ThinkPad T30: Solid Retro Laptop With an Unfortunate Flaw 

Impressive fix on the RAM! I am glad you went the distance to fix it, a lot of other youtubers would have just left the slot messed up and moved on with the video.

You are rapidly becoming my favorite "hands on" RU-vidr, Colin! Research, history, common sense, skill, and most of all, courage to take chances. Excellent production values and very entertaining as well. Thank you for your efforts!!!!

A socketed CPU in a laptop. I want those times back

I always love your true personality coming through in your shouts of joy over something working....in contrast with your professional narrator voice. Lol!

Love the T series. Still one of the best laptop keyboards to this day. I was an IBM/ Lenovo certified tech around the T40 days and they were built so well. I still have a T420 that is such an excellent machine.

Hey Colin, it's Michelle. It's going good!

I had been a speed typist and really appreciated IBM’s full TP keyboard.

The bezels on that laptop are astonishingly thin for it's time. Windows XP looks quite striking on it.

It’s so weird that the prices for this laptop all of a sudden skyrocketed from $50 to upwards of $300 on eBay after videos like this!

When he said Among, that really proved that I've lost my mind.

I have a Lenovo U310 from 2013 and the blacklist bios is still present; when I installed MacOS I tried to put an iMac wifi card to no avail because of that bios lock; then I found some guy had made a replacement bios without the blacklist, flashed the Lenovo with the hacked bios and voila, it takes ANY wifi card, as it should be; thumbs up

Idk if it was this exact model, but my first laptop was a refurbished Thinkpad from my uncle’s work. that thing got me started with digital art back in the day! So nostalgic.

I had a laptop that had a 2.6Ghz Pentium 4. I opened it up to change the thermal paste, and it was a desktop CPU. I put in a 3.2Ghz Pentium 4 Extreme edition in it. Much later in time, so the CPU was reasonably priced. Surprisingly, it booted right up and ran at 3.2Ghz. I still have that Laptop floating around here somewhere. I forget what brand it is, but it had a nice big 16" screen, and the screen shell is Blue. Very good video, well made, and nice touches on how to get around all the problems you found and ran into!

I was a service manager of an independent laptop repair depo back in the 2000's and I remember seeing a lot of T30's come in with the front RAM slot failing. We knew re-flowing the solder would fix most of those boards but since we were performing warranty work for IBM we just changed out the whole board. I was always surprised that IBM didn't offer any sort of fix like a shim for those machines. Most of the ThinkPads we saw in for repair were corporate leased machines so we couldn't do any of our own in-house fixes like you did without potentially having our customer incur the wrath of the leasing company since they wanted the machines to be as OEM spec as possible when the lease was up. Also the Wi-Fi card issue you ran into also happened on a number of business class HP laptops in the XP days. Models such as the NC2400, NC6000, NC8000 would complain at POST and usually hang if you had a non-HP part numbered mini-PCI WI-FI card installed.

i own a T42 which is one of the last IBM Thinkpad laptops that had drivers for Windows 98 SE (excluding the T43 which had unofficial ones). attatched to a desktop setup with Olivetti 14" CRT monitor, a solid buckling springs IBM Model M and an old Horizontal IBM 300GL Desktop case to add the vintage look of a desktop machine it works wonders!

Can't believe you succeeded on reflowing the joints. Very impressive. Louis Rossmann would be screaming at the sight.

