Could this ThinkPad netbook actually be GOOD at retro gaming? 

If you're wondering why the laptop still looks dirty after cleaning it - it's the paper towels. Whenever you wipe something down with paper towels, it leaves a lot of white paper fibers behind and it generally looks bad with a black computer or a black screen. Get yourself a couple of soft automotive microfiber cloths (they're like $5 for a six pack at autozone) and, once the windex has dried lightly brush the surface with a dry cloth to remove all the paper fibers. It's probably not super important to get your electronics "camera ready" for day-to-day use, but boy is it distracting on an all-black Thinkpad.

One thing I loved about the Trackpoint (the red eraser-head looking pointing device) on Thinkpads is that a touch typist can keep their fingers on the home keys while moving the on-screen mouse pointer. Very good for writers and command line nerds like me.

I have an almost identical model (X120e) True story, I coated all the electronics inside with wax and dielectric grease so I could use it in rain and snow. The idea being I could use it when it to look up issues, guides, and parts, when working on cars and trucks broke down in bad weather. But as TDNC said, I found it was mostly good for writing. So now I just write children's stories on it.

9:06 The fact that Lenovo provided DOS drivers for the X100e is amazing for a laptop that new, and it is even more amazing that they are still hosting the drivers for it today!

The thinkpads of old are like the best case for how linux can revive old hardware

I saw the video thumbnail and immediately knew what was being featured. I was also reminded of the ThinkPad Mini 10, which was a cost-reduced version of the X100e made specifically for schools in NSW in Australia as part of a student laptop programme they had in around 2010 or so (if i recall correctly).

I picked one of these up from a computer recycling center in Knoxville and was impressed with how well it handled, if a little hot. Performance on these is uh, a little low, but for basic tasks that make use of its amazing keyboard this ThinkPad offers a blissful experience!

I have some models that still have IBM and Lenovo logos together on system. Don't see those to often. Love the feel of a IBM, definitely something special. If you know you know. 😊 Thx for sharing.

I recently got a ThinkPad X220 from the carboot for £28 (knocked down from £35) and I absolutely love it, I stripped the entire thing, cleaned it very thoroughly, rebuilt the entire keyboard after scrubbing each key (it took me 6 hours to rebuild the keyboard and clean it), it's basically brand new and I absolutely love it, I go to grab my X220 with Debian KDE on it now instead of my ThinkPad X1 Extreme Gen 2 whenever I go anywhere lol. :)

Kinda wish the Netbook form factor would make a big comeback.

If you dont already have one, you might consider creating an XP installer with AHCI drivers slipstreamed in.

the X100 is the black sheep of the Thinkpad X series. If you really want a small, retro laptop, the X60 or X61 are great options. They are light, battery lasts forever, and they have that classic 4x3 aspect ratio on the screen. If you want to move into some retro widescreen, the X200 is a good option. Both have Intel Core2Duo processors so they blow the single core Athlon out of the water. I have an X61, X200, and X201 Tablet, and they are all solid machines, although my X61 is still my favorite.

Love this channel! Great content, and it's like a Time Machine back to the 80's, 90's, and early 2,000's, my wheelhouse.

My main laptop is an X230T with 2x 8Gb 1866Mhz, a motherboard modded with an i7 3615QE (4 cores with HT) and a 2Tb 870EVO. Still doing great, love this little beast

Well shoot I went and got one of these from eBay. Should be a blast for some XP gaming on the go and a nice addition to my small Thinkpad collection. Another awesome video as always Colin! Also big congrats on getting your DayStar working. What an absolute UNIT!

I always look forward to hearing your intro

Thank you this video! It's very similar to my Lenovo IdeaPad s12 which is used a lot in 2010. Back in a days it used to be pretty reasonable machine, considering it's size and weight. but mine has Intel Atom with Intel GMA 950 graphics and Windows 7. it was enough for minor Photoshop work and 720p video playback via player, but it really struggled with even 480p videos on RU-vid. Overall it was really cool to have small, lightweight machine for that time.

