Thinkpads Forum

I own an IBM Thinkpad 760EL laptop and recently bought a used 760XD on eBay, which spects sound really nice on paper (higher screen resolution, slightly faster CPU, TV-out, joystick/ midi jack, MPEG2 decoder chip), but there are sever flaws those make of the 760XD a real cucumber.

I use my laptop mainly on travels for writing and for playing antique emulated and DOS games. My German model Thinkpad 760XD also has no telephony jack installed, thus I can not use the (infamously slow) Mwave modem anyway. (I also had to install the harddisk from my 760EL since my 760XD specimen lacked it.)

awful Mwave sound:

The Mwave sound/modem DSP sounds horrible and in DOS mode it only works when I launch Windows 98SE (takes quite a while to boot) and exit from there back to DOS. Booting directly into plain DOS mode of Windows 98SE crashes MWave and makes no sound. Also FASTCFG shows nonsense instead of the Soundblaster adress,IRQ and DMA in this state. Apparently the DSP loads its SoundBlaster emulator firmware only when starting windows, and thus can not be used at all from plain DOS.

I first tried to install the Mwave driver (v2.25) in a different directory ("C:\Programme\Thinkpad\MWave\"), but apparently the DOS mode driver can not handle longer paths since MWAVE.BAT always crashed when I tried to start MWave in DOS mode even after quitting Win98SE. (It took 2 days to find out why.)

The sound quality during Windows 98SE is a bad joke; DOS games have a lot of static, and MIDI files sound horrible; the pitch of some voices is very off, pitchbend and vibrato is apparently ignored completely and in some songs a triangle(?) is hammering 10 times as loud as the rest. Other GM instrument timbres seem to be made from plain sine wave with attack/decay envelope and thus sound way too quiet in the bass range. Initially drums were completely lacking. During installation the driver complained about a missing sample set.

Because the samples are not available on the IBM site anymore, I installed a 3 diskette MWave sample set (v1.00) from a different MWave card, which at least added a few halfway realistic drums and orchestra hit sounds, but the rest sounds still like plain sine wave and pitches match even worse than before. (I first tried to install that entire sound card driver (v2.33), which caused another crash.)

Also the FM sound emulation is a bad joke. I am collector of music keyboards (see http://www.informatik.fh-hamburg.de/~wi ... index.html) and hear immediately the difference. Although some timbres are nice, the envelopes behave not at all like on a real SoundBlaster OPL3. (I own a "SoundBlaster AWE64 Gold" for comparison, which was the best sounding ISA sound card.) Like with midi files some vibratos and pitchbends are completely missing, and timbres are very off. Dull drums turn into a bright click or hiss, some envelopes end too fast and other timbres are way too bright (e.g. a harsh "dwellnng" instead of "woowoowoowoonnng"). As a composer I consider this quirky Mwave synth hardly usable for making music; a real SoundBlaster is much better. Perhaps genuinely some space aliens have created the Mwave chip for their own secret sinister purposes rather than what it was advertised for. ;-]

I read that Mwave could also emulate a "SoundBlaster Pro"; does anybody know how this works? (But I guess that not the emulates card but the quality of the emulator is the problem.)

The joystick jack needs a special plug that is hard to replicate by my own. I read that the video in/out plugs can be made from a sawed-off transistor. I wish I could reuse the ESS soundcard from my 760EL for the XD, however its joystick/midi jack section is unfortunately empty (traces exist, but a chip and small parts are not soldered in). Does anybody know which components could be soldered here to make that jack work? I start to hate Mwave the more I work with it.