I bought my ThinkPad T30 (P4-M 2.2 GHz), in 2003. Later that year, or in 2004, IBM notified me about a defect in the RAM-gates on the T30. If I recall correctly, the standard warranty had expired. Despite the expired warranty, IBM offered to repair the defect at _no cost to me._ But, the offer was only available for 45 days. I accepted the offer. I checked my system info's RAM and, sure enough, only 512 MB (of 1024 MB) was reported. IBM overnighted a box to me, to ship my T30 to them. It included instructions; to remove components (any PCMCIA cards, battery pack, HDD, RAM modules, and UltraDrive units) before packing the T30 in the box. The box included an overnight shipping label. In less than 1 week from accepting the offer, I had my T30 back. Eventually, I replaced the two 512 MB RAM modules with two 1 GB RAM modules. When I gave away my T30, in 2014, it was still reporting 2048 MB of RAM. Compare that to _Apple:_ *1. My 2008 Mac mini ($600 base-model): power button fails 355 days after first use (10 days from expiration of warranty).* They tried to blame the failure on _cigarette smoke._ "User-inflicted damage" is _not covered_ by their 1-year warranty. I made a scene in the Apple Store. The "Genius" agreed to accept it "conditionally" under warranty (i.e. if they can't explain the issue any other way, they will not cover it). A wire from the power button to the power supply input had come loose. When I was told that, I replied, _"Cigarette smoke can unscrew a wire???"_ smh *2. My 2015 MacBook Air ($1,700 Core i7; 8 GB RAM; plus accessories): display fails 364 days after first use (1 day from expiration of warranty).* I got the "vertical-lines" issue that occurs on _many models of MacBooks._ This time, they tried to blame the failure on _shock damage._ "You must have dropped it. Or banged it while you were transporting it from place to place. This only happens when there's _physical damage."_ Once again... Apple jumps straight to the _user-inflicted damage_ warranty escape-clause? smh I told the "Genius" the following: *"Here's the problem with that. I bought this MacBook Air to take on a 1-month trip to Paris. By the time I was ready to go, the November terror attacks happened. So, I never went. And this is not my primary computer. I only use it on weeknights and on weekends. It has _no cosmetic damage._ It looks _brand new_ because I have only used it for 500 hours... of the 8,748 hours I've had it. Until today, _it has never left my house._ I rarely remove it from my bedroom. I live alone. And _I never dropped it._ Thank you. This is the 2nd time Apple has tried to deny warranty service. Fool me twice, shame on me."* And I walked out of the Apple Store. btw- The problem could be corrected (temporarily) by resetting the NVRAM. The NVRAM only contains a _data page_ for settings like _backlight-level._ How does a _data reset_ do anything to fix _physical damage?_ After 4 months, however, resetting the NVRAM no longer remedied the issue. Eventually, the 20% of screen-width that was "vertical-lines" became 100%. Then horizontal-lines were added to that. It still works with an external display. *WacBook Ail. Light. Paperweight. Wac. It just breaks. CrApple. Stink different.*

The T30 was a great machine, pardon the cracked RAM solder joints. IBM used to repair it at no charge for many years after but not everyone can do the job. As such now, if you have the memory issue it might be more worthwhile to go to the T4X series for overall better reliability long term. Good job on the RAM slot fix though, hopefully that will help it last longer as otherwise I've never heard of anyone ever permanently fixing the issue. I also personally preferred going to the T43 but if that memory issue wasn't in place I would never have gotten rid of my T30. I also swapped at the time when I sold my T30 for an R51. Truth be told the R51 is less desirable in a bunch of different areas (lid clasps, LCD quality, ThinkLight, form factor) but it is newer and more capable and as such it was an easy decision to migrate over to that as my main XP ThinkPad machine.

Man, Netburst ran so hot! It was in the only computer I ever used which was able to turn off the thermostat in the room, making the rest of the house go cold. Even pretty beefy modern multicore systems with similar TDP numbers don’t do it so bad (presumably due to dynamic downclocking and spreading the heat out over many more cores). I guess the Pentium 4s just ran near-maximum much more of the time, thereby more consistently getting close to the TDP rating? With Ryzen, I have to run distributed computing or compilers for hours before it starts impacting the thermostat like my Pentium 4 did, merely by using MSN and playing Rise of Nations.

I *really* enjoyed that reflow. Unexpected and satisfying fix.

Thanks so much for making this! I'm a HUGE fan of the T30 and have four in my collection, still hoping to build he most perfect one from the lot. x) I didn't realize it was (theoretically) this easy to repair the dreaded RAM slot issue, definitely going to give that one a try! From a first impression, I would have assumed that yours was opened up at one point, at least judging by the missing screw covers on the rear side. From a collector's point of view, those things are usually damaged or have become unstuck in some way, not to mention being impossible to find... Whenever I come across a unit that has them intact, I usually try to get hold of it, in the hope that it hasn't been tampered with! The same goes for that tiny black plastic heat shield that usually sits above the graphics chip, which is often not reinstated after people lift the keyboard. Just these little, perhaps meaningless things that one learns when working on these machines. :) To me, the most annoying thing I found out over time is that (at least the German) keyboard came in two different varieties, with one of them having a much cheaper/rattly typing feel. I was very glad when I finally obtained a unit that had a "good" keyboard that wasn't overly worn!

This was my laptop back in the early 2000's when I worked as an auditor. Great laptop.

Haha I used this exact model for work for a decade. People in IT would tell me they thought they got rid of the last of them years before when I needed a new battery. Thing ran great, when it was getting old I just switched to Ubuntu.