Very controversial laptop among the ThinkPad crowd when it was released: AMD cpu, chiclet keys, no soft touch (even came in red or white), no thinklight, no rollcage, crap battery life. If they had named it the ThinkPad Edge 11, it would have been okay. But giving it the "X-series" honors ruffled some feathers. Bought mine new in May2010 - dual core Neo X2. Still use it for some retro gaming in Win7. My dual core L625 benchmarks about the same as my old TP X60s (1.66GHz Core Duo), but runs a lot hotter and a lot less battery life. Dual core was a cheap BTO option at the time, but the "e" was for education and most of these went to schools with the lowly MV-40.

I love this kind of video. Do another one with newer model lik x230 or even t460

Thanks for the vid! Looking for a laptop for both use cases. Along with its size. Makes it attractive.

Oh! I remember these from school! We used to go to a large locker and get these for class sometimes!

Interesting that you mentioned the usecase for writing. I recently was looking for a compact device of this caliber for around this exact price point with this usecase in mind. I have settled for now on a slightly outdated 2n1 dell chromebook, but I can't deny that the keyboard on this model would've proved for a far superior typing experience. It's a bit of a shame that the CPU on this was so underpowered even for the time I'd say being single core. Otherwise it would have aged perfectly well. I do kind of like the idea that it makes things distraction free, but that also proves problematic if you have to do a lot of researching on your projects. Really awesome video!

I'm currently overhauling my Mini10 (a cheap-ass version of the x100e, made for Australian school students in 2009) to be my university laptop. It's 14 years old and still runs. It now has (or will have once I am finished tinkering) 5 USB2 ports, HDMI, VGA, SD Card, fingerprint scanner, backlit keyboard, external wifi antenna, an internal USB3, 16gb RAM, 500GB mini SATA, a second heatsink system and microfan, a new IPS screen, and upgraded speakers. I have the CPU from the higher-spec x120e in it, so it's a little snappier than the original. The additional heatsink got over the biggest problem, which was always thermal throttling. I modded the case pretty heavily to allow for more airflow, including using shims made from another x100e case to make the bottom half of the shell ever so slightly deeper. I also removed the bezel from where the speakers originally sat and made that area the same thickness as the rest of the case, again, for a little more space. The laptop now rests on some 3d-printed folding legs for airflow. The internals corners and back of the screen have been re-enforced with some aluminium sheet. It's incredible what you can do with old netbooks. The form factor is unbeatable for people like me who are constantly on the move. It will never be a gaming or video-editing beast. That's not the intention. Its purpose is reliability, portability, and usability.

I've got a few older thinkpads this year, aT40 and an x40 used but very slightly, and then an a22m and a t42 brand new in plastic. Have been doing some Tiberian Sun and quake iii LANs with them. Fun old systems.

I personally own an X120e with similar specs, and I'm glad I as I heard those have an overheating problem. I'm also a small laptop/netbook enjoyer, so I'm glad to see another video on a tiny laptop. Also, fun fact about mine: when I got it, someone had already put 8GB in it, which was a nice surprise.

i used this for grad school and travel abroad, it was an excellent device back then

I recently picked up a Thinkpad T20. I replaced the HDD with an SSD I got off of eBay since I don't trust the old HDD. It has a PS/2 mouse connector and Soundblaster support for which I found the DOS drivers. It's makes a great pure DOS machine as well as a Windows 98 machine. I can even use the parallel port with something like SNESKey so I can use console controllers - just had to make an adapter.

Great video. 🙂I have one and love it.its small very portable and runs windows 7 like a champ. Great find.

I had this MV-40 configuration in an MSI Wind U230, that also had a spare mPCI-e slot which had all the lanes present instead of just USB as it could be specced from factory with an Avermedia TV card. I used to play Fallout 3 on it with some heavy graphical concessions, it also ran Far Cry 2 pretty well, I also overclocked it and yes it did get pretty hot! I actually added the TV card (and aerial cable which had a cutout on the shell) later, then a Broadcom Crystal HD decoder, then a dual Micro SD adapter and finally a USB adapter card to that spare mPCI-e slot.

It will not stress the hinges so much on your laptops if you open the lid from the middle of the screen instead of the edges. Only a tip for those older laptops with fragile hinges and it will make newer hinges last longer too. ☺

I got one of these years ago, still have it, runs fine with Debian and a light window manager. It's now a good emulation machine with Retroarch!

