Thinkpad 730t

[hwattys]

I notice I last visited here in 2007 and it is good to be back. I had several of the 730Ts a few years back and found them to be very challenging and interesting to play with. Saw an ebay auction for 4 of them and I bit. I actually still had a old heavy iron docking station in the basement for them. I recall that to get Windows 95 running properly on them with pen and pcmcia support you need a hacked pcmcia driver. I found some old forum pages from 1999/2000 from a guy in Germany with a site tagwerks.com. That is where I recall getting the drivers. Of course the link is long dead. Any chance anybody here has the pcmcia driver? I did find Pen Services 2.0 for Windows 95 at the HP site. HP still has Windows 95 drivers posted for the Compaq Concerto, another Windows 95 pen tablet machine.

I have also recently built up 2 701Cs just for the fun of it. I think they are going to be valuable some time in the near future and the 701Cs and 730Ts are most likely to be museum pieces just for their oddity.


Hwattys

[ThinkDan]

Hi - I used to have a site up for the 730T but lost the content in a server crash. Since it was such a niche thing I relied on the Wayback Machine rather than restoring it laboriously. Backups? What backups?!

Have a look here.

Working PCMCIA drivers are available from here. I repackaged them from an IBM Japan product for the PC110, which had the same issues when booting off PCMCIA disks, and they worked a treat in the 730T.

[edit: Ooh - I also packed up drivers for Win95 to use the 730T in portrait mode. I'd forgotten that!]

Please PM me if you feel you have one 701C too many

[hwattys]

U DA MAN!!!! This looks familiar and I had given up hope. I now have 4 730T's, 3 AC adapters 2 docking stations, 1 good and 3 bad pcmcia hard drives, 4 batteries and 4 pens. I have Windows 95 working with the Pen Services 2.0, and now I can get the darn thing on the internet (to the limits of IE 5.5) and network with other computers with a pcmcia NIC. Anybody who wants anything I have over and above one complete unit is welcome to it. Thanks again!!!

[ThinkDan]

Happy to help

[richramo]

I have an old 730TE that someone gave me that I have never been able to get going as I don't have a AC adapter to go with it. Do either of you know the the FRU of the AC adapter and where to get one?

[hwattys]

It is old school; the same adapter as used by the Thinkpad 350....very early. 15v 1.3 amp P/N 66G9523 FRU P/N 84G0505. I do have an extra in addition to a couple extra 730ts still. I have never had a 730TE and would love to have one if you decide to punt on getting it working. The hard part is the pcmcia hard drive and I do have a couple of those, too but what actually works better is a pcmcia CF adapter you can buy at any camera store and then a piece of Compact Flash memory.

[richramo]

Thanks hwattys. I have an old 390X laying around so hopefully that adapter will do the trick, but I will double check.

[hwattys]

No that is different....16 volt and a smaller barrel.

[richramo]

Thanks again hwattys. Noticed that. I'll look out for one on eBay.