My newest 600E

[rkawakami]

I'm cursed! I can't pass up a good deal on eBay . After spending many months in the T23 world, I've returned to the 600 series one more time:

366Mhz 600E (for $30 shipped!)

Ran across this system a couple of days ago. I figured that not too many people would find it because it was advertised as a "690E". I also took a chance that it had a simple problem; I lucked out. The system was not locked but merely suffers from a broken trackpoint (8611 boot error). Disabling the trackpoint from within BIOS, the system appears to boot from both floppy and CDROM without any problems. Hopefully in a couple of days I can get around to swapping/cloning my very first Thinkpad (the 600E in my .sig) and making sure this new 600E can boot from a hard drive. The LCD has a pinkish tint to it when first activated but at least it turns on! My first 600E still has the delayed turn-on of the backlight and a dead column of pixels, which is the main reason why I bought this one. I wanted a system that I could compare with mine to see if I could track down the problem or to use as spare parts.

The laptop came almost entirely stripped down. It has a CDROM drive and hard drive caddy, but no hard drive, floppy, power supply or memory modules. Just recently I sold off all of the PC66/PC100 modules I had around for ages; didn't think I'd need them anymore! I went through my inventory of loose PC133 modules before I found one that works in the 600E. It now has a 128MB low-density PC133 CL3 Infineon module that appears to run just fine with the on-board 32MB.

So, I guess maybe I have to go back to fishing at the eBay pond and see if I can snag a cheap 600E/X keyboard. Poked around there tonight, but most of them cost as much as, if not MORE than the $30 I spent on the laptop! Hopefully I can also put a 400Mhz processor in there without too much fiddling around and make it a clone of my original 600E.

[dsigma6]

Picture Philly fans after their team loses again...
BOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!



I kid, I kid. I guess for the price you can't go wrong. I've been thinking about where I was in the ThinkPad world just shy of one year ago- I can't believe I got by on a 600E! Granted it's one of the best built laptops ever, I could never see myself using one again.

Did the T23 sales fall through and now you're hoping to sell 600E's for $300?

I hope you enjoy your 690E, Ray!

[rkawakami]

Did the T23 sales fall through and now you're hoping to sell 600E's for $300?

LOL! Maybe if I can keep it for another 15 or 20 years and then sell it as an antique! No to the T23 sales falling through; I haven't been able to spend any time with them since my workload has increased and my shipment of eight Ultrabay 2000 hard drive adapters has apparently gone bust. The eBay seller is now NRU (not a registered user) and my two emails asking for shipping status has gone unanswered. Time to start the agonizing process of getting a refund...

[pianowizard]

The eBay seller is now NRU (not a registered user) and my two emails asking for shipping status has gone unanswered. Time to start the agonizing process of getting a refund...

If you paid with CC-funded PayPal, you should be able to recover all the money.

[dsigma6]

Get those T23's out in full force for the last-minute gifts to be expected by the 25th. Offer overnight shipping, non-DOA (which you'd do anyway, I'm sure), and I don't think the lack of 2nd HD adapters will make a difference.

Best of luck getting your money back from that seller...

[rkawakami]

It's looking more and more that I'm going to be offering up the three 2647-4NUs as custom builds instead of the full-blown package I initially conceived.

Getting back to 600E #2, I've cloned off the drive from my daughter's old system onto one of the "pathetic" 6GB drives I got with the 4NUs, installed it into the new system and it boots just fine. The PCMCIA bottom slot works (brought over the wireless card from the old system) and the PS/2 mouse port work as well (since the Trackpoint is dead). All and all, not a bad deal for $30. Yeah it's got a pinkish screen at turn on and it only has a 366Mhz CPU, but now I can start playing with an external PCMCIA CDROM drive I got a few months back and see if it still works (once the power supply arrives). Also got to look through all of the T23s to see if I can find another 128MB low density module. I had just sold all of my old PC66/PC100 modules a few weeks ago!