I have a ThinkPad G40 and it's great. I love it as it allows me to bring desktop pentium 4 power with me in a neat package with a desktop sized screen and desktop-like I/O. When I'm at home, it takes up so little desk space and requires much less wires compared to an equivalent desktop and so makes for a clean setup. The lack of a powerful graphics chip isn't the greatest but I can't fault it, it never needed a Dgpu for what it was meant to do. Overall a great desktop replacement laptop.

Why are these people disliking his videos. His videos are the best, i don't understand why do you need to dislike

I have been servicing IBM ThinkPads for a living back in the day. Loved the ruggedness, the keyboard, the track-point, the anti-glare lcd, the fru, the cru, the color, the feel... Never shifted away from buying anything else than a ThinkPad, for myself since then!

Twin Cities based technology channel: Subscribed from the west metro. Good content sir.

Im like 3 years late to this video, but since im lazy and want to keep most of my old laptops and devices stock, i just bought a wifi extender and turned security off on that and connected to it. works great!

I've just spent about 4 hours trying to connect my T30 to the internet, but I found this video and decided to call it a night, lol. So far the best I've done is connect it to my modern laptop with wireless internet connection via Ethernet cable, and get the thinkpad to the point of "connected" but still only showing "cannot connect to server/webpage unavailable" in various browsers. This was a nice video to watch and learn some things! I got it at a Habitat for maybe $5 last year and didn't know much about it.

oh, i really hate that parts whitelisting bios things! I was really excited you were able to work around it. the reflow ram sockets was amazing too. and then the ssd!

That keyboard layout is pretty cool. I like it.

I own a T43, it was given to me by a family friend about 6 years ago. It feels like a tank, if only ThinkPads of today felt nearly as solidly constructed. From memory, the T43 was the last IBM branded ThinkPad. Super meta that you can upgrade the upgrade... I wish serviceability existed in the same way on today's models.

I managed to save a T30 from the e-waste pile. I have also been very pleased with its abilities as a retro machine. I have Windows 98SE on it which was officially supported by IBM. Great video as always, Colin. (^:

Those old Thinkpads... i just love them. They where the first ones unfortunate enough to be scrapped by me as a IT- Trainee. Some of them i saves from Scrapping an my first one was the T 42. The T61 was the Laptop which i used the longest time period.

It seems so weird how fifteen years ago laptops had dozens of i/o ports

Colin, another excellent video as always. So satisfying to see an old laptop brought back to life and given another chance to shine!

A trick for older laptops, that works: youtube higher res video, that’s not supported, 720p watching for 10 minutes. That enhances the performance. Then back to 480p, still not supported, for another 10 minutes. After that, you fixed your wifi card to support faster download and streaming. Now, the supported 320p watching works, and the video, audio is perfect. I used win7, and Chrome to do this fix, and the full screen videos are clear, no delay.

you go over and above . well done sir .

Really enjoyed this and your mindset/drive/talking. Nice and chilled vibe.

Thank you for the trip down memory lane! I dusted off (literally) my Gateway m500s the other day and was greeted by the old Windows XP boot chime. The old timer machine is still all stock and boots happily-it turns just shy of 20 years old this spring. While the keyboard is amongst its weakest points-mushy and unsatisfying key travel-it’s one of the early entries on the PC side of the equation that featured a widescreen, a built-in sub woofer, and fairly decent speakers for the time. I used the machine for school (went off to grad school with me along with my preferred notebook of the time-my iBook G4 which is a little newer though still happily boots to this day as well), with the device being primarily a portable movie player and emulation machine.

I love T and X series. I have a T30 as well and when you showed the issues encountered I was like "yeap, been there". I am not too skilled with soldering, so I just added some rubber on the RAM stick to have them "properly" adjusted. Great video!

I own an IBM R51 laptop from that era and I never cease to be surprised how good the LCD in these laptops is compared to most later ones.

i worked at an e recycler in 2007 and we got a plentiful shipment of these. we encountered all of these problems then. personally i prefer the t43p. same type of build, worth looking into. we even modified the restore partition to include norton ghost as an imaging option.

