Lenovo/ibm still have the drivers on their website and allow you to buy model specific recovery discs. Takes a little digging now a days but they’re there.
I had one of these in high school, right when Smart Boards were taking off. I managed to bootleg the software for those things and do my homework with it. I'd even take all the lesson board work from my teachers and use it for notes. It was amazing, loved that tablet. The graphics were complete garbage, but Windows 8.1 made it more tolerable with decent Basic Adapter drivers.
I don't understand this thing (though I haven't finished the video). It looks just like an older version of the Thinkpad I had with the testing screen and everything. The thing is I got mine when Windows 8 came out so that would make a lot more sense to have a computer built like this but why would they make one in 2005? I always assumed mine was just a one-off that they made and then never continued making them again or previously.
You’re one of the channels that inspired me to try my hand at making videos and I used to think wow these videos are so well produced might as well be on tv. The thing I didn’t realize was how important speaking cadence was and how difficult it can be to edit content down to a watchable length without losing the point of the video. Thank you for the entertainment and the inspiration.
I was just starting to buy my own hardware around 2005-2006, so I bought a super expensive Sony Vaio that I loved. In retrospect, man, did 2006 have a distinctive style lol. You can tell when that external CD drive was made for sure haha. Great video!
I quite enjoyed this video. A bit different from the others. Maybe in the future, you should consider doing an ultimate retro PC build. I really dig those. Nice work!
Thanks Justin! I’ve definitely thought about doing that for sure! I still have a lot of mod videos but I also want to show some refurbs/mods of other retro electronics. I just got an awesome deal on a Walkman and I’m not sure if I’ll make a video about it but I may. Cheers buddy!
You know, as someone who collects old tech to refurbish, I think this was well worth what you paid! Sure it only has a few niche uses, but the fact that it still works, means you’ve preserved some old tech. I’ve got a small room in my house dedicated to old refurbished tech, which I would like to donate one day to a preservationist. It’s neat to see where we were at one point, and how far we’ve come. I actually own quite a few old IBM laptops, as well as two perfectly functional Apple II computers complete with peripherals
I have the x61, which is one of the next models, they made a docking add-on for these that gave you a slim drive, and all of the ports like parallel, which is what I use on my X61, as it is used to run an old eprom burner :)
I've revived several Thinkpads in the same way you did. It was challenging, UNeconomical, but lots of fun and well worth it. These old Thinkpads are surprisingly functional when revived and the keyboards are a delight. I'm writing this on a T480S that I brought back to life and find just as useful as my $1000 Thinkpad Yoga i9.
This laptop was my childhood dream. I managed to get one a few years ago, but the previous owner didn’t take good care of it. The outer chassis is basically ruined, tho the keyboard and screen are in great condition.
It was your project Tito. I can only say it works as intended. Those earlier systems are getting costly to refurbish. And I never knew there was a modern approach to the ide drive. I have an HP Elitebook that has the rotating display. I was going to replace the battery, but it's $65 sticker price before shipping told me not to. It was a good thing because I installed W11 on a whim and it started to charge.
You are really lucky with this project. The X41 was a fantastic machine in its time. While not having groundbreaking performance it is compact and very versatile, without any real competitors. I still use an X201 tablet, which looks remarkably similar. The only extra i/o port I have is an Expresscard slot which never really caught on, and I do not have an infrared transmitter. The stylus for the X60/X61 tablet and X200/X201 tablet should also fit this X41 tablet, and they are still quite commonly available if you can accept a non-original stylus. The plastic on my original stylus became all sticky after 8 years, so I replaced it with an aftermarket one. That works.
I did something similar for XP, only I got a T43 from a thrift store for $9.99. It came with the ThinkPad factory image of XP SP3 on an 80GB HDD. It's a Pentium M 1.86, with a DVD drive, 1GB RAM and a 1400x1050 screen. All it needed was a cleaning, a CMOS battery, and some thermal compound. Even the battery miraculously still holds about an hour's worth of charge.
I got an X201 tablet from a pile of old computers my college was throwing out. It has the I7-640LM and upgraded to 8gb of ram and redid the thermal paste. Since then I've gone paperless and used this device to do all my homework and studying. Runs windows 11 pretty well.