I downloaded a Thinkpad service manual, that lists which parts are interchangable among 760 series models; the sound card unfortunately is claimed to be not interchangable. (Why? Is it perhaps only a mechanical problem?)

black screen borders:

The LCD of the 760XD has 1024*768 pixels (including about 6 bad ones) while my 760EL had only 800*600 (with an entire row of pixels too bright), but while the EL could stretch all standard resolutions to full screen, the XD makes an ugly black border around the screen in 640*480 and 800*600 resolution. The DOS text mode has a black 2cm border at top and bottom, which on my blue screen background looks like BASIC on an Atari 800XL. Thus the usable screen area is in many games smaller than with the old 760EL.

noisy fan & smouldering smell:

While the 760EL needs no coolers and thus was almost silent, the 760XD contains a small fan on the graphics card, which after about an hour starts to hiss. (Mine doesn't start always, likely because its noisy bearing is damaged.) I don't think that my 760 laptops run really hot (my 760EL consumed only 18W without drive access), however both laptops always odour somehow pungent of ozone (?, likely the LCD backlight transformer) and also a bit burned like when something inside is slowly smouldering. I hope the stinkpad won't suddenly explode or burst into flames - at least my Li-Ion battery pack (from the 760EL) is not a Sony flare shell. The original 760XD battery pack is completely dead and is completely ignored when inserted (i.e. no battery icon is displayed). The standby NiCad battery (3 welded button cells) under the keyboard cover of my 760XD also show some white battey leak residues on their shrink sleeve. I hope it won't blow up. (I saw this when I disconnected the CMOS battery to reset the unknown BIOS password of the previous owner. Plugging the internal speaker into the white "password clear" jumper hole next to the CD-ROM bay did the trick.)

DRIVER NEEDED:

Does anybody know where I can download the original MWave midi sample set and MPEG hardware codec driver for the Thinkpad 760XD under Windows 98SE?

sound card joystick upgrade?

I read that the ESS sound card from my 760EL can be installed in the XD to get rid of the infamous Mwave sound system. But so far I know, the joystick/MIDI port is also part of the sound card and my 760EL lacks it. I once took the 760EL apart and so far I remember, there were indeed empty traces for installing that port on the sound card, but an IC and some discrete SMD components were omitted.

Can the ESS sound card be upgraded with the joystick/midi port (possibly transplanted from the Mwave card)?

In the ThinkPad configuration software available from IBM, you can enable or disable screen expansion which gets rid of the black borders. The soundcard can be replaced with the ESS from a non-mWave equipped ThinkPad which adds much performance. Unless you're using Windows 95 and have the mWave midi samples installed, the mWave is a total lemon due to slow drivers, issues with the modem and resource issues. In fact, IBM actually got sued over the mWave. The joystick port is actually on the video board so replacing the sound card would not remove that functionality.

The fan sounds like it's old and needs replacing or at least a good dusting. All fans deteriorate with age but you can lessen the effects with a normal cleaning from a compressed air duster or an air compressor (be careful if using one). The dead batteries are also a result of age and not exclusive to the 760XD. The odor is probably due to the bad fan allowing the system to overheat.

AlphaKilo470 wrote:In the ThinkPad configuration software available from IBM, you can enable or disable screen expansion which gets rid of the black borders. The soundcard can be replaced with the ESS from a non-mWave equipped ThinkPad which adds much performance. Unless you're using Windows 95 and have the mWave midi samples installed, the mWave is a total lemon due to slow drivers, issues with the modem and resource issues. In fact, IBM actually got sued over the mWave. The joystick port is actually on the video board so replacing the sound card would not remove that functionality.

I will exchange the ESS soundcard from my 760EL instead.

Screen expansion is a bad joke. Without I wil get a screen of 1/3 its intended width, while with enabled expansion I get still an up to 3cm wide black screen border. (With "PS2" commands I enabled the Fn+F8 key to toggle it in any program.)

The fan sounds like it's old and needs replacing or at least a good dusting. All fans deteriorate with age but you can lessen the effects with a normal cleaning from a compressed air duster or an air compressor (be careful if using one). The dead batteries are also a result of age and not exclusive to the 760XD. The odor is probably due to the bad fan allowing the system to overheat.

