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

and after all those upgrades, right to the shelf

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.

I will never get rid of my T43. Feels like it could survive a nuclear fallout.

You are rapidly becoming my favorite "hands on" KZfaqr, 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!!!!

I loved how the screen bezels were so much thinner in that era compared to 2010ish era laptops. We've only just recently got back to such thin bezels!

"...swapping its drive for something a little more solid..." Pun? Denied! :D

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

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.

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

Recently bought a T43, is a beautiful piece of engineering. Maybe I’ll do the SATA mod and install a SSD

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

Thank you. The memory slot repair was something I've never seen done, and you make it look like a no brainer.

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

Man that "no way" was so awesome. I love tech moments like this

All 17 minutes are very interesting to watch and listen through, thank you

Absolutely adore your retro laptop videos. It’s a hobby that I wish I had more time and space for.

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

Kudos to your enthusiasm on this project!

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

Maannn, it's realy weird to watch a Colin video went well. Good job!

great video, I have a collection of X-series Thinkpads X30's, 40's & 60's and they are fantastic machines for retro usage as well as modern day usage in the shape of the X60/61. All have the upgrades such as ssd, ram and wifi cards. That 1802 bios hack is a lifesaver on the few occasions I have used it.

Such a good and quality content in this video, I’m amazed.

Awesome video Colin keep up the awesome work 👏

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

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.

Great video as always! That external 3.5 inch floppy drive reminds me of the ones that were made for iMacs in the late 1990s.

you go over and above . well done sir .

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

Man, my college gave these and the t40 series out to students for years. Absolute tanks for the most part.

Had one of these when I was a kid, picked it up at a rummage sale for $5. Used to watch dvds on it. Got to a point where the battery wouldn't even hold a charge but for 7mins. Still my favorite thinkpad to this day.

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

5:30 this same exact thing happened to my Dell E6320. After upgrading my RAM, I was getting horrible graphical corruption on the screen. I noticed that it went away if I flexed the bottom half of the machine just right, or pushed on the memory socket. I affixed a small piece of a foam anti-slip furniture pad to the inside of the bottom bezel to put pressure on the module a few months ago, and it’s been going strong ever since. Fingers crossed! With more RAM and a SSD upgrade, it runs Windows 10 just fine even for an old machine.

Thanks for the video! Just a week ago I picked up a shipment of 16 old Thinkpads, and one of them was a T30 in mint condition. The harddisk even contained the recovery partition, so that I could factory-install the machine. I do like the machine, and still like the T42 a bit more (that's what most of the 15 other old ones were).

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!

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!

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

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

I have two of those - one with a 2.0 GHz processor and one with a 2.2 GHz. I pretty much went through the same process with both of them - no 1802 error, reflowing the RAM slots and SSD upgrades. However, keep in mind that the resoldering job that you did on yours won’t last. I initially did the same, but it took a month or so for the joints to go bad. It seems that the solder itself is not the best quality which would explain why it failed in the first place. What I did as a permanent fix was to use a lot of flux and replace the solder with a leaded one. Just make a big blob on your soldering iron and go over all pins. Don’t worry about the bridging - I managed to bridge several of the pins, but you can always go back to them with a clean tip and fix them. This permanently fixed my two T30, they are absolutely gorgeous machines. Cheers!

Strong and steady video. thank you!

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!

What a great video, thanks. You helped me solve 2 mysteries I had with the T30. 1. What that little pocket was on the bottom and 2. why one of my RAM sockets didn't work. Now that I know I hope I can do the same and return it to functioning. Thanks!

Of all the series that is done on this channel, the retro Thinkpads are my favorite. They bring back so many memories of a time when laptops were mostly for business men and women, with their built quality top notch. I love the T30, T41, T42 & T43. Those were the days!

Not sure what ThinkPad my friend had but it sure was a cool laptop in the 90s. Used to go every weekend and end up downloading 1000s of random songs to take home on my creative MP3 player

I have a T30 that I bought slightly used in 2004 that I still love! I bought it with tons of accessories including 2 full docking stations, as I worked in IT... It's over 20 years old now, an after more than a few replacement batteries, it's still going strong!

I did an SSD mod to my XP IDE laptop, and I also have to agree that it is blazing fast. Great video as always!

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

that air filled bumper is adorable :3

Nice work reflowing the RAM slots!

Great episode Colin!

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. (^:

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.*

Nice work on the laptop and the video.

your X220 video still rules for bang for buck! Thanks for the video!

I literally just acquired a T30 from my works stockpile of old laptops. Great condition and the quality is great. I literally use it for what you said, basic games from the time. I was in high school when XP came out and had a lot of experience with it. Great video. We have a similar taste in computers/electronics. The Sony CD/MP3 disk man you repaired was the same one I had when it first came out. Also I had no idea that was a “airbag” to help protect the hard drive.

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

Nice job and video like always

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

Very enjoyable review. Thank you.

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.