Love the video Tito!.. I graduated in 06 so I love anything 06 lol.. I remember think pads from 96 lol.. Amazing machines from the beginning. I have a 2010 fujistu computer with the tablet switch and always wondered about updating the software losing the tablet compatibility so your video very helpful as usual !!
Thank buddy! Glad you enjoyed the video! Definitely, keep your old recovery CDs if you have them for the Fujitsu since they probably have those special drivers for the tablet functionality. I found it impossible to install the drivers individually. Cheers dude! Great to hear from you!
Pretty sure I have this exact model kicking about here somewhere, with the HDD Caddy and Cover. If I come across it, you're more than welcome to it, Tito! Love your videos, keep up the fantastic work! I also believe I have the original stylus as well!
I think it'd be really cool to eventually do a follow-up to this video! I love retro PC and Laptop restorations and builds, and I think it would be cool as heck to design and print a HDD cover/holder for the slot! Also I, along with most people I assume don't know how to or where to refurbish old batteries, which I think would be great to explore and share, as a lot of these older machines have potentially refurbish-able batteries since they don't have too many custom Li-ion cells in them and just take old batteries. Also on how to update the bios to remove the HDD error, maybe you'll even eventually find a stylus for it, heheh. Love these videos!
That's generally the problem with laptops that are being sold for cheap with some components missing. The price will look enticing at first, but even if the laptop is just missing RAM and a hard drive, the prices can quickly add up.
For the batt you might be able to open the plastic case (most difficult part most of the time) and replace only the battery module which might be kinda standard I think
Beautiful machine. I have one as well with a dead backlight. I bought it cheap for it's screen, as I wanted to have an IPS panel for my X32 (with some modification these screens can be used in those machines) and was planning to LED mod the screen anyway, so the dead ccfl backlight wasn't an issue. The thing is though, this mentioned X41 tablet turned out to be in extremely nice condition, so I just don't have the heart to strip its screen out then leave it as a parts machine. So in the future sometime I will try to LED mod the screen, and restore this X41 tablet as it was.
Probably one of the weirder computers to be nostalgic for tbh :P. If you want it to not be that big I suggest getting one of the smaller, more flush batteries.
Lol. We had one of those back when I still programmed building automation. I made my first floorplan-based HUI for our office/showroom to control all the lights, curtains, blinds, heating and A/V. It was terrible overall but it was amazing for the time. 😂
Still an incredible deal!! Those think pads are built like tanks. Can’t go wrong with em. Had one back in the day but unfortunately it broke and it got chucked out. You can probably get a new battery online. All the parts are still readily available. Just brought an untested Think Centre for £40 myself. Got a 64bit processor so gonna up the ram to 4gb, add an SSD sound blaster etc and put a lightweight model of linux on it. Gonna be a fun lil project. Best choice since pis are spiked😂
Glad you enjoyed it Madblaster! This was a project that I’ve been meaning to finish for a long time. I’m glad I was able to finally cross it off the list 😅 although it still needs some work
Great video! I would definitely love to build my own PC someday! I’ve watched plenty of RU-vid videos on how to do it, and it’s really not that complicated.
Thinkpads are gems. These ex corporate machines make great cheap laptops for kids first computers that cost identical to new chrome books and much less than PC laptops with similar capabilities even compared to today's standards. Best of all, they are built as tough as bricks so they can withstand more abuse than the fragile slim laptops.
I have a X60t that the seller sold me as X61t back when I was still new to the ThinkPad game and didn't bother about 32 vs 64bit CPUs. Really enjoyed using that thing, earlier this year I decided to reinstall XP to get me a nice little retro gaming system which works fine. Needs some new CPU thermal paste tho.
the x41t was my very first computer. i made so much art with it, and miss it so much. they seem to be a bit hard to find in decent condition, any more, and priced way too high for what it is when you do find them.
