Thinkpads Forum

And I've been married with children, so the whining must be annoying...

Has anyone ever done a fan upgrade or otherwise fixed the 380z's whine?

I've never replaced the fan in a 380Z, but if you follow the maintenance manual you should be ok.

http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... XXPB9.html

Thank you, HarryC.

I have realized that it is in fact the *hard disk* that is whining so loudly. Scary!

For them as what may be interested...

I replaced the whiny old 20 GB IBM Travelstar disk with a newer 30 GB Fujitsu disk. For the 380z, the first partition must be no larger than 8 GB. As others in this forum have said, there is no limit to the size of disk otherwise. The whining was entirely caused by the old hard disk.

I used the minimal Ubuntu ISO to install the 8.04 base system, then built a light-weight Gnome environment by installing select packages. Like any Thinkpads I know, this one has a great keyboard and a nice screen and I didn't want to see the notebook go to waste. Now I have an Ubuntu environment that uses 80-100 MB when Firefox is running, the notebook is quiet, and the OS is powerful.

If you're going to try what I've done, increase the RAM to the 160 MB maximum. You can still get a battery for this Thinkpad but I don't recommend it. I keep my 380z docked -- the docking station provides an Ethernet port.

With enough RAM, a larger disk, and Linux, the 380z is still a viable little box. (o:

Thanks for the follow up Cogitordi! Glad it's fixed and happy. Your right about these little boxes being viable, I carry mine on my long cross country motorcycle trips.