Category Archives: ThinkPad

Butterfly Conservation

The OS/2 Museum recently acquired one of the famous IBM 701 ThinkPads, commonly nicknamed “Butterfly” thanks to the fold-out keyboard. Unfortunately, the unit suffered a fate common to many old ThinkPads—battery leakage. The unit would power on, but it had … Continue reading

Posted in PC hardware, ThinkPad | 3 Comments

SMD Fun

I recently tried to revive an old ThinkPad 600 (with a 300 MHz mobile Pentium II processor). The system wouldn’t boot up and reported errors (173, 163) which are usually a good indication of a dead CMOS battery. In a … Continue reading

Posted in PC hardware, ThinkPad | 2 Comments

IBM ThinkPad 755CD

An earlier article about PowerPC-based ThinkPad 850 mentioned that the 850 was a close cousin of x86-based ThinkPads of the era. The OS/2 Museum now takes a look at one of those laptops, and interesting laptop in its own right: … Continue reading

Posted in IBM, ThinkPad | 9 Comments

Cracking a ThinkPad 755C

Note: Most of the following information does not apply to any Lenovo-made ThinkPads or even IBM-made ThinkPads manufactured after circa 1999. If you have one of those laptops protected with an unknown password, please look elsewhere. Imagine you bought, found, … Continue reading

Posted in IBM, PC hardware, ThinkPad | 16 Comments

Don’t Let This Happen to You

I recently got an old ThinkPad on eBay for a modest price. The seller marked it as defective, with absolutely no warranty. Since the ThinkPad came with a port replicator (the kind with two PCMICA slots) and an external 2.88MB … Continue reading

Posted in PC hardware, ThinkPad | 10 Comments