Thinkpads Forum

I have a 390X bought from eBay a year ago and when I try to install Windows 7 it gets stuck on the Starting Windows screen without the logo coming up. When I try to go into Safe Mode, it listed all the core files and stayed there. I had 384mb of RAM and that same DIMMs I tried on a T22 Win7 booted up. Anyone have any ideas why is that happening? I don't want to throw it out.

kfzhu1229 wrote: Anyone have any ideas why is that happening? I don't want to throw it out.

While I haven't touched a 390X in many, many years my best guess is that it just doesn't have the horsepower to deal with W7 on *any* level. The weakest T22 sports an 800MHz Coppermine CPU if I'm not mistaken, so the answer to your question likely sits somewhere in the combination of severely outdated (and I'm being kind here) CPU and insufficient RAM.

Install W2K on that poor thing and watch it fly. Seriously.

Good luck.

ajkula66 wrote:so the answer to your question likely sits somewhere in the combination of severely outdated (and I'm being kind here) CPU and insufficient RAM.

I agree with you.

I've seen a netbook with an Atom N450 CPU and 1GB of RAM take more than 5 minutes booting Windows 7.

I've personally experienced how excruciatingly slow a Thinkpad X61s (Core 2 Duo 1.6GHz) can be when running Windows 7 with only 512MB RAM.

The Atom N450's performance ranges between a PIII 800MHz and a Pentium M 1.2GHz depending on the type of workload.

Your 390X, however, is housing a processor that's half the performance (at best), and RAM that's much slower (SDRAM vs DDR2) and smaller (384MB vs 1GB in my example), so I'm really not surprised that boot sequence seems to have stalled.


On the other hand, the laptop might have some sort of issue that's causing the problem, may it be bad RAM, failing hard drive, etc.
Run diagnostics (RAM test, HDD test), then try if you can boot a Linux live CD, particularly on that's suited to older machines. Puppu Linux comes to mind, though I'm not even sure if it's still available.

On my x21, 384mb ram // PIII Coppermine 700mHz // SSD, I run the current version of Debian (with xfce) and it's pretty snappy, even with the CPU throttled to 450 mhz.

axur-delmeria wrote:

ajkula66 wrote:so the answer to your question likely sits somewhere in the combination of severely outdated (and I'm being kind here) CPU and insufficient RAM.

I agree with you.

I've seen a netbook with an Atom N450 CPU and 1GB of RAM take more than 5 minutes booting Windows 7.

I've personally experienced how excruciatingly slow a Thinkpad X61s (Core 2 Duo 1.6GHz) can be when running Windows 7 with only 512MB RAM.

The Atom N450's performance ranges between a PIII 800MHz and a Pentium M 1.2GHz depending on the type of workload.

Your 390X, however, is housing a processor that's half the performance (at best), and RAM that's much slower (SDRAM vs DDR2) and smaller (384MB vs 1GB in my example), so I'm really not surprised that boot sequence seems to have stalled.


On the other hand, the laptop might have some sort of issue that's causing the problem, may it be bad RAM, failing hard drive, etc.
Run diagnostics (RAM test, HDD test), then try if you can boot a Linux live CD, particularly on that's suited to older machines. Puppu Linux comes to mind, though I'm not even sure if it's still available.

I have used a Lenovo IdeaPad netbook with Atom as my first "computer" in 2010. Indeed, even windows XP takes 3 minutes to load and that was only the first few boots. Then I had a T43 and even with that it is much faster that it takes 35 seconds to boot windows 7. I would say Atom's performance (at least for mine) is around a 266mhz PII (Even my TP600 only takes 1.5 minutes to boot to XP considering the fact that it takes 45 seconds out of the 1.5 minutes to finish POST) to 1ghz Coppermine PIII and my 900mhz Coppermine PIII T22 with 384mb ram takes little bit more than 2 minutes to boot to W7 while my A30 with 1ghz PIII Tualatin 1gb RAM takes 1 minute to boot to W7 and I am currently using this device to type this reply.
Well until now I have no idea how I'm going to use the 390X. And with the 390X in NT5.x the audio playback seemed to be choppy no matter what audio driver I use. So either it has to sit on the floor for months or I can make it use Windows 9x and do old gaming.

axur-delmeria wrote:I've personally experienced how excruciatingly slow a Thinkpad X61s (Core 2 Duo 1.6GHz) can be when running Windows 7 with only 512MB RAM.

By comparison It flies with Trisquel 7, which I'm using now with 512 MB ram.

jaspen-meyer wrote:By comparison It flies with Trisquel 7, which I'm using now with 512 MB ram.

I put Debian Jessie on that machine, and it ran well until I had too many tabs open in Iceweasel. In any case, it was just temporary-- I put two 1GB sticks when I found a few for cheap.

The oldest machine I actually did try installing Windows 7 on was a ThinkPad 600 (not a 600E, a 600) at 233MHz and 416MB RAM... needless to say, I had quite the adventure Even XP wouldn't run very well on something like that or even the 390X; for anything older than the T2x/X2x series I'd definitely go with 98SE or 2000 depending on memory installed

danikayser84 wrote:The oldest machine I actually did try installing Windows 7 on was a ThinkPad 600 (not a 600E, a 600) at 233MHz and 416MB RAM

I am unable to install Win7 on my 600 due to the lack of ACPI. Can you tell me how to install Win7 on that thing? I have a PII 600 with 266mhz, upgrade to 416mb ram soon, 40gb 5400rpm HDD from a T40, whenever I try to start windows 7 it tells me that this computer does not have ACPI support and refuses to boot. When I try to run the setup from boot it sits there with a blinking underline. What can I do to that thing to install Win7? Thanks

I did upgrade the BIOS to the latest version, which does have ACPI support (a similar occurrence on the 380Z, 560Z and others of this era; older BIOS revisions of machines of this era did not support ACPI but was added later on)

danikayser84 wrote:I did upgrade the BIOS to the latest version, which does have ACPI support (a similar occurrence on the 380Z, 560Z and others of this era; older BIOS revisions of machines of this era did not support ACPI but was added later on)

Well no thanks then, I really want to keep the datestamp of 04/02/98 on my easy-setup screen