IBM. Established in 1911, the company pioneered their "Thinkpad" line of laptops beginning with the 700T in Q2 of 1992. The laptop that I recieved last year from my Grandfather is shown here on the right; the Thinkpad x40 here contains 1.5GB of DDR333 RAM, an Intel Pentium Mobile processor clocket at 1.6GHz. It contains a 40GB (very cute) 1.8inch hard drive (this was also featured on the original Apple iPod!), known as the "IBM Microdrive". I/O can be seen on the last 2 pictures, but my favourites are the RJ-11 connector featured for dial-up internet, and the PC card slot that technically allows for some USB-3.0 ports to be installed, even if they couldn't ever get close to real USB 3 speeds.

Setting up the Thinkpad was certaintly a process. When I recieved the laptop, it wasn't booting whatsoever. After finding a suitable battery out of the number that were provided to me, I charged it up to get a loud beeping noise before start up - this was a cmos error. I took it apart to check the cmos, and used my multimeter to test that it was providing current - which after about 20 years it of course wasn't. A replacement came quickly from amazon with the wrong connector, so I soldered the new battery onto the old battery's wires, before plugging it in. It seems taking it apart for this also fixed whatever errors I was experiencing that stopped the computer from entering POST, and it promptly booted right up. Unfortunately the drive was wiped, so there was no Windows XP for me!

I originally set the thinkpad up with the i386 build of Debian Linux, which was Bookworm at the time. This worked well, however the laptop came with only 512MB of ram, and with the Sway config that I loaded up from my Github (in a rush to test it's power), it was lagging to high heaven. I cycled through a number of distributions, with issues throughout - the Runit system on Void Linux proved problematic when it didn't allow the computer to be soft shutdown, and Alpine linux' package manager was lacking to say the least. I even got a build of archlinux32 to work, however the massive number of issues became too much to handle. I decided that the best course of action would be to settle for Debian Bookworm.

The current setup is using Debian Bookworm with the LXDE Window Manager. LXDE is an open source desktop manager that is extremely lightweight, and has had no problems running on this computer. I kept it pretty default, with a lain background that I found on Pinterest (I found the greek cool haha). The aesthetic that I aimed for is the early 2010s aero kind of feel, which I think i captured pretty well in the title bars and taskbar on the desktop, as well as with the hazyness of the background. I was able to use the laptop for a number of tasks - programming with Neovim in C, terminal commands and navigation, as well as file management, and I even got some decent internet browsing done - Firefox still supports i686 systems well, so no javascript issues here!

This laptop has been so fun to use. It has it's many quirks, but it has allowed me to really get a sense of how it was to use a computer back in the 2000s, and has given me the much needed experience of a real 32-bit device! I am planning to keep using it with the current config as it is working perfectly. I hope that you enjoyed reading about it, and if you have any questions feel free to contact me about them at truneosprinter@proton.me