I will likely dismantle and clean the fan when I install the ESS card. I already a few times cleaned the bearing of my PC CPU fan (which I later replaced with a much larger silent fan). I will also add a pot to reduce its speed and thus noise. (The laptop doesn't run that hot.)

I would not recommend slowing the fan down. While in a normal situation, the 760 runs fine, trust me that in some situations, they will heat up like a stove burner.

As for screen expansion, it really didn't become truly usable until IBM started using 4mb and better video cards in their laptops and even then it still left a little to be desired.

AlphaKilo470 wrote:I would not recommend slowing the fan down. While in a normal situation, the 760 runs fine, trust me that in some situations, they will heat up like a stove burner.

Why that? My 760EL (133MHz) never contained a fan, and I played plenty of DOS games on it. Without drive access it draws only 18W mains power (measured at the mains socket). Only with full drive access there are short 30W peaks for some seconds. The few hours I operated my (unmodded) 760XD yet on the carpet floor, it also ran only warm but not scaringly hot despite the broken fan started only by every 3rd power-on.

Only when I put my 760EL on a sofa, I place a wooden bread board under it to prevent it from running hot. Modern laptops tend to draw >50W power and are infamous to toast testicles when placed on the lap. (However WLAN cards do that anyway by their pulsed microwave radiation - the resulting sperm is only good for breeding freaks.)

When your 760 runs hot, perhaps it has a faulty Li-Ion battery - I hope it won't launch as a flare rocket.

As for screen expansion, it really didn't become truly usable until IBM started using 4mb and better video cards in their laptops and even then it still left a little to be desired.

-Is the screen stretching calculated by the video card or the CPU or the TFT monitor itself?

-My video BIOS is revision 1.00. Is this BIOS part of the normal BIOS upgrade diskette or is it separate?

Are there any video BIOS hacks or replacements or drivers known to remove the black border and/or fix the partly badly wrong hues on the TFT? Since the TFT has only 64k colours, it would only consume 128kB of RAM to make a lookup table to output better matching TFT screen colours.

The 166mhz CPU gets a little bit hotter than the 133mhz CPU. Also, when you factor in the higher end video chip set, the standalone MPEG processor and extra chips scattered about, you have more heat generation across the board. Even a 760ED (which has a 133mhz CPU) gets a good bit hotter than the 760EL.

If there is any BIOS hacking you can do, it's beyond my field of knowledge.

Good luck finding the Mwave sample table, almost all the links on the net are dead.

gearguy wrote:Good luck finding the Mwave sample table, almost all the links on the net are dead.

I already found the #@*%! sample-set. However it is from another Mwave sound card (called "Dolphin"?, and Aptiva?) and the midi player still only uses few of the samples and they even partly sound badly detuned against the rest.

Here is the crap:
http://members.aol.com/donnaskani/336.html

The sample set has the version number 1.00 and thus may be incompatible. Watch out only to install the midi files and not the driver v2.33, which seems to be incompatible with 760 series and is hard to completely remove after accidental installation (in Windows 98SE). In the samples directory there is a config file that describes the pitch and midi mapper data to tell Mwave which sample it shall use for which GM preset sound. However I guess this part is incompatible with the v2.25 driver of Thinkpad 760XD.

It might be that only the INF files of the v2.33 driver are wrong for 760XD and the rest would be ok. But I don't want to mess around much longer with it, because I anyway will remove the Mwave card in favour for the ESS sound card to get rid of this constantly crashing, CPU downslowing piece of extraterresstial hardware that may be only good for some ETs to phone home, but not even to connect a German 760XD to a telephone line (it lacks the phone jack due to missing telephony kit).

I am not sure if in Germany at the time when 760th were made it was even still illegal to connect any internal modems to phone lines; at least in 1980th ther was a strict ban of connecting anything to phone lines that was not rented from the only national monopoly phone company "Deutsche Bundespost". I think their only legal 300bps modem once cost about 150EUR rental per month or the like, and the Post unjustly threatened anybody with jail who only though about making your own DIY modem (or accoustic couplers or any mechanical phone receiver lift or dial turning mechanisms). However there was the Chaos Computer Club that despite [censored] on their bans and made accoustic C64 modems from 2 toilet suction cups (sink plungers) plugged over the phone receiver.