I've recently refurbished an IBM Thinkpad R51 and these old IBM thiknpads from the early XP era are amazing for retro PC gaming, with the right drivers and knowhow, you can dual boot into windows 98, which gives you the ability to run everything from dos games with the midi drivers that are supported complete with soundblaster emulation, all the way up to much newer xp games such as unreal tournament 2004, and like you mentioned, with ATI mobility graphics built in, these things run very respectably, with just an upgrade to the RAM, an install of an SSD and if you really want to push them, installing a high end CPU thanks to them being socketed in most of these old thinkpads, which for these can be bought for real cheap from china, you can get yourself something that can play a decade and a halfs worth of classics and do so very, very well. I bought and restored mine a little while back and it's the best purchase I've made in ages. With software designed to make XP more usable in the modern day, you can even use it for more practical work purposes, these things work great as word processors or for browsing the internet, assuming you have a browser intended for them like mypal with windows XP. Great video as always, always nice to see someone who knows what they're doing restoring one of these old things and saving them from becoming undeserved E waste, I wish more people knew about these, then again, where I'm from I can buy these as cheap as £20 without storage because people don't really appreciate them, so maybe it's best if it's my little secret, heh.

I had a T30, used the hell out of it for years and never had a single problem with it, ran XP then Linux. Has to be one of the best laptops ever sold.

love the screen and keyboard design of that laptop, wish they made modern ones like that, esp as some now are comming with square screens

I had this happen on my toshiba satellite pro 4300, the upper ram slot stopped working and i had to reflow the solder joints, but it's working fine now ever since! This repair will be good for another 15 to 20 years

Just finished similar kind of upgrade-refresh with an i7 x220t. Changes made (SSD, 8g ram, win 10 x64 (orig. x32) have it now performing like a brand new machine. This video now has me inspired to dig out my first laptop, a t22, and see what we can get out of it using Linux.

Wow, did not expect the reflow to just... work right on!

retrieved and upgraded a R50e from a Celeron to a P4, filled it with a 128 gig SSD, 2 gigs of DDR, and really it's a comfy machine to write, not be distracted by anything els. Playing retro games or tuning to some station. I never thought I could even use it, but hey that's the challenge. Yes they made solid machines.

Dude, your videos are always stellar. Keep at it.

I'm surprised such a quick solder swipe with the Hakko did anything! For the amount of circuit stuff you end up doing, a reflow heat gun would be a reasonable investment.

We used to have an X61 in our school that I used to use all the time (when everybody else thought it was stupid). The thing would constantly get pretty hot, but the browsing was decent for the time (even with a Windows XP), and I always loved that little red pointing stick in the middle of the keyboard to compensate for the lack of a track-pad.

Damn those bezels are so thin!!! I’m impressed

I used one of these to tune my Hondas back in the day. Loved every bit of it.

Kudos to your enthusiasm on this project!

This video inspired me so I got a think pad a22, it was so much fun and I love playing my favorite old games on it

Yeah, HP also with the TC1100. Had a rigged wireless card it could only be replaced with a hp genuine part. Honestly if you need a great cheap retro tablet i recommend the hptc1100 and get a peta to m2 adapter solid retro xp machine

I purchased a ThinkPad T30 new in 2003 when I was a senior in college, it had the little bubble on the bottom. I always wondered what it was actually there for. I called it the primer. like you would see on a small weed eater motor. lol . I used the heck out of that laptop and have fond memories of it. Thanks for making this video. Sadly the computer got stolen when I accidently left it in my car.

I have a T60 and it’s still a legend, it survived a house fire and smells like it, I could run almost any OS on it even windows 10 thanks to the dual core and WiFi.

Hi! I think this laptop was from a Brazilian, or it was assembled in Brazil. I realized this when the wi fi card was removed and on it, there is a label from the Brazilian National Telecommunications Agency (ANATEL - Agência Nacional de Telecomunicações)... How cool!

Somewhere in a box in my storage is one of these. This problem with the memory mean that it is on its third motherboard, An IBM technician was a regular visitor by me to change them under warranty. But it was a great machine.

I was given 2 T30s that were slated for the trash. I was able to cobble a working one from them and used it for Starcraft lan parties with friends for a few years. The T30 sold me on IBM ThinkPads. I currently use a T440p I bought on eBay.

Love these machines, I've got a T40. And they still have drivers for Windows 98 as well, so you could dual boot if you wanted

Hello, Very nice video ! You redeem this machine which hasn't a lot of love, mainly because it's big, hot and with this flaw you mentionned. I have a lot of IBM laptops from this era, but not this one and you gave me the will to find one. I got recently an barn find X41 (I'm waiting for a screen - backlight is dead on mine - and a IDE > mSATA adapter to install an SSD) and this week end a trashed T23 (which is totally functional and in even better shape than my other, which is already almost like new). Is the T30 going to be the next ? I'm going to look at your other videos, I'm discovering your channel and it seems it's nice ! :) W.

