Thinkpads Forum

A friend recently bought a couple 755CE on fleabay dirt cheap........Turned to me for help........As usual;I am turning to you all.........I have located a Hard drive and battery.........also a power supply.I have an IBM external pcmcia 8x cd rom to load his gps software.
What I havent had luck locating is system info,users manual and such.Also does anyone know what type of ram we can add...........I am sure it has something soldered in.I noticed though there are two empty slots......for ram? these are under the floppy drive............THANKS in Advance for you time and help.................Bob

PS He bought his unit soley as an addon to his gps for motor home use

As their Gps units are so expensive.and he noticed what a fine gps a Thinkpad makes

Do you know of any obstacles we may encounter?

Wow that is a really old machine. It came with a 100MHz 486, but you can (and SHOULD) upgrade to a 75MHz Pentium.

TWBOOK says the RAM goes up to 40MB, but that information may be from when the machine was made. (I have a 750P that could only go up to 20MB when new, but goes up to 32MB.) There is 8MB built in, and each slot can take up to 16MB of 72-pin JEDEC SO-DIMM memory, whatever that means. Kahlon will sell you a 32MB card (that fits if you remove the memory slot adapter) for $99. Kahlon calls these 88pin, JEIDA DRAM cards, parity, 5v.

The 755CE is too old to have a PDF user manual, but I think there is a HMM for it: ftp://ftp.software.ibm.com/pc/pccbbs/mobiles/tpvol2.pdf Same as for my 750P.

That manual says this:

One of two types of memory cards can be used, IC DRAM card or DIMM card. See the following table for the total
memory size available when they are installed.

IC DRAM Displayed Value
0 MB 7808 KB
2 MB 9856 KB
4 MB 11904 KB
8 MB 16000 KB
16 MB 24192 KB
DIMM Displayed Value
0 MB 7808 KB
4 MB 11904 KB
8 MB 16000 KB
12 MB 20096 KB
16 MB 24192 KB
20 MB 28288 KB
24 MB 32384 KB
32 MB 40576 KB

Unless your friend's GPS software runs in DOS, any modern OS will have a hard time running in that small amount of memory. Windows 95 should work well, and Win98Lite may be OK. Check the GPS software for system requirements.

Also, the BIOS may limit the usable size of the hard drive to 8GB, which should be more than enough for this job. However, since the machine is SO old, the drive may not work without putting a jumper on it, or perhaps bending a pin.

You are in for a challenge. Let us know what happens!

Thanks a lot for posting.........The info will come in handy.I will let you know how it turns out.