I love that you did this video as I've got a Thinkpad L520 (15.6" 1366x768, 720p camera, Core i5 2520M, 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3-1333MT/s) that I've upgraded from the original HDD to a 2TB Crucial BX500 and soon will boost to 16GB (2x8GB) DDR3-1600MT/s ($41 AUD, it's cheaper than finding a 16GB kit of DDR3-1333MT/s) that I bought new back in 2011. It is currently dual-booting Win7 Ultimate x64 and Zorin-OS 16.3, and is still fairly snappy if only limited by the 8GB of RAM (hence the upgrade to 16GB) with about half of it going to my Minecraft Beta 1.7.3 modpack (Mango Pack) install and that causing Zorin-OS to use the Swap file a lot.

ram and CPU always hold these retro builds back. Even with 8 gigs of ram, half of that will be used by the browser nowadays. You're either browsing the web, or doing something else, never both. And you can forget watching video while doing other stuff. Also for systems like this i think a light Linux distro such as Lubuntu or Puppy Linux would be better. Linux Mint is heavy for something this old.

This laptop got me through college :-) I also finished Starcraft II with it and spent a summer using it to scan and restore all my old family photos.

Loved the x100, this was an amazing workhorse

I have one of these that I picked up a few years ago. I really like the machine and it runs well with Haiku os. I like the form factor, if they made this same model with new hardware, I would buy it.

I think a custom Windows 10 stripped down will do the job, and/or Linux antiX and Linux Lubuntu are a lightweight OS's

Its very cool colin, you should do a video on hp elitebook g3 and g4!

I recently picked up a ThinkPad 11e (1st gen) which was apparently a rugged small laptop for students. 8G RAM and Debian and it's a fantastic netbook. One of the best keyboards I've used on such a small machine, I love typing on it. Screen viewing angles are a bit crap tho.

I have a think pad T470 as a bedroom pc. I am watching this on it!

Viewers! Do not overlook the x120e. It's physically identical -- same body, display, great keyboard, etc., just with a newer AMD SoC, the dual core AMD E-350 with HD 6310 graphics. It's essentially the same exact laptop, just now capable of running things like Windows 10. I had the X100e in the video for years before upgrading to the x120e, which is so great I still use it to this day. I mainly use it for light digital audio work in Renoise and making retro alien landscape style art with Bryce 3D. In my opinion, best netbook ever made!!! :D

I had a rare X100 in bright red with an AMD Neo CPU. It ran hot but did a great job as an internet and photo offloading tool overseas. I wish they did this form factor again.

I would have expected a bit more testing on MS-DOS compatibility. You mention win 9x family (ME included), so dos games are a thing. Does commander keen have issues with graphics? How's the SB compatibility in dos? Does bios allow using USB mice/keyboards under dos?

Ooh that brings me back! that was my first laptop, it worked very well with windows XP for me, I used to play a lot of Minecraft on it, which ran well, but only if you had one of those cooling pads on it lol, otherwise it'd just overheat and shut off for older games like GTA Vice City and SA it ran quite well too

I remember having a lenovo netbook for a while but I completely forget the name, or the year haha. I guess a generation or 2 after this and not their thinkpad. It came with 8gig ram, 512gb hdd and athlon.. something, with integrated gpu and 16:9 screen running vista 64 at a decent price, I loved it and it was great for emulation, I wish that I could remember the model number. I honestly wish that I could remember more but I only had it for 3 months I guess before giving it to my sister and nephews.

I had a MSI netbook with a AMD e-350 dual core APU and it was great, olso powerful graphics performance. It could run GTA SA and more old 2005 games fine. Although with windows 7.

Very cool!

I’ve used the newer X120e for several years, upgraded all the way to Windows 10. While it’s small, it’s also quite heavy for its size.

I've just refurbished an IdeaPad S210. Doubled the RAM, dropped in an SSD, and replaced Win 8 with Win 10. It activated with the Win 8 key with no issues. Found a new battery online. They still make batteries for these things and only about £27. The person that asked me to do it was really happy with it. It's only a Celeron, but you wouldn't know it.

