Older Thinkpads

[thealphaoverseer]

Hi Everyone!
How do I install Windows 10 on older Thinkpads?

[cadillacmike68]

How old?

I have a T60 with W10, but I didn't install it. I have heard of folks putting it on a T43.

What I would do (if the machine can take W10) is have the system running with W7 or W8/8.1, go to the ms site and DL the (still) free W10 package, burn it to disc, boot it and install. OR install directly onto the HDD.

Of course I will have a back up image of the HDD prior to doing this, and preferably have the backup already restored to another HDD and verified to boot and run.

When working with your only laptop, you need to make sure you have a fallback. If you only have a single machine, you need to be careful and approach it methodically.

With a dozen or more here, I could give a rat's 4th point of contact if an install gets FUBAR'd, other than the wasted time which is still a major aggravation to me, but it won't leave me out in the lurch.

[kfzhu1229]

The oldest ThinkPads that would start up the setup of (at least some versions) of Windows 10 are the ThinkPad X41 series and T43/R52 series.
The X41 series and T43/R52 series with only the intel GMA graphics CANNOT give you a working graphics driver in Windows 8 and up though. The ATi chip in the T43/R52 series with ATI graphics only works fully with Windows 10 x86 up to 1607. 1703 and 1709 will give you unusable video playback performance and bogs the system down quite a bit more, and 1803 and later will throw you a BSOD when booting up Windows setup.
The X/T/R60 series should work with the latest 2004 version and x64 will work too only if you have a Core 2 duo CPU installed. But with the 3GB ThinkPad RAM limitation on those models x64 is not recommended.
The X/T/R61 series and later should fully work with Windows 10 2004 x86 or x64 provided you at least have the minimum requirements amount of RAM for the edition you are installing.
If you already have Windows 7 SP1 or 8.1 with Update, just run mediacreationtool on those and upgrade them to Windows 10 that way for you to get a genuine Windows 10 license. Then reinstall Windows 10 to get rid of all the bloat from a major OS upgrade (your system should activate automatically as soon as it is connected to the internet provided you are reinstalling the same edition (home or pro).

[thealphaoverseer]

Thanks for the tips. I realised it was the installation disk, not the laptop's fault. I was trying to install it on a SL410k. However, it runs both W10 and W7 ridiculously slow (with only 2GB of RAM), do you think Windows XP is a good idea before the RAM I ordered gets delivered?

[kfzhu1229]

Windows 7 and 10 32 bit should work just fine by itsel with 2gb of ram, just forget about multitasking until the ram arrives

[MikalE]

I have a Core 2 Duo E4400 Acer tower running a 32 bit copy of Win 7 with 2 GB of ram. It runs along just fine if I'm not running WX radar, You Tube videos, and have ten tabs open all at the same time.

It isn't really powerful enough to multi-task, but one program at a time runs very well on a clean system.

That tower used to be my main flight sim computer running three monitors for outside visuals and cockpit displays. It was running XP Pro back then and did a pretty good job with frame rates hovering around 30, which was really all that was needed as the eye can't distinguish anything higher than about 24 or 25 FPS.

[thealphaoverseer]

Nice. Was it Microsoft Flight Simulator? I've also tried IL2 Sturmovik, and it is amazing what computers at that time could do...