IBM ThinkPad G41 Upgrade!! 

I love that era of Thinkpad. IBM built those things like tanks. Also, Good choice on the drive, I've had good luck with Dogfish for cheap SSDs.

I love that you reply on everybodies, thoughts and comments! you’re a superstar!

One issue with cloning something as old as an XP HDD to SSD is that you won't have optimal alignment. I don't remember the command but there was a way to do a NTFS format on XP with proper alignment. If I remember the issue correctly, the wrong alignment causes certain reads and writes to hit 2 cells when 1 cell would have held all the data with correctly alignment.

Fun story, had that exact issue with the hard drive replacement, happened with a Z60M and Z60T that i got, drove me crazy, and ended up with me completely cleaning the system and installing all the original software, was a nightmare at the time, glad that i did it for my Tipads!

I never knew there was a G-series ThinkPad. I knew about the A, T, R, Z, W, and X series previously. Wonderful video, by the way!

Oh man the G41. BEAUTIFUL.

I actually have a few old computers, all I got for free from my school. A Compaq Armada E500 running Windows 98SE, a Dell Latitude D630 running Windows XP Home SP3 and a HP Compaq dc5800 SFF desktop PC running Windows Vista Ultimate x64 SP2.

i used to use this laptop to Lan Red Alert 2 and Generals Zero Hour with a friend.

I do not have any particular memories about the specific device, but it is just the right amount of bulk that is totally acceptable in my eyes. This machine would serve someone even to today, like that aunt who only goes on Pinterest and checks Facebook marketplace. heh

Best wishes for 2024. Thankx for sharing with us. Nice ThinkPad too. Greetings from Steven from the Netherlands

I love old ThinkPads! The oldest one in my collection is a 380XD from the late 90s. Still works perfectly, and the battery still holds a charge for about an hour. I actually just ordered a T21, I'm excited to get it and throw Windows 98 onto it,

A few years ago I did the IDE-mSATA 128GB upgrade on my Amiga 1200. That amount of storage lets me put the entire game library on there and the full public domain library and still have 30-50GB free heh!

I remember going through a ton of pain cloning a drive for my T41. I don’t remember what I did with Ghost but I didn’t use all of the default options.

Everything was great but then it went from great to AWESOME when I saw Doom 3 on the desktop... 💯🍻

A ssd makes many things better! Keep up the good work!

this thing should meet up with my Alienware D900T its an absolute Beast

also i have a minty leather ibm laptop bag that has the old ibm like on your computer. it has the over strap the zippers have the red ball on them.......i was pretty happy with finding it.

I like it when you upgrade to laptop or computer to max

Yea the SSD makes a huge difference the main thing is the random file access. Windows is made from thousands of small files so it loads extremely fast when access times are in nano seconds.

6:46 i use the same ide adapter in my thinkpads with 32gb msata ssds, works like a treat

Watching this is cool, but also made me sad. I had one of these machines back in 2005 as a "test" laptop from my employer and they basically gave it to me when they upgraded to newer T series around 2007. I had it sitting down in the basement until around 2018 when I e-wasted it along with 3 other old Desktop PC's, all of which I now wish I had kept. :( I even had the massive docking station for it!

Das habe ich bei dem uralten Toshibalaptop meiner Frau gemacht, als die IDE kaputt ging. Mit der kleinen SSD rennt das Ding wie eine Rakete.

what i would do on the ssd closure since you maybe not have the drive caddy is to use tape and make a little "notch" so you with ease can get the ssd out again.

Nothing beats Acronis for cloning. All others are hit or miss.

32-bit editions of Windows XP are limited to a total of 4 gigabytes of memory.

A fine upgrade!👍👍 Cleaning that ram., stick with IPA., may make it work and 2 gig., of ram., is the maximum which that computer can handle. Perhaps you could make a cover for the ram.. I have one laptop which has an IDE., interface, a Dell Inspiron 9300 and I have considered obtaining one of those adaptors and drives, but I have a few working IDE., HD., so they will do for now. I did have Sparky Linux LXQT installed on the 9300, but it's now has LMDE6 installed and so far it's handling basic tasks well, YT videos can only be played at the lowest settings though, but the computer is over 18 years old.

