Bringing new life to my old X40 Thinkpad

[CometCKO]

I wanted to sing the praises of my rejuvinated X40. I bought mine new over eight years ago. Even though I've had three Thinkpads since then (x61, x201, x220), the old X40 was one of my favorites. I just like the keyboard better and the tall screen (especially compared to the wide-but-short x220). I appreciate the lack of a trackpad too. It's just a joy to type on.

But mine has traveled all around the world and taken a beating. So it was time to do a little refreshment. First, I was able to source a brand new IBM keyboard from China via eBay. That makes everything a lot crisper. Mine was missing occasionally on the space bar and I was occasionally getting repeating characters on the "i" and "a" keys, plus the escape key cap was missing. All that is fixed with the new keyboard.

Second, I replaced the wireless card with an Atheros-based TP-Link TL-WN861N card, which gives me 802.11n speed for a nice improvement. I did have to do the "no 1802 error" patch, which involved burning the mod to a CD-R and running it on an external drive. I found wireless card drivers on the net and they seemed to work without a problem, although I did not patch Access Connections to see the new adapter, so i use Windows to find and log onto wireless networks.

Third, and perhaps the biggest, I followed directions here to get a PATA to mSata adapter (for $15 again on eBay) and found an Intel 310 mSata drive for $113. I started by cloning my current drive onto the new drive, and checking to make certain the drive image was correctly aligned, since WinXP is notorious for starting on the wrong start bit. The clone worked perfectly and everything was much faster and more useable.

Fourth, and finally, I discovered a lightweight Linux distro (http://www.peppermintos.com) which is a true joy on the X40. I tried a few different Live CD versions and settled on Peppermint Three (Four did not run on this Pentium M CPU). I downloaded and installed Peppermint Three, which is based on Lubuntu 12.04, and is very light weight). Impressively, everything seems to work perfectly, including wireless, suspend/resume and all i/o stuff. I did not have to do ANY fiddling with patches or hardware to get things working, which was a nice surprise!

Peppermint works a lot like Windows, with a start menu, and everything. I've downloaded and installed Wine to run a couple of Windows programs that I can't live without. In fact, as a safety measure until I'm confident, I've set it up to dual-boot with Windows XP. But with Windows XP reaching the end of its support and Ubuntu 12.04 good for another three years or so of support, I'm feeling good about using my favorite Thinkpad X-series computer for another few years.

Hope this helps someone! It sure makes an old, slow computer into a joy to use! I'm lovin' it!

[Temetka]

I am really glad you got your X40 working better. I used to own an X41 Tablet and I really loved it. I also own an X61T which I also enjoy using a lot as well. One thing I have enjoyed a lot on these forums is reading stories from our members about how their machines have served them well over the years. Reading about how they spend a little bit of time and money to show the machines that have loved them, a little bit of love back. I hope you get many more years of service out of this machine.