Thinkpads Forum

Hello,

I registered here today to pick some minds about a screen problem on my recent find of a 365XD, though I have been tinkering with IBM Think... technology for a while. I found this beast on Ebay, listed as simply an old IBM laptop (no model number was visible in photos nor listed), that didn't work. When I unpackaged the thing the laptop bag it was in was decaying and the metal parts were rusty, I'm not exaggerating when I say small flies made an escape when I unzipped it. Sure enough the laptop was filthy, had a yellow coating of possible cigarette smoke and the screws were rusted. I stripped it down and cleaned it, removing all the filth and replacing rusty screws and removed the dead batteries. When I booted it up I noticed that the internal CD drive wouldn't open (now fixed) and that the screen has a thin red line running vertically down it, other than that it works just great.

Is this a ribbon issue, screen issue or OS issue? I'm assuming it will be a ribbon issue (but will be happy to stand corrected) so my next question is; does anyone have a spare, working screen for sale?

I'm not sure what to do with this machine next. It runs 98SE fine, but it's 40MB RAM really does limit any OS upgrade (any experience of best Linux installs to HDD?) It has the built in CD drive but in BIOS the option to change boot order is greyed out, is this due to a lack of CMOS battery or because the machine won't allow booting from CD?

Sorry for all of the questions, thanks for reading.

Vertical lines of dead pixels on an LCD would indicate a problem with the conductive material that secures the display itself to the signal ribbon coming from the PCB inside the LCD. This is a rather infamous problem that occurs with the late 2006/early 2007 17" iMacs but is a problem that can affect all LCD displays. You'll need to source another LCD...

This machine will not boot to CD. You will need to find the appropriate external floppy drive and cable to boot to a floppy disk with CD-ROM driver support enabled in order to boot to optical media. I can get you the P/N of the proper cable (there are at least three varieties of floppy connections at the computer and only one at the drive - to my knowledge) off the one I have after I get off work later.

Thanks for the swift response. I have the floppy drive (sourced it today) and it does have an odd connection, so I will boot via that. Thanks for the heads up about that.

As for the screen, I was worried it would be a full screen change. If anyone ha one for sale or swap or a dead 365 I can scavenge one from please let me know.

Thanks again.

Hi... I have a 365XD. Unfortunately, I don't have an extra screen.

You can add a 64 MB stick of RAM (even though the official max is 32 MB) to the 8 MB onboard for a total of 72 MB.

The laptop will boot from a Compact Flash Card in an adapter in the PCMCIA slot. You used to be able to get CF-to-PCMCIA adapters on eBay for 99 cents.

I removed the hard drive on mine. It runs Slackware 11 from the CF card. I couldn't get any newer version of Slackware to run. It will run a GUI (I use fluxbox), but works much better with console apps. In fact, mine has always had a little bit of screen flicker when running a GUI, either Linux or Windows, so I just boot into a console.

Alternatively, I'm sure you could copy an install CD to a CF card and install to the hard drive, but since my CF card is much larger than the original hard drive, and silent, it seemed better to just run the OS from there. There are changes you can make to your fstab to reduce the writes to the CF card and prolong its life. Just google something like "Linux CF card write fstab" and I'm sure you'll find any information you need.

If you want a really simple Linux install for this laptop, try Basic Linux (http://distro.ibiblio.org/baslinux/). It's based on Slackware, installs from 2 floppies, and you will learn more about Linux playing with Basic Linux than you will in any other way. I guarantee it.

Hello, great reply there, thank you so much. I've never owned this particular model so I'm really glad to hear from someone who has tinkered with one as to the limits and successes in doing so. You have been a great help.

Do note that there's four different LCD panels for the 365XD - 10.4(A), 10.4(B), 11.3 DSTN, and 11.3 TFT.

The parts are all different for each model, and IIRC the only way to tell which you have if it's 10.4 is to open up the lid. If it's 11.3... if the color and contrast is absolutely awful, it's DSTN, if it's OK, it's TFT.

What's the type-model of your machine? (My 365XD is 2625-DEF and has a 10.4(A) if I recall correctly - but that's not guaranteed, it could be 10.4(B) with the same type-model.)

Ensure that you update to the latest BIOS before inserting a 64 MiB SODIMM.

Also, the IDE controller in this machine is notoriously picky about drives. I've not found a CF card it likes yet (some won't be detected properly, some will appear to work then crash, some will fail diagnostics right away), and I ended up getting a specific Toshiba 6.4 GB HDD to make it happy. (I forget the exact model though.) IDE back then really was quite terrible. However, the PCMCIA controller is more tolerant, so if you can figure out how to make a CF card actually boot in this machine, it will work there. And, you shouldn't see any performance loss, as PCMCIA is actually faster than ATA-2 PIO-4 (there's no DMA HDD support on the 365XD).