These are my Thinkpad 760 modification experiences. Before you open the thing, I strictly recommend to download the IBM service manual for it, because some components (power switch, microphone cable, plenty of different screw lengths) are not that easiy to re-install correctly than they look like.

NOTES: Despite the service manual everywhere mentiones nylon screws those are claimed to be not re-usable, I found neither in my 760EL nor my XD any of them. All screws were simply of black painted steel.

The service manual claims that the entire system board assembly has to be taken out of the case to remove any cards. In reality in most cases this is not necessary; it is sufficient only to remove the sheet metal cover to access the electronics, unless you want to reach the bottom of the main board or the CPU card.

exchange sound card (get rid of Mwave):

I now have managed to transplant the ESS soundcard from my 760EL into the 760XD and vice versa. The DOS sound rocks now and makes no crashes at all. Also FM works great. Only the different synth tom timbres seem to be less noticeble than on my SoundBlaster AWE64 Gold, but that may be also due to the tiny speakers.

hot MPEG chip:

The MPEG decoder chip on the enhanced video card of the XD is cooled by the sheet metal of the PC-Card chute. Mine apparently ran tremendously hot, since its naked silicon die (like with Athlon XP) has left a discoloured square burn mark on the metal, which shape indicated that only the rim had good contact with the metal. (The chip looks intact and the die is still shiny.) Thus I added a blob of heat conductive paste for better contact.

improve cooling, fix fan assembly:

I oiled the fan by removing the silver center sticker on its cast metal back and adding a drop of silicone oil to the bearing. Then carefully push the propeller a few times in (propeller facing down) to make the oil flow into the bearing. Before re-sticking the sticker, remove oil residues with isopropanol and a Q-Tip from the metal surface (otherwise it wouldn't stick.)

The fan bearing is a strange construction that sits loosely in its hole, and apparently the magnet force attempts to push the fan capstan upward out of the bearing when the plastic circlip is removed. Unfortunately the sheet metal cover is bolted to the casted bottom and thus can not be safely removed to take out the propeller assembly for cleaning.

My fan cable was halfway crushed between the metallic fan case and DC/DC card, thus I insulated it with adhesive film. I am not sure why my 760XD smells a little burnt and somehow sweaty. However the small transformer on the DC/DC card smells a bit this way, and the blue plastic foil around the coil looks a bit melted (like shrink wrap). The yellow foil of my EL trafo isn't distorted this way.

To reduce fan noise, I soldered a potentiometer (medium size 2.2k trimmer) into the fan line. There is little space left in the case, thus I removed the anyway useles modem eject slider and hotglued the trimmer there. Because the trimmer was too thick, I pinched out with a string cutter the center plastic rail under that slider and instead hotglued a flat plastic board a little lower to secure the trimmer against falling down and shorting the PCB underneath. I also replaced the modem jack cover with a piece of holed sheet metal (from an old speaker grill) to improve ventilation.

After the mod, the fan didn't start at all anymore despite fully cranked up fan trimmer and an hour of operation (in DOS mode, on the carpet floor in winter), thus I expected that I damaged the fan cables somewhere. Thus I took everything apart again, measured the fan cables and tested the fan with a power supply, but everything seems to be perfectly intact. Thus my only conclusion is that the cooler ESS soundcard, heat paste on the MPEG chip and the open modem jack hole has become sufficient now to keep the thing cool enough to prevent the fan from starting. (Previously mine made noise after about 45 minutes, but it only started sometimes and only after the laptop was powered on again.)

keyboard assembly:

In the 760 series the keyboard PCB, speakers, CMOS battery and rechargeable standby battery are located under the keyboard palm rest.