I generally just love the Lenovo/IBM as a whole. No wonder it is the school computer of choice in my country. My computer is a Lenovo ThinkCentre M91P with a 3.10GHz 4 core Intel I5 2400, 12 GB RAM (1233MHz) and 2.2TB storage. It is also fitted with a "beasty" MSI RTX 1050TI, and a 500 watt PSU. Installed with Windows 10 Professional 64 bit. Stout little machine if I have to say so myself :D

I had one of these while I was in college, which meant that late night game sessions of Red Alert 2 and Max Payne were the norm. HOWEVER! You missed the best feature: Fn + PgUp turned on the the little LED light mounted at the top of the screen which shines down onto the keyboard.

I still think the ThinkPad A2x series is by far the best option for "retrocomputing". The biggest problem with a T30 will be that DOS support was long gone by the introduction of this model, which means you're going to have trouble getting a lot of classic DOS titles to work. The A2x series was the last ThinkPad in that range to have DOS/DOS sound support (not true ISA but emulated, and it works for almost everything). Also, the A2x series is one of the first to have a "decent" integrated 3D chipset (which means screen scaling isn't terrible like on older models), and is capable enough to run WinXP without issue (with a P3 800/512 MB RAM). I have mine configured to dual boot between Win98SE and XP. Plus, the docking stations for the A2x series allow for a PCI slot - which you can actually fit a Voodoo 3 into. The Voodoo 3 kind of breaks the idea of a "laptop", but it can allow you to run some classic higher end/glide titles that the onboard chipset will struggle with. There isn't a whole lot of range of laptops that have both full DOS support as well as being XP capable - and the A2x series is one of them.

Lol, I was always curious about those KingSpec SSDs. You can get that exact same mSata to IDE adapter and a corresponding SSD for a fraction of the price they’re selling theirs for. I stuck one in my ThinkPad A31 and it works very well.

Our friend built us a PC when he heard we were going to buy an Pentium 4 based system. He interrupted us and built us an AMD system that served for close to 10 years as the family PC. It was a kick ass little thing. All the kids from the neighbor hood played with it because we had the close to top of the line system and ADSL. Nobody had that at the time.

these laptops are the most satisfying ones to type on, ever.

I have one of these at work sitting on my desk...we found it behind some desk and the last person who used it retired around 10 years ago.

What a machine, IBM Thinkpads with Pentium II, used to have one and got it to dualboot with Linux at the time, rock solid machines they were.

Notice how Kingspec properly calls the drive "PATA" on it's markings. S-ATA drives are also mostly IDE. IDE is the procotol that the drive speaks (for optical media it's often ATAPI) If P-ATA and S-ATA are like UTP-CAT5 network cables versus optical fiber networkcabels, then IDE could be Token Ring and NVME could be Ethernet

holy shit i just realized i had one of these when i was a kid. First laptop. It was super slow, but i liked to play with the PCMCIA slots. Probably around 2007

Nice work on the laptop and the video.

7:44 It has the NTC sticker so I assume the laptop was used in the Philippines.

I had a t30 it was a fantastic laptop. I think it had the higher rez display as well as the combo optical drive. It had a 10 gig IBM travel star drive that spun at 4300 rpm. The only reason I stopped using it was because it developed an issue where it would intermittently not post no beep codes. When it would post it work for a while but then lock up. The display would start displaying circles and blotches all over the screen. All the same color gradually till the whole screen turn white. I think the cpu burned up. My current laptop is a Lenovo t510. I like that laptop but I think the keyboard on the T30 was better. *edit spelling

I loved my T30. I put the better lcd in it, best cpu it could use, fixed the ram slots but it just couldn't do the job. Playing a youtube videos was painful. Had to step up to a T60.

Thank you for also showing the Pata SSD insides! I wondered what's in there! :D And a question: Since there's no trim feature on the OS or ATA, is there a way to avoid wear? Does the drive do it itself?

I bought the Dell Latitude equivalent, the C640 from FGTC as well, for $15. Weird thing about it, had a designed for XP sticker, but had a windows 2000 coa on the bottom. Solid laptop that runs games very well.

Freakin love my TANK R50p with 2K IPS Screen, Pentium M 780 2,26GHz @FSB-Mod, 2GB DDR400 DC, Radeon 9600 128MB (DX9), 250GB SSD @ATA100, USB 2.0, GBit LAN, S-Video, WinXP + WinME + Win10. Just my R61 15" 4:3 can kick it off the throne since it is kinda similar just with much better specs.

