This is an IBM ThinkPad X21, it has a PIII 700mhz with 256mb of RAM, and a 40gb hard drive. It is an ultralight model that runs very smoothly and even has a 1024x768 resolution screen.
I had one of these, and loved it. Bought it used and refused to get rid of it for years. It was bulletproof, lightweight, and memorable enough for me to be looking up videos on it almost 20 years later.
4:51 it's a so-called ultraport. the devices which used it include a webcam, a bluetooth adapter an infrared port and a compact flash card reader. it's basically a usb1.1 port with a different connector.
Anyone else here slightly addicted to Thinkpads? I own nine and bought them all in less than three years, and I would like more! Z61p x3; G40 x2; G41; X60s; X61; X61s. I'd like a W520 and W701ds, oh and the T43p is very attractive if a little tricky to upgrade to SSD.
Well i have : 380ed , T23 , T40 , T60 , R40e , R51 , X31 , X41t , X201....and you don't know what a pain is if you don't try to upgrade X41 to SSD because it uses a 1.8" IDE HDD (3.3v). That's a top tier BS because chipset does support SATA but smartases decided to covert that to IDE >:( Also if you are searching for T40/T41/T43 avoid ATI chips they are prone to failure ( intel GPUs are ok ) .
@@MF175mp Nice and both interesting models. Since my last comment I did manage to get the W520 I wanted in 2018, but not the W701ds which is very rare and expensive. I've also sold a couple of my G40 to justify the new ones.
@@EgoShredder just got also a T43, I think that one would be still usable in playing 2005-ish pc games and web browsing as well. I have also a couple Compaq's and a Gateway Solo, I will sell those at some point because the Thinkpads are much more awesome and you can still get even a new battery for a 1998 model and many other parts used from ebay. By the way the T21 thinkpad despite being 20 years older than my newest laptop, has narrower bezels around the screen than that, I think that is the coolest thing
@@MF175mp T43 can unlock the drive bus to be SATA, but I have not tried that yet. I do have an mSATA SSD drive in and even at the IDE speed is still fast. I'm thinking of buy a cheap PCI card interface adapter that plugs into the ExpressCard slot. Some are dual PCI, so I could use a Hauppauge video capture card and old Yamaha SW1000XG to save space with old desktop machines. Yeah despite being old, these old Thinkpads are still genuinely useful to have around, and are supremely engineered and designed. Love 'em!
Nice to see this video but you made a mistake selling it. I bought a well used X21 about 15 years ago. The HDD made a noise that gave me no confidence in its remaining life but it was a joy to use. Today the disk still clicks like no other HDD I've ever had yet it plods on. The whole machine is a beauty. Win98se with 700MHz PIII & 256mb ram really flys and with a few tweaks, extras and third party prog's is a wonderful setup. Add that to a lovely physical machine and we'll I won't be replacing it with any bloated new OS. I love my T60 (XP) but since M$ ceased issuing security updates I'm off the net on my laptops and am just as likely to use this for work. You didn't mention sound, that small speaker isn't too bad but add the docking station and you'll gain two very decent speakers on the sides as well as floppy and DVD drives. Even with the docking station the bulk / weight is okay. The only thing M$ has to get people to constantly replace perfectly good programs, OSs and hardware with now is fear. Put Linux on an old box for browsing and do everything else on good kit. My main desktop uses a heavily tweaked XP. I do have a slate/laptop with NT8.1 which gets some light use mainly when I need to work away from home. [I admit NT8.1 works nicely for this slate/laptop combo' but as a general OS it stinks as does NT10]
This machine is quite similar in specs to my old Dell Latitude CPxJ 650GT. 650MHz PIII, 1024x768, 256MB RAM, upgraded to 512, 20GB HDD. Good machines back in the day.
good video..i still have a x21..but now i cant get it to boot..i have an empty HDD 60gb ide..i try to install linux and always give me an error..i cant install windows 2000 or anything else..can you help please?
I have an IBM ThinkPad x22 and there is an dead line on screen and it missing the bios battery and last and not least : the wrist wrest is sticky AF and I can't remove the nasty stickiness... I used windex and damn... I used so much paper towels and they where all black because of the gunk... Now I have a ThinkPad that has a sticky wrist rest and no cmos battery, so I can't use it
The A20 series seemed to have built-in floppy drives which is always better than USB, as USB rely on the host software for most of the drive commands. USB drives do not work well with 720KB disks if at all.
EgoShredder second best would be a a series machine with two ultra bay ports. Mine had a dvd and CD burner and a ls 120 drive that can write to superdisk, and both forms of 3.5 inch floppy disks
I also found my mom's ancient X31 a few years ago. I was surprised watching this video to find how thin the X21 is. My X31 is bulky... Not sure how IBM went in that direction lol.
I hope you're Vaio has a floppy drive too, you need to take the driver for the CD-ROM and put it into a Windows 98 Boot disk, if you send me the driver and the notebook model I'll make a floppy disk image that is bootable so you can launch setup from the CD. You just reminded me that I should do a video on the Mac mini that i put an Intel Core 2 Quad in, it doesn't overheat but boy does the kernel hate it, modded the kernel myself and it has to be the fastest Mac mini in the country.
In the olden days most computers didn't have a BIOS that was capable of booting from CDs instead they would put in a floppy with a small version of DOS on it, that version of DOS would load the CD-ROM driver and allow you to begin the setup that was on it. Many Windows 98 and Windows 98 SE cd's (especially ones from ISOs) don't have the boot sector on them. I was hoping the computer might have a floppy that worked with it otherwise you need a bootable Win 98 CD and that still might not work. -->
I cheated and took the hard drive out and plugged it into my new laptop with a USB adapter, then copied the drivers to the old hard drive's desktop folder.
@@shdowhunt60 Hi. Windows 10 Pro and full Office 365 running on my X61 12" albeit with SSD. I use mine on special occasions to show young people how laptop/tablet combos should be made. Pen use is very accurate too. NB: this written in December 2019. Happy Christmas!
