RetroTour: Let's Explore: IBM Thinkpad T30 Pentium 4M Laptop!

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[RetroTechChris]

Here's another one from the archive, guys! A little retro tour of a Thinkpad T30 that I made back in... November I think? Anyway, forgive the video technique regression, from here on out, I am putting videos on the channel in the order I MAKE THEM (well, with one exception, but THAT'S IT!!), so hopefully they only get "better." As always, thanks for stopping by and having a watch!

[temporarilyoffline]

That 3rd blue button for the trackpoint was THE KILLER FEATURE... nothing else worked as well for daily driving... until multi-touch pads. Still prefer a mouse for serious "business"

[tss]

The IBA slot entry in the boot menu stands for Intel Boot Agent. IBA is the network booting firmware on Intel NICs.

[molivil]

Thanks to an active hacker community around the IBM ThinkPads, unauthorized HDD + 1802 unauthorized network card issues have all been fixed with a custom firmware. I've applied this on all my ThinkPad X41's, so they shouldn't give whitelisting errors on boot even if the CMOS battery runs out. But I've also changed the CMOS batteries on all my X40's and X41's. The ones my laptops use are the thinner CR2016 batteries. They're still occasionally sold on eBay. I buy a couple every time I see them pop up. I buy the ready-made batteries, I think they were only like 5-7 bucks a pop.

[georgemaragos]

Hi Chris

Nice machine, i never owned or used a thinkpad, but a few friends had them, not quite tanks but sturdy and well built, the only complaint was the price and they flatten the battery overnight even in sleep mode, i think the 1995-1997 era the cmos clock or sound card drained it

When i do fresh OS installs on theis era of machines, if they have legacy drives or ports i install dos 6.22 on 2G partition, and leave the rest of the drive un-partitioned, that way XP will auto use the unformated and use that and enable the XP dual boot on start up

I notice you had XP SP2 the 1Gig ram would be marginal, the machines i have on that era with 1Gig or less runs the original or SP1 version XP, 1.5G is the next step up for SP2 and fully loaded 2G or up to 3g or 2.5 usable is the SP3

Anyway the P2>Celerons are used for period games one had office 95 the other office 97

Funny how every second windows version is Ok and the one in between so-so

Regards
George

[ted-b]

Nice one Chris! I've a soft spot for the old Thinkpads. I've got an old R50e which I bought new in 2003 or 4. It has a Pentium - M 1.8 GHz chip in it, running XP Pro. The battery still holds a charge and the cmos battery still does too! Keep up the good work and thanks.

[retropcdurham]

I just got my hands on a T30 that I need to do some work on. It currently won't post so I have some troubleshooting to do!

[excalibur]

I too, have a ThinkPad T-30 which hasn't been turned on in years. I recently had to dig it out to run a legal program that wouldn't even run in newer versions of Windows. So I had to use the T-30 to install the software to create some legal documents. The keyboard has spoiled me for life. I've been using an Acer Aspire for years now that also has a wonderful keyboard. I don't know who changed the design of the keyboards, but I absolutely hate these individual, separated keys on modern laptops.Of course, I'm old and learned how to type in high school on IBM selectric electric typewriters! That being said, I finally decided to upgrade, as I have been resisting the purge to Windows 10 and eleven. I actually drew the line at Windows 8 with that ridiculous cartoon interface. I ordered me an MSI gaming laptop last night. I'm not a gamer, but I have the need for speed.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane. I actually came her to watch how to replace the CMOS battery. It's in the memory compartment, but the connector is under the case, so sadly it can't be removed without taking of the keyboard.

[knightcrusader]

Oh yeah it wasn't until Lenovo that they got Windows keys... IBM was not bowing down to them.

[Henk]

My E540 still has that annoying network card approved list, to my knowledge only thinkpads do this and it prevents me from getting more stable network adapters in the system. But oh well, at least its a good laptop.

[eDoc]

The T30 was my first exposure to ThinkPads. But you forgot to mention the (IMO) best feature: the ThinkLight!

Rather than share every little story I'll just say that I'm now the proud owner of an X31 with 2GB of RAM and a perfect battery. It's pretty much the same design as the T30 but it's smaller and has one small but notable difference: when you slide the latch to open the screen it stays in place until you actually open the screen. Opening the T30 with one hand was a bit of a juggling act as you'd need to get both latches pulled at the same time. Unfortunately my X31 went totally dead but I was able to revive it, I made a video of that on my channel.

And one last thing, there's a great mirror of the drivers site which is more complete than what's left on Lenovo's site:
I'm mentioning this because they have the missing UltraNav (touchpad) driver that you couldn't find.