I've said a few times to some of my friends that I always wanted to have an old laptop to mess around with and do cool random stuff on, preferably a ThinkPad, since they are very reliable and upgradeable. For a while though, I didn't have a lot of luck finding one (for a cheap price, or at all), so I didn't think much of it since I knew I wasn't going to use it much anyways. But that changed in early December, when I stumbled across a ThinkPad T41 at Value Village, and with a 20% coupon, I only got it for around 24 dollars. The part with me not using the laptop much at all didn't change though.
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When I got the laptop, it didn't come with a charging cable, so I had to order one, which took a few days. In the meantime though, it gave me time to look at the condition of the laptop. Overall, it was pretty good! There were some minor things, like a crack in the frame where the mouse was, but besides that, it was in really good condition. It was also missing half the feet, which, thanks to my new Bambu Labs A1 I just bought, I was able to recreate by measuring what remained of the old feet and recreated the feet in FreeCAD, then printed out with TPU, which works really well! (click here to get to the post where the STL files are linked if you want them!)
I didn't want to crack open the laptop yet, in case I messed something up and then I wouldn't know if the laptop was broken because of me or if it was already broken. But after a few days, I finally got the cable and tested the laptop.
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The laptop booted, but oddly, it took a few minutes for the BIOS to finish loading and boot into the OS. I thought initially that it was a hard drive issue, since this laptop was 20 years old at this point, but it turned out to be a CMOS issue for some reason. I guess the old cell battery was dead, and it caused the BIOS to hang for a long time before booting.
Once it did finally boot though, it loaded into Windows 7, which is a really odd choice of OS for this laptop, considering its age and specs (which I'll get to in a second). Whoever owned this before was trying to game on it, I'm guessing with terrible results.
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Once I checked the specs for this laptop, I was a bit surprised. This laptop had 2GB of DDR RAM inside of it, which was the maximum this laptop supported and, as far as I know, wasn't a configuration provided by IBM, so whoever owned this laptop before had already given it some upgrades. Later on, I did open up the laptop, and sure enough, more hardware was upgraded.
The storage I thought was a dying hard drive turned out to be a 64GB PATA SSD from KingSpec, and the WiFi and Bluetooth modules were not stock either, I didn't look at the Bluetooth much, but the WiFi module showed that it supported 5Ghz connections, which I'm pretty sure wasn't a thing in 2003 when this model released. And considering what I saw from a couple of system config checks on Windows and Linux, I think the CPU was also upgraded to the max and the GPU is the highest performance variant provided by IBM. Someone already did my job of kitting out the laptop with upgrades, which was pretty nice since it saves me money, but also leaves less for me to do with it haha.
Jumping back to the Windows 7 install, shortly after looking through the install, I wiped it and replaced it with Windows XP, which I also tinkered with briefly before installing Void Linux alongside it.
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The Void Linux install was annoying for me, since the installer itself didn't work properly and I had to do some of the installation work manually, which eventually worked, but I didn't like using xbps as the package manager, and it crapped out on me eventually, which led me to wiping Void Linux and installing Debian 12, along with the i3 window manager, which worked a lot better for me, since it was more consistently stable and I was more used to Debian's conventions instead of Arch.
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I installed Firefox and did some optimizations to make it run somewhat smoother (not enough for normal web browsing, but enough for some tinkering with stuff like my website). I also tried DVD playback, which sadly didn't work because I think the DVD laser died while I was working on the laptop, since I had tested it in Void Linux and XP prior and it worked, so I don't know how it died, but it did. CD playback still works though, so I can listen to my CD collection :)
And that's where I'm at now. I want to experiment more with the laptop, but sadly, school has started for me, and alongside work also starting for me again after having a week break from it, I don't have a lot of time for this laptop nowadays. I'm not too bummed out about it, since I wouldn't have much else to do with it anyways, but I do want to try a couple of things with it.
1. Running games on it, both on Linux and Windows.
The main thing I like having with this laptop is that if I need to run older software, I can now do it without setting up Wine on my PC, or using an emulator like PCem or DOSBox, I can just do it on this laptop. I want to try running some older games, like Unreal and Half-Life, but also more obscure games, like some Japanese VNs, and all that. It might be better to have a desktop for that, since I can better upgrade it and it generally has less risk of hardware failure, like maybe the laptop screen can die, or the battery blows up, or something. But desktops are huge, so I will stick with this setup, since it works well for my cramped setup.
2. Writing and website work
I would like to try setting up a workflow that enables me to also use the T41 as a writing device for my website, not really for the purpose of productivity, but because it's cool. I like doing stupid shit like that. So it would be fun to use it for that.
3. Maybe writing cool software?
This is more farfetched, but as I'm also working on getting my degree in Computer Engineering right now, I would also like to try writing software for older machines and hardware. I want to get into writing homebrew for consoles, but I also would like to write programs optimized for old machines. Why? Because again, it's cool. There's no practical reason, other than I just want to. But this reason is a HUGE maybe, since I'm not smart or committed enough to write software. So we'll see.
Anyways, not much else for me to say here, just wanted to talk about my new laptop, so yeah. Thanks for reading :)