I owned that thing, got me through a year of college. Very portable, and as long as you didn't use it for HD media or large websites, it didn't overheat and shut off! it was hell. I still loved it though.

Ahh back in the day when even a low(ish) end, highly portable machine like this gave you two RAM slots for upgrading! Single thread performance issues are really interesting. Like... I remember getting along just fine with a single thread for so many years, I appreciate that the OS & software demands are much higher now but it's still surprising just how demanding even a web browser can be nowadays given we did all of this and more back when single threaded CPU's were the norm.

I liked my Atom N450 Netbook back in the day. Squeezing out as much performance as possible was half the fun. I threw an SSD in it right away and that definitely helped. I prefer just getting modern hardware and emulators today, however, because you don't spend as much time waiting for things or tinkering. My current "Netbook" is just a small laptop with a modern CPU that can decode AV1 video codecs for watching RU-vid while travelling.

I have a ThinkPad T410 that I use for most of my 98 and xp erra gaming. It's currently running dual boot 10 and xp. Although it's uses on 10 are a bit limited.

I had a direct descendant of this one with an Edge 11 series (intel i3 380um, 4 gigs quite the same specs but with an HDMI port) after being bored the limits of my eeePC 1000HE. Once I upgraded its poorly performing 5400tpm hard drive for a ssd, it was a quite capable machine for work on the go and dosbox games. Gave it to a friend which might still use it. It migrated to win10 but it was a bit too much for it.

i loved Thinkpads - they were built like tanks! I had a T20 for enterprise sales & it was a beast! when it came time to buy my own computer in 2001, i think (ahem) i got a refurb T21 or T22 & I remember the day i got MAME and Metal Slug working - made me so happy - it became my new demo! 👾

Thanks for doing a video on my very first laptop! And yes I bought it for $450 back then haha

I've been planning on getting an older Thinkpad and putting something like XFCE or MATE on it just because I like old tech and I like using it, like properly using it everyday.

The x100e is my favourite thinkpad! Still use it as my daily driver

I used to have that Thinkpad netbook, thing was slow as molasses. It also was always underclocking itself due to thermal regulating, I even reseated the heatsink and replaced the thermal paste early on but the thing always ran super hot.

Properly calming.

I have a Lenovo x131e, basically set up the way you have your x100e, but with xubuntu on it. I run a windows xp vm on it to play old games when I travel. It's better than I expected when I bought it and decided to un-Chromebookify it.

One thing you can do to get XP to use that extra RAM is dig up a copy of the PAE patch somebody made for XP (a project called One-Core-API seems to be one such patch, plus a whole bunch of other enhancements, kind of like KernelEx was for Win 98). See, the XP kernel CAN handle more than 4GB of RAM (sort of like high memory on DOS, PAE does something kind of like that on newer Intel CPUs). It's just that, being 32 bit processes, any individual process can only handle 4GB and MS made the decision to limit the consumer OSes to 4GB. The initial release of XP actually had PAE enabled, but that got killed off by SP1, if I remember correctly. Server 2003, based on the XP kernel, had it turned on still, but of course you don't want to run the server OS. But all the code is there in XP and it works, it just needs to be patched to be enabled. There's also the very odd Windows XP Professional x64 Edition that isn't quite sure if it's Server 2003 or XP.

Got hold of a Sony Vaio 2011 All-in-one. Turns out it’s the fully specced four core 8 thread i7 model with hdmi in and out. A clean out, fresh paste, SSD, upgraded RAM to 16gb and a new wifi-card (to get wireless ac & bluetooth 4.0) and it’s a fantastic 24 inch monitor that also includes a whole pc. Great for old games and work. The person who gave it to me said the reason was “it wasn’t Windows 11 compliant”…. Her loss.

What do you do with the spare 2.5 inch hard drives? Looking for ideas. Also, consider installing Tiny XP from back in the day. 😅

A couple of other choices on these older laptops and PC's is Raspberry pie for PC, or Android-x86 for PC. Both will work on very low resource PC's, and are up to date for browsing the internet, RU-vid, & emails and such.

