Thinkpads Forum

Hi, new to these forums, thanks ahead of time for your help.

I found an old IBM Thinkpad 390E in my company's electronics recycling pile, and grabbed it to see if I could put it to use. I would like to use it for wireless web access at hot spots, word processing while at home in bed or on the porch, and learning Linux OS. Is it possible to use and/or upgrade this machine for these uses? Sorry, I am computer literate in general, but the line is drawn at hardware issues like this for me.

-- can anyone tell me what the minimum hardware, memory, etc I would need to do this would be? Or what you would recommend me trying to get?

-- Or if the age of this laptop would be a red flag in that it would just not be worth trying this on.

-- It turns on and runs fine, but is slow, especially the start-up, so are there ways to increase the speed of that as well?

Thanks for your time. - franklen

The 390E should be perfect for your use.

Since you don't state WHICH 390E you have... the CPU could be a Celeron 300MHz on the low end to a PII 333MHz or Celeron 366 on the high end.

You can have 256MB RAM for sure, and maybe 512MB.

You've got an adequate video chip (NeoMagic 256AV, same as the 600E) and 2.5MB video memory. Enough for 24-bit color at 1024x768.

The bottlenecks (as always) are CPU, memory, disk and network.

If you want this machine to perform at its best, I would recommend you get some memory. 256MB would be a great start for a modern Linux distribution.

Also go get a faster hard drive. Any new drive (up to 128GB) will work fine, and it will be MUCH faster and MUCH less noisy than its original drive. If you want to go cheap/used, at least get a drive with Fluid Drive Bearings. Very quiet and available down to 20GB. They use less power and should last longer. And drive RPM DOES make a difference. 4200, 5400, 7200RPM are all available, all will work.

I recommend a CardBus WiFi card, whether you get 802.11b, g, a or any combination. It will take less of your CPU. Be sure to get a card that's well-supported under Linux.

Go get Knoppix (www.knopper.net) and boot it. It will detect nearly all your hardware automatically. But it's not meant to be installed.

I've always used Red Hat and derivatives, so I use Fedora on my machines. It found all my 600E and 600X hardware flawlessly. Mandrake, Ubuntu are two other highly praised distributions. Ask on the Linux forum for suggestions.

And as for surfing on the porch or in bed, you can put two batteries in that machine and go for hours.

I found an old IBM Thinkpad 390E in my company's electronics recycling pile, and grabbed it to see if I could put it to use. I would like to use it for wireless web access at hot spots, word processing while at home in bed or on the porch, and learning Linux OS. Is it possible to use and/or upgrade this machine for these uses? Sorry, I am computer literate in general, but the line is drawn at hardware issues like this for me.

-- can anyone tell me what the minimum hardware, memory, etc I would need to do this would be? Or what you would recommend me trying to get?

Hi there,

I wouldn't call this old - it's more than adequate. You'll be able to configure your GNU/Linux distribution to use as much or as little of your hardware resources as you wish.

CPU speed is never a problem - I use my 486s and early Macs for all sorts of apps, it's memory you need. At least if you want to run intensive graphical applications. However there is always an alternative with less hunger for system resources.

Two of my kids have Thinkpads - a 760e with a P120 and 48MB RAM, and a 560 with P133 and 40MB RAM - they're fine for coding, writing, email, browsing with elinks or Dillo, many games and most other tasks :-)

But max out your RAM (256 on the 390?) and you'll have the choice of running badly-coded resource hogs too =o)

btw for best advice contact your local LUG for more opinions on what to run than you'll ever want to hear ;-)

- Richard