Yeah you missed out. A couple years ago you could still find a plethora of them, x220s, x230's, and all the tablet versions etc etc, but sadly they hit RU-vid from creators just like this video and all the nice ones seemed to be scooped up and now there's even a price gouger who owns majority stock and is pricing a lot of these old machines between 400-600 dollars, which is ridiculous. I feel lucky to have gotten an x220 in mint like new shape for around 60 bucks. So far I've replaced the paste/pads, installed an x230 fan, installed an IPS screen and gave it a 2tb drive and secondary msata drive along with a wifi/bluetooth combo chip and modified bios. Really love the little machine
He definitely said tablet instead of laptop at the beginning of this video. I haven't finished the video yet but the screen looks like it's flipping around which doesn't make any sense for 2005. It does make sense for 2013 when Windows 8 came out which is what I have. Well I sold it to my best friend but he still has it. I've replace the cooling fan and the battery when those went bad and it's still a really awesome machine. I am confused why the hard drive bay stopped working properly with a hard drive plugged in (can't even boot to bios) but luckily it had a 24GB mSATA drive I could reformat and install Windows 10 on. Having the screen flip around is so much better because you don't press all the keys on the back side while you're holding it I mean you're not really supposed to hold them they're too heavy but still in the event you do decide to hold it You just burn your hand on the cooling system. My favorite mood was tint mode with a proper keyboard and mouse when I was at home but that was just because I was a young kid and so I was fascinated by new things and reality tent modes not that useful.
Yikes on the cost, but I also understand why you went though with the project anyway. I just recently picked up a fully loaded T480 in mint condition for $330 on Ebay that's going to be a dedicated personal devops projects machine. Classic Thinkpads just have magnetic betwitchery about them forcing you to ask yourself the rhetorical question of "Do I fully upgrade and bring it back to life?".
I traded for a x60 the other day which seems like an updated version of the x41. It came with the stylus and it’s in decent condition. I was thinking about swapping the board from an x61 Thinkpad so I can run Windows 10 on it. It’s a solid machine and I like it’s design.
I had the x220t for a while, amazingly robust machines, I can see why places still use think pads, although the new ones are a shadow of their former build quality. What a lovely little project, thanks for sharing Tito!
Any computer that runs XP is worth it. 😁 More seriously though, that machine looks awesome. As cool as these new, slim machines are, nothing beats the IO of these old school machines. I had an old Dell for the longest that had like 4 USB ports, a Wi-Fi expansion bay, a PCI slot (don't recall which type), easily replaceable and upgradable components, an Nvidia card (don't recall that either), VGA, a Pentium 4, 2 GB of RAM, and, of course, XP. Unfortunately, my motherboard died at some point, and I ended up laying it to rest. RIP ANOMALY. 😭
My battery was the same, and even tho it was always kept in office, the problem was corrosion. I took battery apart and theres a pcb in there that get so corroded that it doesn’t work. I cleaned and reflowed it and the battery charges around 70 percent
The battery probably needs to be jump started or whatever the term is, afaik basically the issue is it hasn't been charged in so long that the battery level has dropped to below the minimum amount to begin charging, I've found a pda from year 2000 that had this same issue and I was able to fix it after jump starting the battery (im using the wrong term but you can probably find it out by googling)
I ve got this x41 used and beat up, with many scracth on surface and bottom, the lcd dead too, but i have the original dock station and its run xp as my desktop retro pc.
I bought the same laptop and the seller is in FL the SSD will put up an Operating System Not Found message at least in WIN7 and the only way to fix it is with a HDD. i made custom ram covers and HDD cover from steel and never bought the battery as it's too expensive. overall a great performer with the 1.6 CPU. I also got the missing WIFI card from China. Hard to imagine this performance in such an old device.
Nice mSATA ADaptor. Though maybe an m.2 SATA Drive and a SATA m.2 to 44pin Adaptor (a bit harder to find but possible to source) might have been a better choice? Some even come with a plastic top cover, so you only might want to use some tape for the buttom and it looks like a normal 2,5" IDE HDD.
These older X-thinkpads are using 1.8" HDD, so 2.5" case wouldn't help. On other hand, chipset supports SATA so you could even mod SATA SSD in without using IDE-adapter.
that's cool. is that the highest end CPU available. The CPU in the big rig XP machine is more powerful for sure. Hope the underground community release a laptop for all the windows up to windows xp. Pretty much a pack of games that isn't capable with newer windows.
Wow I didn't realise just how close it looks to an X200T - Regarding the stylus, the one on the image looks identical so might be worth looking for one of those instead.
I’ve had good luck with leaving thinkpad batteries to charge for days on end, where they suddenly started charging again. “Jumpstarting” them with a bench power supply is also a viable option.
The software for is-nitro-emulator can be ran on windows 10 in compatibility mode. There are forum topics on how. I’ve had no issues or weirdness using mine like that. Also look into it because you can update the nitro to unlock all features.