My 760XD (from eBay) initially didn't start due to keyboard lid switch problems; it likely thought the lid stayed open. I also had to disconnect its keyboard battery to reset the BIOS password, thus I unscrewed the palm rest to reach the components inside. (Nowadays I know that unscrewing the case top cover and pulling out the keyboard connector would be an easier way to disconnect the CMOS battery power.)

CAUTION: The tiny plastic lever of the keyboard lid microswitch cracks off very easily. Thus do not attempt to push down the unscrewed keyboard PCB back into place while the keyboard lid is closed, because in closed position the keyboard switch slider is pushed in and cracks off the lever unless the lever is carefully pushed in manually. Thus better leave the lid open or put an object (e.g. the palm rest) between keyboard and case bottom to prevent it from shutting completely.

In my XD I cracked off this microswitch lever; despite I glued it back into place (use an aligator clip to hold the lever and apply a tiny drop of superglue on the lever, NOT the switch), the lever didn't spring out fully anymore and thus the switch could not detect when the lid was open. Thus I later swapped the intact keyboard PCB from my EL (which has different looking ICs) into my XD, which makes no problem.

The foil cables are pushed in a special connector socket that has a moveable top part. Pull this top up to unlock before you pull out the cable. To re-install it, insert the cable back into the slot and gently push the top down to lock it. When I bough my 760EL years ago (for still 150EUR with defective keyboard), the only defect was that one of these cables was loose.

Also the speaker jacks on the keyboard PCB cracks off easily, thus do not bend it when you pull out the speaker cable. (I cracked off and had to resolder the right speaker jack in my XD 3 times when I first worked with the PCB.)

loudspeaker repair & different types:

My 760EL and 760XD have very different loudspeaker types. While the EL ones have an uncovered semitransparent black plastic diaphragm and open chassis holes, my XD ones have a shiny silver sheet aluminium grill with big round holes in front of a transparent diaphragm, and the chassis holes on the back are glued tight with a black felt ring.

When intact, both sorts sound astonishingly good regarding how tiny these yellcoins are. IMO their sound quality beats many 8cm speakers found in lousy clock radios. However in direct comparison both speaker types differ a lot. I noticed this when I exchanged the keyboard PCB assembly between both models first toghether with the speakers (after I instealled the ESS sound card in my XD).

The 760EL speakers sound a little dull and hollow, and in many games (e.g. on MAME arcade emulator) they were too quiet to hear them well. Installed in the XD they kept the same characteristics.

The 760XD speakers play at least twice as loud and sound quite bright and much more powerful. Unfortunately my right speaker was damaged and thus made a bright crackling distortion also in bass sounds, which was very disturbing. I expect that the voice coil rattled against the magnet gap beause either something was bent or melted or windings came loose by thermical overload. Thus I took out the speaker, carefully peeled off the felt ring and pryed with a screwdriver to bend the sheet metal chassis and cover of the playing speaker until distortion nearly disappeared. (I collect music keyboards and succesfully fixed many sound toy speakers this way.) I also carefully pushed in the flexible foil diaphragm to bend the voice coil. I manged this way to strongly reduce the crackling, but could not eliminate it completely. However after I glued the felt ring back into place (with a glue stick), the distortion disappeared almost completely. Only at high volume there are sometimes small residues of crackling, but it distorts only barely more than the other. I also glued a layer of window insulation foam rubber on the magnet and the rechargable battery to prevent rumbling.

I know a bit about high-end hifi (e.g. I modified and regularly use a Grundig 6199 tube amplifier from 1963 and have built my own TML speaker boxes), and I think that also these tiny loudspeaker chassis in the 760XD were likely developed by very bright propellerheads, since they not only sound tremendously better, but also don't look at all like average other small speakers. The diaphragm is embossed of thin foil with an unusually curved pattern (similar like in modern headphones) that apparently was designed to re-shaped and distribute partial vibrations similarly like the star shaped structure in the patented Manger loudspeaker. Also the relatively thick felt on the rear chassis holes likely works similar like a Variovent (a Dynaudio patented, non-linear air duct for speaker cabinets that damps large amplitudes stronger), and also the different hole sizes in the aluminium front cover certainly do something important like a sonic lense to spread the sound wave or even partly reflect it back to the diaphragm to interact with partial vibrations.

