Spent 4 days reviving a 2005 ThinkPad with a dead hard drive

Found an old T43 in my uncle's garage, and I swapped in a spare 80GB IDE drive I had sitting around, then loaded XP from a burned CD. Took forever to find all the right drivers but after 4 days it boots up faster than my modern laptop. Has anyone else had luck with old ThinkPads running light Linux distros?

2 comments

2 Comments

dylan_green5821d ago

Have you tried putting something like Puppy Linux on there yet? I read somewhere that those older ThinkPads can actually run that distro pretty well with only 512mb of RAM. Might be worth a shot if you want to keep using it for basic stuff without the driver headaches.

margaretf4021d ago

Yeah that "only 512mb of RAM" part got me thinking. Back in the day I had an old Dell with 256mb running a super stripped down version of XP and it was painful. I tried Puppy on a friend's ThinkPad once and it was actually usable for browsing and typing stuff up. But here's the thing. You still gotta deal with the hardware limitations. The CPU in those old machines is slow as molasses. Even with a lightweight OS, opening more than two tabs in a browser will choke it. And forget about playing videos. It will stutter like crazy. I'm not saying don't try it, just keep your expectations low. It's more of a fun project than a daily driver at this point.