The X120e was my first laptop because of how efficient the AMD E350 was. After Windows 7, I used it with Mint and now it's running Cloudready/ChromeOS Flex. I only use it on ethernet now because of how slow the wifi card is

The successor X120e with the dual core AMD E-350 was pretty zippy for its time. I could run WoW at 1024x600, medium settings, and pull around 30 fps. And it was a more than serviceable student laptop w/ an SSD upgrade. Probably the best $400 laptop I've ever owned.

I have an X240 and love it.

I had a Thinkpad T430s from 2020 through august 2023 I loved the track pad especially but sadly it broke and the power also eventually died so i had to upgrade to a ideapad gaming 3 but i must say i really miss the trackpad

I too have an x100e but with the dual core Athlon Neo. Still Hella slow....and hot. Stock OS was Windows 7 but even that struggled at times. Xp seems like a decent fit, with Dosbox or similar.

Until a couple years ago I owned a x120e! I genuinely wish I kept it. It's kind of sad because these could have been great little machines, if the CPU wasn't a limiting factor in what you can do with them.

CPU in this thing is actually pretty interesting! It's basically a miniaturized Athlon 64 (a 2003 design) and with a lower clock speed than most desktop counterparts. For this reason, it was far more capable than early Atoms (64-bit, SSE3, etc) and (as you show, at least theoretically) it can run relatively modern OS. This video actually made me purchase this semi-retro computer for late 90-s/early 2000s gaming on Windows XP I will also love to experiment with Linux, maybe a fully-command line distro? or something like that? For sure I'll keep it far from modern web browsers, or maybe even internet altogether 😅

I am a Lenovo fan, so this video made to want an X-series Thinkpad.

After watching this video i went on a hunt to find one of these machines. According to your data and in the Factory service manual, those two other models with the dual-core processors were offered but are EXTREMELY rare. The CPU's are soldered onto the motherboard so the only way to upgrade a single core model is to find a used motherboard that has either the Athlon Neo X2 or the holy grail motherboard with the Turon Neo X2. Every single one listed on ALL the major sites had the Athlon Neo MV single core processor. I'm still going to keep looking though.

My first computer ever was a thinkpad t30. Got it for $5 at a church sale when I was like 7. Loved that machine. Mainly used it to watch movies lol. Would bring it on vacation and watch movies in the hotel room.

I still have my Lenovo x200 tablet. It looks like the first time out of the box so it is in an exelent status. P Dual core, 8GB, 256GB SSD, the Captive Pen with the little cotton wire and the docking station with DVD and an extra ssd hard-drive in a bay. A small wireless mouse and i love it. The only thing i did was cleaning it again, update the ram plus BIOS and a new accu 4 years ago. It works perfect under W7 64 bit. A bit slow yes but it works for what i need it. It is also a very good retro machine which will stay until i die.

I have this model well the i3 model. Under Windows 10 and mint Linux. I was able to install 16gb ddr3. Ive run a lot of Linux distros on it. Its worth it to get 250gb and up ssd tho. It really pops with more ssd but its still kinda dinky, but it can be a good one for Batocera

Had an X130E for a while - we ended up giving it to my wifes dad so he could do basic internet tasks - like you i plopped Windows 10 on it with 8GB RAM and a 128GB SSD, funnily enough - the change from the MV-40 CPU to the E450 dual core must have been pretty significant because while it was a bit on the slow side, things like web browsing and youtube weren't intolerable.

was this the first thinkpad to move away from the classic design? I assumed the redesign began with the 40 lineup and the x1.

I recently picked up an 11e for 55 bucks in mint condition. It's a student edition, folds back to be flat, has a touch screen. Dual core, 4Gb of RAM, and a 128gb emmc. The Intel GPU is a better one of it's caliber, I think a 615 or something, 128mb of dedicated video memory, not bad tbh. I have it running Windows 11 just fine, and loaded to the brim with Indie pc games. Things like Shovel Knight, Braid, LIMBO, Enter The Gungeon, etc, all run smooth as silk with an Xbox Bluetooth controller. It's the coolest thing to me! I actually plan on picking up 10 more on eBay, loading them up in the same way, and gifting them to friends that game but never dabble in PC, to show them even this cheap old rugged little guy can game in really cool ways. I HIGHLY recommend getting one. It's my go-to tinker device now.