Another great video. I think it's a partition aligment and/or boot code problem that prevented the SSD from booting. I would probably load the XP CD and go to Recovery (R key) and go to the command prompt. There are two commands: fixmbr and fixboot. There is also chkdsk C: /p. I usually use Norton Ghost 12.x. It does a pretty job. According with interwebs, that laptop seems to bave Intel 852GME as chipset which supports upto 2GB DDR-333. It may like 2x 1GB DDR-400 memory modules as long as the SPD has support for DDR-333 (faster memory has support for slower speeds for compatibility reasons), it will just run at slower speed. But, yes, some machines are picky.

waw i did the same thing to a pars laptop the other day! it had 2 ddr266 256mb sticks and i put 2 1gb ddr400 sticks and you are right its like night and day

The only thing I found to be consistent with copying old drives over to new ones is using dd in linux. Havent had any issues since. I've been through at least 30+ drives at this point with no errors. Maybe check that out :) Love the g series thinkpad!

I have a spinning rust bias for retro and I get a little sad when I see more & more go straight for the flash-based storage. At the same time I understand people's desire to eke out a bit more performance from their machines.

Having done an HDD to SSD copy many times. The biggest issue is in the "page file" portion of the HDD. SSD's don't use it, to prevent premature NAND failure.

this thing would be neat on a very light weight linux system.

saludos de Perú, tengo una de estas es una maravilla me gustaria actualizarla como tu lo hiciste, es una maquina de muy buena calidad.

If i can find the files i will 3D Print the covers for you.

I like retaining Windows licenses as well. In fact, as much as possible, I like to keep the originally installed OS intact, along with the software, especially if it was paid software, but delete personal files.

with hearing the whole thing on why you dont do ssds made me think the experience would be nice... issue is those older laptop drives arent the most reliable and i like reliable media to be in my stuff

Here's a tip that will save you a lot of grief on upgrading some Dell laptops to a digital drive (Like a D820 for example) if it doesn't see the drive. Add a thin cardboard shim to adjust the drive height and try it again. I've run into this several times and for some reason it works. I found this solution online after hours of frustration the first time.

Excellent work, I was looking for a video on exactly this subject. I own an IBM T40 running xp sp3 and wondering if these exact parts would work in my machine, any advice would be greatly appreciated. Its ether that or perhaps picking up a caddy for the expansion bay and plugging the ssd via that method, there by holding on to the hdd for data storage purposes only. I use the T40 extensively along side a pen tablet in my teaching practice to access text books, documents etc... and receive other materials and communications via email from students, freeing me up from continually having to switch screens on my pen tablet, improving work flow. The 4:3 display is also a game changer for ease of reading. I will also be making use of the card bus slot in the near future by picking up a PCMCIA card for ~ $10 to expand the number of usb ports on the machine. I love the versatility and the modifiability of these early t-pads ...still very capable as dedicated machines in this day and age. I just love them, there's a certain mystique about these vintage Thinkpads, just something about them...crazy good stuff!...thanks for the video.

Some notebooks and pc are quite nitpicky about certain sticks of ram maybe try it on another pc. Also try passing a white eraser rubber on the tracks of the memory stick.

I worked at IBM NL when these came out. For the day they were absolutely amazing. It was the time when desktop replacement was a thing, people wanted to swap the chunk of crt and the hum of the 486 hanging in a sidecar under their desk gone. It's been a couple of days since, if I recall correctly 3Gb of DDR333 was the maximum, if you could get a 2Gb stick. They were prohibitively expensive, I've seen a couple of those made by Wang. You could put a 2GB and a 1GB in G41 in only one combination to make it work. It made little sense to do so at the time, hardly any software could use that vast amount of RAM. I think Lotus Notes 5, Lotus e-Suite (a very nice, Java based Office package that went nowhere), some Oracle clients, Maemo and Yellow Dog could. I thought 120GB was the largest possible drive size for the G41, is that 128GB mSATA one of those 119Gib drives? I still have my T43p and R52 with a 15" UXGA (1600x1200) display from back in the day. Amazing build quality, compared to modern laptops. The screen of the R52 developed a red hue recently, either the screen or the ATI card may be about to expire. Just picked up a nice T60 with a bit more muscle to replace the R52, another great retro gaming machine.

