ThinkPad T30: Solid Retro Laptop With an Unfortunate Flaw

The ThinkPad laptop line from IBM (and later Lenovo) has gotten a lot of love over the years for being reliable and well-built. As such, they're a great option for those looking to get into retrocomputing...except for this model and its major problem.

Sources:

"IBM Sells PC Unit to Lenovo," InfoWorld, December 13, 2004.
"Introducing...Pentium 4", Maximum PC, January 2000.
"Frequency-Busting Procs from Intel and AMD!", Maximum PC, November 2001.
"Immodest Predictions for 2007," InfoWorld, December 18, 2006.
"Netburst Slinks Away," InfoWorld, July 10, 2006.
"IBM T30: The Best Business Notebook," PC Magazine, June 2002.

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[theshadowman]

A socketed CPU in a laptop. I want those times back

[John-jcty]

and after all those upgrades, right to the shelf

[digital]

Impressive fix on the RAM! I am glad you went the distance to fix it, a lot of other youtubers would have just left the slot messed up and moved on with the video.

[Fred_Raimer]

You are rapidly becoming my favorite "hands on" YouTuber, Colin! Research, history, common sense, skill, and most of all, courage to take chances. Excellent production values and very entertaining as well. Thank you for your efforts!!!!

[dreammfyre]

I will never get rid of my T43. Feels like it could survive a nuclear fallout.

[rynomuncher]

I loved how the screen bezels were so much thinner in that era compared to 2010ish era laptops. We've only just recently got back to such thin bezels!

[dogeymon]

I always love your true personality coming through in your shouts of joy over something working....in contrast with your professional narrator voice. Lol!

[wjadams]

Love the T series. Still one of the best laptop keyboards to this day. I was an IBM/ Lenovo certified tech around the T40 days and they were built so well. I still have a T420 that is such an excellent machine.

[didoriginal]

I have two of those - one with a 2.0 GHz processor and one with a 2.2 GHz. I pretty much went through the same process with both of them - no 1802 error, reflowing the RAM slots and SSD upgrades. However, keep in mind that the resoldering job that you did on yours won’t last. I initially did the same, but it took a month or so for the joints to go bad. It seems that the solder itself is not the best quality which would explain why it failed in the first place. What I did as a permanent fix was to use a lot of flux and replace the solder with a leaded one. Just make a big blob on your soldering iron and go over all pins. Don’t worry about the bridging - I managed to bridge several of the pins, but you can always go back to them with a clean tip and fix them. This permanently fixed my two T30, they are absolutely gorgeous machines. Cheers!

[amandawashington]

Hey Colin, it's Michelle. It's going good!

[fuelhemi]

Recently bought a T43, is a beautiful piece of engineering. Maybe I’ll do the SATA mod and install a SSD

[OneEightZero]

"...swapping its drive for something a little more solid..."

Pun? Denied! :D

[WubwubDJ]

Man that "no way" was so awesome. I love tech moments like this

[benkeysor]

Windows XP was an extremely good OS and I used it for a very long time even after it was no longer supported because I refused to use Vista. I'm currently using a 10 machine and I'd much rather have XP or 7 instead because they were much more user friendly. Plus I don't see anything wrong with using XP online as long as you are just doing the basics and have a good Antivirus program installed.

[jafizzle]

The bezels on that laptop are astonishingly thin for it's time. Windows XP looks quite striking on it.

[adiposerex]

I had been a speed typist and really appreciated IBM’s full TP keyboard.

[alerey]

I have a Lenovo U310 from 2013 and the blacklist bios is still present; when I installed MacOS I tried to put an iMac wifi card to no avail because of that bios lock; then I found some guy had made a replacement bios without the blacklist, flashed the Lenovo with the hacked bios and voila, it takes ANY wifi card, as it should be; thumbs up

[JDCarnin]

I've got a R500 two years ago, upgraded it to its absolute Max. It features a C2D T9900, 8Gb RAM, a SSD (120Gb (I'm more a cloud guy, so it's plenty for me)) the better Display, a Webcam, and the Fingerprint reader. Drivers are available from Win 2000 up to Win 10. It's actually my daily driver and at the moment my only PC. Got it in Dual Boot with Windows 10 and XP. In Windows 10 it's not much slower than the Laptop from my little Sister (it's a cheap one for around 300 Bucks but mine was significantly cheaper) and in Windows XP it's blazingly fast. I'm from Germany, used Thinkpads tend to be a bit more expensive here. I paid 83 Bucks for the Machine itself, 40 Bucks for the CPU, 10 for the RAM and the rest was already built in or already in my drawer. Got it with a activated Copy of Win 10 Pro on it, I was very glad about this, so I could disable the annoying lock screen in the group policy's. I also paid tribute to it's roots and got the XP Standard Background (in German "Grüne Idylle" ) and I made a modified Welcome Screen from XP so that it says Windows 10 instead. For it's age of now 12 years it's in flawless condition and was extremely clean inside, as if it was never used. Later I found out the Macine was from the Technical University of Braunschweig and was used in the Clean Room, so that explained the extreme cleanliness of it...

[yoshiguy]

When he said Among, that really proved that I've lost my mind.

[RustyX]

It’s so weird that the prices for this laptop all of a sudden skyrocketed from $50 to upwards of $300 on eBay after videos like this!