Thinkpads Forum

I'll consider "vintage" to be the 200, 300, 500, 600, 700 and 800 series, as well as any laptops that slot around there, such as the 701, some of the i-series, and the PalmTop.

But-does anyone legitimately use theirs for their good daily work? Such as web browsing, typing up, messaging? I had a 760 when I was little, that I used for homework and games. And then a 770X was next up for that, until I got my Toshiba Satellite 1005.

But I just can't find a real use for any of my vintage Thinkpads... the hardware is just far too underpowered, and the resolutions are far too puny. I'm wondering if someone out there has made it work for them, for a very specific feature of their older Thinkpad, or if their work just doesn't permit the need for a newer Thinkpad, or even that of an A-series or older T-series.

The old series I collected, I'll play on em for a week but then put them away.
I don't think they would suit my needs, especially since most of them have dead batteries and I have yet to get a WiFi PC card.

Though I do hope the 770s arriving soon will work OK.

The 770 is pretty good- the graphics is capable of some older forms of 3D, and the CPU is actually pretty brisk compared to most other desirable vintages(701, 760). Although- anything newer than XP SP2 won't run smoothly at all, and don't expect it to run any modern web content swiftly. Disregarding all that, the USB 1.1 port on the back keeps it in the new world very well, and I put an Ethernet card and Wi-Fi Card in the CardBus slots for connectivity. The UltraBay and Battery Bay in the 770 are also pretty interesting. The 770 is no doubt a truly pivotal piece in the Thinkpad lineage, I'd say any genuine Thinkpad junkie should have at least one at some point in his Thinkpadding.

A Wi-Fi PC Card is an absolute necessity when toying with vintage Thinkpads, it's always good to keep the driver CD handy as well. It's always a right pain in the butt to not have that handy.

How about a rare IBM Transnote?
Got one recently, which turned out to have everything working, except the double-CMOS (2xCR2016) and pen (1xAAAA) batteries. They were easily replaced.
Both the (rare) main- AND the (extremely rare) sub-battery are each still in perfectly good condition.
It's got the original Windows 2000 ex-factory installed, and the recovery partition is also intact and working.
This is a touchscreen laptop from 2001.
It must have made a Space Odyssea to land into my hands!
I wouldn't use it for my daily needs though (for that I have a home-built PC-tower), since the screen is too small (10.4", 800x600).

My A31p is as vintage as it gets for me. I don't foresee getting older Thinkpads, as I'll have nothing to use them for. Even the P4M-based A31p does not really cut it anymore...

I use a 600X maybe twice a year. I've got a couple of old utilities which are used to program frequencies and options into Vertex/Yaesu amateur radios via a serial cable. A duplicate setup exists on one of my T23 systems but it gives me a good excuse for dusting off the 600X .

I use my old ones to play old fashioned DOS games (in my 380XD for example), a while ago I installed Grim Fandango on my 600E but the cut scenes were too slow so I moved the game to my T22. Unfortunately I haven't had the time to play with it

In my lab at work, I use an X31 once every couple months, which controls some of the electronics involved in a certain type of experiment. But that isn't old enough to be considered "vintage" as defined by the OP.

The oldest computer that I still use is the Dell Inspiron 7500 in my signature: 700MHz Pentium III, RAM maxed out at 512MB, Windows XP Pro SP3 with no updates or virus scanner (to keep the system as fast as possible), and a 250GB PATA HDD full of MP3 files ripped from my own CD collection. I play these MP3 files once in a while, and sometimes I also type up simple documents on it. But it's never on the internet.

RealBlackStuff wrote:How about a rare IBM Transnote?

This begs for a topic of its own, with photos! *green with envy*

I really like my 560X for not having a fan and have used it for some time but it mostly collects dust. Putting linux distros on vintage thinkpads makes them usable for quite a bit of tasks, just haven't got enough free time to set them up. My other vintage TP which I will definitely be keeping and putting it to use is a mint 770X with the 13.7 screen. When I make up my mind for an OS, I hope to take photos and post about it. It's like it never got any use with a fully working battery.

Every day because I have a non-convertible DOS data-base with over 30,000 photo negs in it and another with gobs of family tree stuff. Original programmer died and nobody could figure out how to convert to WINDOWS . So I use a 600X to handle that with a 600 as backup if something goes wrong.

^^^
Can probably run it under DOSBox on any modern OS/HW, but your system is valid as well. There is something fun in keeping dedicated DOS machines.

Olde Man wrote:Every day because I have a non-convertible DOS data-base with over 30,000 photo negs in it and another with gobs of family tree stuff. Original programmer died and nobody could figure out how to convert to WINDOWS . So I use a 600X to handle that with a 600 as backup if something goes wrong.

See if this may help: https://www.google.com/search?q=convert ... channel=sb

I boot up my 360 a couple of times a year, but that's mostly for fun and to keep it moving. I even type some simple documents, and later transfer on a floppy to another computer, just because I can. The 380ED has been used a couple of times to play CDs while I have been working. It still runs Win95, so I took it online once and some really old IE version still displayed the Google search page, but little else.

Thanks for the good advice. I will keep it for my kids. As I am old enough to remember when the Japanese bombed the PANAY and the Brits were chasing the BISMARK, we are not talking Spring Chicken here. So I have no burning need to convert. But it is nice to know it exists.

Hi all,

I've used my right handed Transnote a while for my work.
It's sometimes handy during meetings.
Only drawback is that the battery only last about 30 minutes on a full charge.
Still have to find out if the cell's can be replaced by new ones.

The left handed Transnote is for my wife but she doesn't use it.

Sometimes I use the 240X as well.
I've used it until a couple of years ago as a "holiday" computer.
The kids could view DVD's on it and I used it to store the pictures on it I made with my digital camera.

