whoah whoah woah hold the phone

[Casperb]

I've done a fresh install of windows on my T30. In this forum I've seen quotes that Diablo 2 is 'trivial' to a T30, and that Warcraft III and even Counter Strike Source can be managed on low settings

Well, Diablo II won't even run. It gives error 22: A critical error has occured while initializing directdraw.

I've tried looking for a video driver (http://www-307.ibm.com/pc/support/site. ... MIGR-41918) Is this the right one? I haven't had any luck installing it, could someone maybe give me a short walkthrough?

I picked up this T30 for $20 from a friend.
236686U
IBM ThinkPad T30
2.0 GHz pentium 4
512 mb ram

[Neil]

Welcome to the forum.

Yes, you found the correct driver. However, when you run the downloaded .exe, it will created a directory in the "drivers" directory, but it does not install the driver. Go into the drivers folder and find video, and run set-up to install the driver.

Even with the driver installed, a T30 just doesn't have much gaming power, but should be much better than with no gfx acceleration.

[Casperb]

Which setup? there's many setup .exe's in here.

C:\DRIVERS\WIN\DISPLAY\issetup.exe
results in "Windows could not complete the installation. Try to setup your display adapter with a standard VGA driver"

C:\DRIVERS\WIN\DISPLAY\cpanel\setup.exe
C:\DRIVERS\WIN\DISPLAY\FGLmax\...
C:\DRIVERS\WIN\DISPLAY\phildec\...
C:\DRIVERS\WIN\DISPLAY\driver\...

None of them seem to be working?

And thank you kindly for the welcome.

[Neil]

Here are the instructions from the Lenovo Support page:

Manual Install

1. Start Windows 2000/XP and logon with administrative privileges.
2. Extract the video drivers to the hard disk drive.
Driver package is extracted into C:\DRIVERS\WIN\DISPLAY.
3. Click Start, then click Run.
4. In the Run dialog window, type C:\DRIVERS\WIN\DISPLAY\SETUP.EXE
to install the video driver. Click OK to start the installation
process. If you extracted the files to a different location,
specify that location instead.
5. When the Welcome window appears, click Next.
6. At the Software Licence Agreement screen, if you agree, click Yes.
7. At the Select Components screen, click Express.
8. At the Setup Complete screen, select Ye

[jronald]

I believe George turned me on to these a few years ago:
http://www.omegadrivers.net/index.php?o ... Itemid=125
These are specially tweaked drivers to get the last once out of the video card. However.....The T30 is NOT a power house.

For gaming I would try the following:
At least a 2.0gig CPU
Max the ram at 2 gigs, and use 2700 or 3200 speed
Lock the CPU on max speed
Make sure you have a decent battery, and run on AC power when gaming
Use the vented wireless cover
http://cgi.ebay.com/WIRELESS-CARD-COVER ... 562a66cb3b
Use the dimpled memory cover
http://cgi.ebay.com/NEW-IBM-Thinkpad-T3 ... 3cb04e5520

Your are still going to be pushing it!
YMMV
Ron

[Casperb]

Awesome, thanks guys!

Some drivers from a failed installation were interfering so I decided to reformat again, now it updated beautifully.

I'm not too interested in upgrading this PC as it was only a $20 investment. Possibly just a ram upgrade but only if my gramps has some extra DDR lying around.