Not that I’m saying using more period accurate computers is more fun and can be easier at time, I need to get an XP machine because the wii NDEV units drivers need XP while the software itself doesn’t.
5:10 Here is a small tip. You see that blue Pentium Inside logo? You probably have the Broadcom WiFi. You can change it to display Centrino one by replacing the WiFi card to Intel 2200BG one. Centrino was the more premium brand with a better WiFi. You can even buy the Centrino sticker that you put on the palmrest (left side) to go with it. There is a catch, however... you must get a specific Intel card that goes into IBM laptops. Other branded ones (for Dell, Toshiba, etc.) will not work and will not be recognized. You should be able to get one for less than $10. Dell laptops of that period are not as picky, so they accept most of the Intel 2200BG cards of that format. Darn, I might have an original OEM IBM Tablet Windows XP image somewhere, but no promises, as I just worked on the usual laptops, not tablets, but I'll try to have a look.
I wonder if it would be possible to put more up to date components in this chassis (frameworks sell their motherboard alone and is quite compact). Im a sucer for puunishment, and for vintage electronic, so i might have to look further into it. Imagine seeing a student pull this bad boy out of is bag for his classes at uni.
please can you share where you buy the msata card i got an old ibm x22 type 2660-95s with docking station i work as technician for a seller of ibm and lenovo in the support page you can find the recovery disk in iso format
I found out the hard way that just because the RAM fits into the laptop doesn't mean that it's going to work. Apparently there's a difference between DDR3 and DDR3L so be careful. I didn't damage the RAM the computer just kept beeping though.
Nice refurb video, Tito :) You can swap out the cells in the battery if you have a working battery lying around. Just make sure that the E-fuse is good on the battery BMS board. I did that with my IBM ThinkPad X40 I purchased with a CD docking station on a local flea market for 10 dollars this weekend. I soldered the cells instead of spot welding, and they are used cells but the laptop runs on battery for about an hour which is fine with me. Where exactly did you find the recovery for this laptop/tablet combo? By the way it is a HIGHLY collectible item now :) That
Thanks for the tips Andras! I found this laptop on eBay over a year ago. When I bought I remember seeing a lot of these partial laptops available. I liked more recently and didn’t see any available. I’m guessing this was from a lot that was sitting at a warehouse/storage
These laptops generally use 18650 cells in both series and parallel configuration. Usually just need some skills, a spot welder and and soldering iron and some glues. Is can be done DIY but be extra careful with those 18650 cells.
My man, dual boot it with Linux and otherwise hold onto it. It's museum-quality and that's rare for these. It'll be worth more than 200 especially if you hold onto it for a number of years to come.
A few weeks ago, I restored one exactly like that! But, unfortunately, I couldn't get the IDE to M-Sata adapter to work. Could you provide some info about your adapter? By the way, it is possible to put 2,5GB of RAM with a specific RAM speed and brand. I have done it!
I am not sure, but I think that the correct adapter is one of those that don't have the 3.3v voltage regulator. If someone could guide us all with some info, it would be great! Thanks
I hate to break it to you, but laptops that have that rubber coating on the laptop are disintegrating as we speak. I have some leftover T20-T23 laptops here and they became very sticky and if you push on the coating it will move like some kind of goo. Same goes for the extended battery for Dell D410-D430 and D620-D630. With these batteries you can clean off that sticky goo with a napkin and some IPA. Also some older desktop mice with rubberized sides have that problem, including ones from Microsoft. Truly a shame... X41 is bit newer than the T20 line, so you may have few more years left in it.
I had no idea they made thinkpad tablets that early! I have an X230T that was released in 2013 and encountered a similar issue with the tablet-specific features; My quick-buttons by the monitor don't actually work because I chose to run windows 10 and couldn't find the appropriate drivers :/
If it's from 2013 then it was running Windows 8 like mine was (s230u) I didn't know there were other twisting moddles of Thinkpad cuz they were the hotness when Windows 8 came out but now not so much.
@@bland9876 Could be that yeah. I was looking at the separate drivers, not the whole recovery disc image. I generally just use it as a backup normal laptop now, dunno if I'd go through the trouble of reinstalling for Windows 8 and correct drivers. But I might find the recovery disc and save a copy just...because lol
How much is to get a new tablet at a comparable price. It would be a better update. Of course I used sd cards instead maybe they are not as durable but I would live with it.
