models. It works well, is fun to configure, and nostaligic. Then, I run the latest version of Opera that runs under Win 95, I'd have to check which version that is. That version of Opera still surfs the net well with very few errors.

edit: I forgot, Windows NT 4.0 also would work great. I run it on an older 380D with P166MMX and 48MB (or was it 80MB?).