The 365XD just lies around. Unfortunately, it has a DSTN display which is hard to read after all those years.
I'd like to swap it for a TFT LCD but still haven't found a suitable replacement for a reasonable price.

I don't know if this qualifies as "using" but I have a Transnote sitting on my desk and I use it every day to record telephone messages. The handwriting capture can be OCR'ed, and if I write it just right I can import the names and numbers into my "contacts". Other than that, at PIII 600 and 320 megs of RAM it is not capable of any modern web surfing.

Seems the Transnote is a particularly popular old Thinkpad for people to use, or have as a toy.

It'd barely slot into my criteria that I mentioned in my OP though... because the Transnote is more closely related to the X20 rather than the 500-series... it's a really close call though. I'd probably call it vintage.

My 390X is the music player/radio streamer in my weight room. It replaced my 365XD a couple of years ago, because the 365XD could not play AAC+ files, and the local sports station streams hockey in AAC+. Otherwise the 365XD would still have the job. I'm planning to use it to do some writing next year, because I hate hi-res screens and their small default font sizes. I may report back on how that goes...

ilakast wrote:

RealBlackStuff wrote:How about a rare IBM Transnote?

This begs for a topic of its own, with photos! *green with envy*

Your wish is my command!
Check this out: http://forum.thinkpads.com/viewtopic.php?f=11&t=113428

Currently I use a T61 in a 14" 4:3 T60 Chassis. I doubt I could go any older than a T60 and still be happy. SXGA+ would be my minimum accesptable resolution, I use wireless all the time, and I use bluetooth often.

I did come across this thread while surfing the forums on my 600E (dual boot win2k and Debian). It is a usable machine with pcmcia wireless, but barely so. I just like the feel of the keyboard a lot.

The oldest daily driver I think I could deal with would be a 1GB ram SXGA+ T23 with bluetooth dongle, internal wireless, and a real lightweight linux distro. Anything older than that is just for the fun of using an old machine.

I use the 701Cs for Yamaha FM Synthesis as they have a real YMF289 chip. Not widely discussed... perhaps everyone is obsessed over the keyboard?
Great for tracking OPL3 music or listening to OPL3 music (Adlib tracker 2 anyone?). Also they can play a lot of my older games.

Of course everyone's response is to use emulators, but emulators don't sound exactly like real hardware and occasionally run into problems; I was an emulator junkie for a long time. And as it stands, there are *no* emulators for ESFM and Crystal FM synthesis clone OPL3. The TransNote has a CS4237 chip, which I can't wait to see if it sounds like CS4236B with FM synthesis generation, or if it has a bugged noise generator like CX4235.

So in a bizarre way, I use all of my old thinkpads for multimedia. I can see how the TransNote would be awesome for making notes, which I may use it just for that.

I have a 701c with a badly corroded battery - it sat in storage for about 14 years. The keyboard mechanism still works and the screen looks pristine. I would sell it at a reasonable price obviously

I do still use my 600X but only for the one thing that no new ThinkPad can do: As an mp3 player. The 600X has a really decent soundcard, all newer ThinkPads have such a crappy one however, I never even let them near my speaker system.

If I ever get my hands on a 600X with a faster processor (800MHz or something) I might consider using it for surfing a bit again and perhaps do some typing work on it.

I use a 570 as the audio source for my small FM broadcast station, a Ramsey FM100B stereo FM transmitter, running XP and ZaraRadio with music or old time radio shows, about 12 to 18 hours every day. It sits in the Ultrabase, but would work without it. The battery is long since dead and was removed.

I don't go very recent with laptops, not least because I don't want a wide screen so my everyday laptop is a 15" T60.

I stopped using the 560X when I needed glasses to read the screen (now I need them for a 19" desktop monitor) and with the two 570Es and the 600X wireless network cards seemed an overhead too many and they slowed to a crawl. Still here and complete although I think I'm about to strip the hard drives from the 570Es to use as backups in Ultrabay adaptors. As I've got all the accessories for the 600X it'll come in handy if anybody ever needs to read an LS-120 disc.

Other than those, we take a T43 on holidays if wi-fi is available, the T42/R52 runs any automotive software I need and my other half uses an R51e all the time.

We don't do modern...

I'm still using my 385XD. I'm on it now.

Basically what I do is remote desktop into another computer running XP or Windows 7.

It works great.

I don't own any vintage Thinkpads. My oldest Thinkpad is an X61T followed by my T410.

If I were to get a "vintage" Thinkpad as laid out by the OP it would be a 600X. I have wanted one of those for a very long time.

I haven't booted up any of my 600X's or 770Z's for a long while, but just this week I realized that I've no longer got a machine in regular use that is running XP, and I can't any longer test websites with Internet Explorer 8 (which is what shipped originally with XP, I think). Microsoft of course has discontinued XP now, and hence is no longer officially supporting MSIE 8, but apparently there are still a chunk of people still using it.

Maybe this will give me a functional reason to boot up my trusty 600X in a SelectaDock III with its awesome Voodoo 5 video card...I had that machine maxed out (Pentium III 850MHz with max 512MB memory) and I had XP tweaked out to fly pretty quick on it as well.

XP shipped with IE6.

My 600X with a PIII 500 and 576MB RAM ran at a perfectly acceptable speed with a standard install of Windows 2000 Pro until I started using a wireless network card. It's still just usable but I had to use it for a week or two last year when my T42 died and it was a bit like watching paint dry.

Ken Edmonds wrote:XP shipped with IE6.

Yes, but was upgradeable up to IE8. IE9 was Vista-only, and IE10 and above are only supported on Win7 and later...