About the “being a 32-bit OS I wasn't able to make effective use of that 8GB RAM upgrade”: you can solve it either running Windows XP 64-bit or XP 32-bit modified with PAE support

I have been using IBM/Lenovo Thinkpads for decades now and they are hard to kill.

You have to make a video about your whole laptop collection and your storage solution for it! ;)

I have the same think pad and I still using it in my office. It's really reliable.

I've got a thinkpad I set up to use for writing ONLY with a tiling window manager but I think the setup is maybe a bit too bare bones and I don't use it frequently enough for arch to be a good choice. Might go back to the drawing board and start with a different Linux

I have core an old core duo @ 2.66(oc @ 2.8) along with 8g dual channel ddr3 memory. Two ssd's and a 9600m gt nvidia. The machine(PM45) works spectacularly with windows 7. I will never think of changing it.

I have X140e which have A4-5000 APU. It was a good lugged-ish mini-laptop that was good enough for office work, web surfing, and can run app players to run android mobile games. The successor to it, Thinkpad 11e, lacked the trackpoint so it may not be called thinkpad anymore and now the line is discontinued. And the 'e' stands for 'education', 'cause this line was for K12 students.

Hey I like to ask how hard it was to clean the cpu and the fan and reply the paste I heard some these models can be real pain in the but to do and one seems like great one to play XP games on the go!!!!!!!!!

I had one of these with the Turion X2 L625 back in the day. That second CPU core made a big difference compared to the MV-40. It ran even hotter, but it could almost play Left 4 Dead at non-PowerPoint frame rates! Almost!

Those 2 4GB ddr2 sticks are quite hard to find nowadays.

I had this laptop in university, tried Win XP on it, Win 7, Ubuntu 10 something and Arch Linux. Arch was the most snappy, especially with installed tile window manager (I used Awesome WM). But the slow CPU was an issue even back then, it had troubles playing some YT videos with quality more than 480p, and it's around 2013.

I still own a Toshiba Satellite with an AMD Turion X2 and 3 GB of Ram. Those old AMD always had overheating issues but with a special thermal paste and a factory fan recall, it runs beautifully. Windows 8.1 embedded was the last Win OS that ran smoothly. After that, I ve been running it on Antix Linux OS for fun.

I don’t know about this particular laptop, but on many thinkpads with an empty cell modem spot, you can install a second nvme drive. It gives nice expanability

Love your videos, Im trying to get a cheap Lenovo laptop to edit using Filmora Im way way short of money.

I just bought one of these off eBay for $60 including shipping. I'm looking forward to seeing how well Chrome/Chromium/Whatever OS runs on it while I relish in the retro goodness of a machine I wished I could have owned when it came out. Better late than never though. :)

There is a dual core version, so I can't help but be curious about how it runs. There's also the x120e. Is it a better option?

Speaking of the rubbery soft touch materials that get sticky over time... Any tips how to clean that and make it not sticky? I have a great wireless dolby atmos home theatre. but the remote control has its side and backside from such a material. And it got disgusting. Sticky, catching up any dust and dirt. And I have no idea what to use (and what to avoid to use) to make it clean and non-sticky....

Actually just ordered one of these for cheap. Here in Brazil it's difficult to get a hold of a good windows 2000/XP era machine to play games from that time period (things like nfs porsche unleashed, gta vice city, quake 1 and 2, that kind of windows 98~2000 type of thing). Seems to be in very good condition and comes fitted with an ssd, so my plan is to put windows xp (actually if I can get 2000 working with drivers, even better) and run old stuff in it. It's that kind of thing that was terrible at the time it released (like all netbooks) but actually has value now that it's dirt cheap if you wanna use it to run things way older than the machine itself.

I remember there being a patch for Windows 32bit so it would allocate/recognize more than 4gb, I can't remember if the kernel patch worked on Windows XP.

Check out the latest thinkpad 11e from 2021-22 - it’s a more modern take on this netbook. I believe there’s some upgradeability, 8gb of ram DDR4 optional and can be found cheap with more modern processors. These were mainly sold to the education market.