Objectively these 0.5W yellcoins are certainly not considered hifi, but the conditions under that they work are really extreme; they are tiny, there is almost no chamber volume behind them, the magnet lies directly above the harddrive and the effectivity and amplitude is enormous in ratio to their diameter. And despite all this they don't distort too much and even make a little bass.

Thus when you replace in a 760 series Thinkpad the speakers or keyboard assembly that contains them, always watch out to get the right ones. The aluminium covered speakers sound better and especially much louder than the plain black ones. But I also recommend not to turn them unneccessarily loud, since their construction is so extreme that there is certainly a high risk of mechanical or thermical damage. (In sound toys with similar tiny speakers it happens often that the voice coil melts itself through the plastic diaphragm.)

QUESTIONS:

* Does anybody know how to overclock the 166MHz Pentium MMX CPU to 200MHz?

Is this safely possibly or will the thing overheat. It looks like a heatpipe at the lower front rim of the system board assembly. Is there one? (I havent' taken out the entire mainboard yet.)

* What are the many unused case openings intended for?

There is e.g. a wide rectangular hole on the left side of the CD drive and a smaller one above the front IR port, those are shut with a plastic board. What are they for?

* Were there ever 760 series Thinkpads with Nylon screws? (claimed in IBM service manual)

CYBERYOGI =CO=Windler wrote: exchange sound card (get rid of Mwave):

I now have managed to transplant the ESS soundcard from my 760EL into the 760XD and vice versa. The DOS sound rocks now and makes no crashes at all. Also FM works great. Only the different synth tom timbres seem to be less noticeble than on my SoundBlaster AWE64 Gold, but that may be also due to the tiny speakers.

Thanks for starting this thread. I swapped a keyboard from a 760XL I have as a parts unit (doesn't power up), and might do the same to get rid of that POS mwave card. Like you, the mwave midi samples don't do squat. It also hosed my NT 4 installation, so I went to Windows 2000 (which has better PCMCIA support, anyways). I think mwave is high up there with IBM's colossal screw ups, along with the PCjr.

##EDIT##

I ended up taking apart my system and swapping out the mwave for the ESS1688 that was in a 760XL parts laptop (BIOS password). I'll update my own progress as soon as Windows 200 finishes installing.

Been ages since I broke out any of my 760's, but I remember 2000 being sluggish even maxed out on RAM on the XD.

Radioguy wrote:Been ages since I broke out any of my 760's, but I remember 2000 being sluggish even maxed out on RAM on the XD.

A little, but it runs a helluva lot better than NT 4. I used to be an OS/2 guy (about 15 years ago, not anymore); Windows 2000 made me decide I'd never run OS/2 or NT 4 as a primary OS again (although I'm now actually a UNIX guy).

Next up is putting on a copy of Linux now that the mwave card is out.

You know, it's funny. So many people have had issues with the Mwave, but I never did. Mine always worked perfectly, despite the bad press, sounding great on games and playing music CDs. I guess I was one of the lucky ones. Best of luck getting your's back to full fidelity.

Same here, I've never had any issues with the Mwave on either Windows for Workgroups 3.11 (755CX) or 98SE (765D) (I did have a faulty Mwave card in one of my 755CXs but replaced it)

aptivaboy wrote:You know, it's funny. So many people have had issues with the Mwave, but I never did. Mine always worked perfectly, despite the bad press, sounding great on games and playing music CDs. I guess I was one of the lucky ones. Best of luck getting your's back to full fidelity.

My 760ED's MWave synth sounds alright as well, although I've yet to really put it through its paces with soundblaster emulation.