I think Pentium 4 was developed not as a marketing exercise, but to capitalise on their devtools division, C++ and Fortran compilers. If they could make a processor that allowed high degree of software optimisation, but had a very average performance with general purpose code, they could offer their compiler as a solution. In turn their compiler would not need to generate optimal or reasonable code for competitor processors. So they could create an artificial performance lock-in of sorts. That the clock rate came out high and so did power consumption relative to performance was probably just a side effect. Perhaps they counted on technology improvements absorbing the power efficiency disadvantage and allowing them to push the performance further, and didn't count on AMD catching up, which really was exceptionally arrogant. Also they got under attention of regulatory authorities in EU for potential anticompetitive practices including regarding their compilers and libraries not enabling optimal path on AMD, and the compiler division failed to make Netburst magically fast too. Itanium, another bafflingly bad design, and also one which would have depended on progress in compiler technology which never materialised, was also introduced around this era. Ultimately, few people care about Fortran that much, and aliasing rules etc have been found to preclude a lot of C optimisation, which may have not been entirely apparent in the mid-late 90s when these designs were all drafted up.

my first laptop was a T30 ibm with the ultra nav and keyboard illuminate light at the top of the screen bezel. was a serious unit at the time...

I have a stack of Stinkpads from this era. Solid iron. All still work. Still using them. XP and 2K.

Back in high school I knew some one with a Toshiba Qosmio with a 3.2 GHz P4-M, what a baroque plasticky hot laptop, but it ran the games as promised.

I got an R32 for free recently - it's virtually identical except for there being no trackpad. Unfortunately I didn't know about the RAM thing and so only upgraded it to 1Gb. I also tried one of those drives - although I bought just the housing from eBay as I already had an msata drive. I couldn't get it to work though - the housing also wouldn't fit like yours, but I found for me it was the actual pins that were offset by about 0.5mm to one side meaning I couldn't get it in there. I removed the outer casing and used just the PCB so I could get the pins in, but then the laptop wouldn't start at all - it was completely dead. If I swapped the hard drive back in it booted right up so I think I had a bad housing, which was annoying. And I also had the wifi card issue. I had a card already that was blacklisted, so I bought one from eBay that was supposedly from a thinkpad (and was compatible with my laptop) but again, bad luck! It was also blacklisted. I ended up using a PCMCIA wifi card instead, which works perfectly. The only other problem I'm having is updating the BIOS - or rather NOT updating it, IBM won't let you update it without a fully charged battery, even if you have the charger plugged in, and of course my battery is dead. Still, overall I am very happy with the laptop, it's fantastic!

I felt the joy of the successful RAM fix

Excellent video! I learned alot!

I found my NO-1802 disc during a recent move. I used it on a T40 that I used to have. Supposedly you can modify the card firmware it will be accepted but I never managed to get that to work. I had bought what was allegedly a think pad Wi-Fi card, too, but had the problem.

I started with the T-20. Progressed through the rest of the 2* and really like the T-23 Had a few T-43s, but my now lappy, is the T-60. You are correct, the IBM T series is pretty indestructible. (Well, the T-23 had the choke coils falling off.) steve

Great machine I have one of them and as you said the flaw of the ram is in mine too. I was able to upgrade it to Windows 7. Now I'm looking for the ram and SSD updates

I always have loved thinkpads, and this video inspired me to tinker with the thinkpad I own!

The steel hinges were not just for looks. I had the previous model, a T20, with plastic hinges at work. Over time, they would stick somewhat, leading to cracks in the case. My co-worker had a T30. He referred to the shock protector underneath it as "the nipple". I still miss the Trackpoint eraser-head pointing device, but I have not had a Thinkpad in recent years because now I have to pay for laptops myself.

Most surprising part of this video was finding out that the Kingspec drive is literally identical to the mSATA to 44 pin IDE adapters I've been using for a while now. I've seen people recommend the Kingspec SSDs simply because they are 'native IDE' and that's why they cost more. Well, nope!

I got my T43 upgraded. Love it!

Serious question, what would be an “equivalent” machine (in terms of build quality and expandability) today?

I have a t20 with a PIII, I don't use it very often these days as my t61 has far superior specs, especially with how I have mine equipped.. still looking at that IBM logo is well.. retro. The parts to fit these decently are also cheap enough to make it fun.

The Wi-Fi card whitelist has to do with FCC compliance. Those cards cannot get modular certification because they do not include the antenna.

Very enjoyable review. Thank you.