The Macrium reflect software, doesn’t always clone drives worth of shit, this is why I usually just stick to CloneZilla

Was the ssd aligned to 4k?

Regarding SSDs in retro PCs, there are couple of things that needs to be adressed. First - partition alignment. It is good idea to partition a drive using livecd linux and ensure it is aligned to 1MB. Second - that ide44 to m.2 adapter. Most of those utilizes poor controllers that are only capable of ATA33 speed and that is obviously your case. Is is much faster though because SSD is vastly superior in terms of access time. Regarding RAM, sometimes one module won't work in slot 0, but works fine in slot 1, try swapping them around in all possible configurations.

Links to adapters etc., would have been nice. Several items I have tried from Amazon lately haven't worked.

i had t40 it stoped working few years ago

the only downside to the ide to sata is you are limited to the speed of ide.....it's better for heat purposes, but otherwise not much different.

Just Use Windows Vista or Windows 7, becuz Windwos XP doesnt have any optimization with SSD and in disk defragmentation, the Win xp do a disk defragmentation method which is for harddisks. If do for ssd, SSD becomes lower life with read write cycles. In Windows vista or 7 have better support for SSD and have the new defragmentation method with TRIM method feature

When you use Macrium reflect to copy a system disk it pretty much never work to use the Intelligent copy method, it fails to copy over MBR records and stuff when you use this method. to get the best result that works pretty much every time is to go to settings and use the sector by sector copy method and make sure to orient the partitions Exactly the same way as on the source drive. you can increase the partition size and it will work too but they must be put the same order on the drive. I have a whole computer dedicated for hard drives that have recovery software, test software and cloning all together. I can install two drives and make a direct copy to a new drive without making any images. quick and easy

What else that could be a problem is the ibm mite not hande the 2GB of memory

wowza, what a beefy laptop.... Sadly my oldest system currently is a Dell Precision T3500 with a quad-core Xeon and 24GB of RAM... I tried to install XP x64 edition, but but it failed so it's running Vista :) I'm currently looking to get a system that can run Win 95/98/2K/XP natively for gaming, ultimately like a 1ghz P3 system with 256-512MB Ram that I can get a good GPU in and setup like multiple drives or CF card to IDE adapter, and just have each OS on a different card and a second drive with all my software and games on....

i did that on my 2011 MacBook pro added ssd it boots faster

Try upgrading to Windows 10

Old Sys/Net Admin here.... 2 suggestions. (1) Label that SSD conversion case with the model and size of the SSD. (2) You might want to check if XP knows how to do SSD Trim??? I don't think it does.

Another solution for storage ive seen for machines like this is a IDE to compact flash card reader. Its not the best solutiond but it saves you the time if justifying putting a Sata ssd in a machine this old. 😂

I was told old machines can kill a SSD faster. Wouldn't be an issue if SSD's didn't have read write limit suck @$$ drives.

Pentium Floor ☠

I'm going to upgrade my fujitsu pc with 10 gb ide to 120 gb sata ssd

i do know windows xp will read 3gb of ram if you have 4gb ram in the system.

The problem you had with the copy of the whole disk through Macrium has and still is haunting me too. The very same problem I have on an Acer Extensa 5220 upgraded to the max. Its OS, a Win 7 32bit, is non-copyable no matter what I do. Change the USB/SATA interface? Done. Use another copy software? Done. Change SSD? Done Results? Must I really tell? Go and make a new install of Win 7 32 bit and it works fine, try and copy the old 80Gb SATA drive on a SSD and it freezes during boot-up with error messages. Always. Never could understand why, since it seems everyone else I could ask and their cousin has always managed a perfect copy of their disks. Regretfully I bid you welcome in this little, unlucky club.