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've got a R500 two years ago, upgraded it to its absolute Max. It features a C2D T9900, 8Gb RAM, a SSD (120Gb (I'm more a cloud guy, so it's plenty for me)) the better Display, a Webcam, and the Fingerprint reader. Drivers are available from Win 2000 up to Win 10. It's actually my daily driver and at the moment my only PC. Got it in Dual Boot with Windows 10 and XP. In Windows 10 it's not much slower than the Laptop from my little Sister (it's a cheap one for around 300 Bucks but mine was significantly cheaper) and in Windows XP it's blazingly fast. I'm from Germany, used Thinkpads tend to be a bit more expensive here. I paid 83 Bucks for the Machine itself, 40 Bucks for the CPU, 10 for the RAM and the rest was already built in or already in my drawer. Got it with a activated Copy of Win 10 Pro on it, I was very glad about this, so I could disable the annoying lock screen in the group policy's. I also paid tribute to it's roots and got the XP Standard Background (in German "Grüne Idylle" ) and I made a modified Welcome Screen from XP so that it says Windows 10 instead. For it's age of now 12 years it's in flawless condition and was extremely clean inside, as if it was never used. Later I found out the Macine was from the Technical University of Braunschweig and was used in the Clean Room, so that explained the extreme cleanliness of it...

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 would so love to have one of these. So fantastic.

Windows XP was an extremely good OS and I used it for a very long time even after it was no longer supported because I refused to use Vista. I'm currently using a 10 machine and I'd much rather have XP or 7 instead because they were much more user friendly. Plus I don't see anything wrong with using XP online as long as you are just doing the basics and have a good Antivirus program installed.

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 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 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!

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

That keyboard layout is pretty cool. I like it.

Ahh the T30 :) we had some on school. Nice retro stuff

Great video. I had the Dell competing model for a while (Latitude C640) with the 2.0GHz P4-M and 32MB ATI 7500. Used to play WoW and such on it, albeit at low settings back until 2008 or so, when I sold it to purchase a HP DV8000 laptop from the store I worked at the time.

I have one of those, my dad bought it back in the early 2000s, never thought it would become a popular laptop some 20 years later.

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.

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!

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.

This video was made with love, god i really miss those machines.

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

Excellent video! I learned alot!

I got my T43 upgraded. Love it!

I have no idea why but his video hit the spot. It was a really satisfying and entertaining video.

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!

Thanks, a lot of useful info here. I just bought one at Goodwill for $10! It definitely needs a CMOS battery, and the main battery is gone too. Unfortunately those are hard to find at a reasonable price. It came with one 1GB RAM module, so if I can get the other bugs worked out I might try bumping it up to 2GB. It also had a 30GB HDD with XP installed, I was thinking of running Linux but I might play around with XP for awhile for old time's sake. And while it seemed to be working OK yesterday, when I booted it up today the touch pad wasn't responding. One more thing to futz with.

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.

Great content!!!

Gracias por tu vídeo, me sirvió muchísimo.

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

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.

This one was our favourites back in the day. X40 was a mixed bag while this one was pretty well flawless.

T42 is the highest compatible spec thinkpad for win98. This video has motivated me to get mine working!

This has inspired me to fix my Satellite Pro 4600 laptop - it has the same faulty RAM slot issue though it does work more often than this T30's slot. Even so, it's not ideal having half the RAM drop out after a reboot.

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.

Fantastic video!!

I deployed hundreds of these to users when they were new. To this day, I think it's still one of the most solidly built laptops I've ever encountered.

I love the nostalgia road your videos always put me in. I worked with one od these machines back in the day, and up to this day, it was one of the best windows machines i had used.

love that screen and the 4/3 like screen ratio, we need a new laptop with such screens, hope the new 16/10 screens will feel similar

This was my first thinkpad, I got it when I was like 7 in 2005 and this thing outlasted 2 other IBM desktops. It was specced like this one, except it's only got 512mb of ram atm. I was stuck with it until late 2013, though, and I was doing everything in my power just to keep it usable in that day because I couldn't afford a modern computer yet. I got a Dock II for it and an Nvidia GT 520 for it's PCI slot, and this card is essentially the last PCI video card ever made (Besides the GT 610, which is identical spec-wise save for a slighter newer revision of OpenGL 4). I've been using this as a retro XP laptop lately, and this video is making me consider fixing a few issues on mine and upgrading some stuff. Namely, a ssd, new cpu, wifi, and maybe fixing those ram slot pins so I can get the full 1gb in there, though I'm not confident in myself and I don't want to risk bridging pins. I've already put in a modern track-nub thing and use a Soundblaster Audigy 2 ZS in the pcmcia slot with it for games, which is really nice.

We frequent used the Infrared port to print to HP printers of the era that had IR ports, and to send data laptop to laptop.

I almost bought that same SSD for my T42, but opted for an adapter + mSATA. Now I see that it's the same thing -- even the protruding pins issue!