Thinkpads Forum

I have quite a few Thinkpads that are around 20 years old.

I know plastics become brittle and battery will die eventually no matter what you do.

But what about the circuitry? I know one problem vintage electronics have is the blown caps due to age.

If I power up the old Thinkpads occasionally, oh let's say a couple of hours every 12 months or so,

would it somehow help prolonging the life of the circuitry, especially caps?

I don't have the theoretical grounding for this, but intuitively I think it's worth doing. Caps die mostly because of overheating, so powering them up occsionally should be of no harm. Another unit to fail over time is LCD. Not sure if turning it on prevents it form degrading though. Anyways I personally turn on my thinkpads(in my signature) periodically, 3-4 times a year, and had no losses so far.
And what's also very important is to keep the stuff in a dark cool dry place.

I just had to power up a 770z that had an old DOS program I needed to look at.

From February 1999.

Not super speedy but worked perfectly.

Even had the correct date and time as I changed the CMOS battery 4-5 years ago.

Took me longer to locate it than to look at what I needed.

Just lucky I guess.

Brad