Go Retro! IBM ThinkPad T60

[TPFanatic]

I could have taken this photo in 2007, or 2002, given that a T60 serves the same basic appearance as a 600. Essentially this build aims to reincarnate a snapshot of my childhood, the part with IBM ThinkPads, Windows XP, and the Internet.

Thinkpad T60 type 2007
T7400
X1400
3GB
UXGA (B-grade harvested from T42p)
Windows 7 Ultimate x64 cleverly disguised as XP
lubricated fan
spinning rust for authenticity. once I start pulling out my hair at the I/O speed rivaling a 20 year old USB stick, I'll relive my first SSD upgrade.

Admittedly I've been sitting on a small triad of T60s that were kindly gifted to me years ago. They had the mid-tier Yonah Core Duos and LG Philips SXGAs, showing their age with rattling fans and dead bios batteries. Regrettably I never gave them the love and attention they deserve as the final 15" laptops to grace this Earth. That is, until recent occurrings have catalyzed me to finally give the lot of them a serious refurbish with Core 2s and WD-40 (the lube version).

Plan is to try VxKex to install Firefox (insert latest version here), not that 115 ESR is incompetent, it's already a pleasant experience trowling reddit or forums or BBC news. Also will take a serious look at Flashpoint. Otherwise my standard practice is to load up the old games and play old DVDs.

[dr_st]

A T60 is still one of my favorite systems. I have a similar, near-stock T7200/X1400/SXGA+. Upgraded to 3GB RAM and a 320GB 7200RPM drive. That one runs XP, because it's almost the only XP system left in my home. I use it to test old games and software here and there.

[TPFanatic]

vxkex was unreliable at tricking programs to install, when i got FF 124.0.2 installed it didn't work due to 7 missing some metro ui dlls. So im sticking with ESR for now, still viable for awhile.

Also did the SSD upgrade since that hard drive was slow as hell. I could tolerate it back in XP days and a fresh install of 7 seems decent enough, but any serious utilization and saturation of storage especially fragmentation just wrecks performance.

Actually finding the T60 decent for my casual personal computing entertainment, hardly worse than T61/R61, nowadays with 8GB DDR2 still expensive and of hardly any meaningful use when the primary bottleneck is CPU, I now favor T60. Especially with UXGA. NVME storage can be added through the expresscard slot and i believe the WWAN slot can be repurposed as a USB port. But not really feeling a need to trick out the machine further, the basics are always good enough.