You probably know me as the kind of person who has a lot of Apple laptops.

Well, I recently got invaded by some IBM ThinkPads.

I bought a ThinkPad 570 off ebay. This is a nice 'thin-and-light' model with a Pentium II. I installed Windows 98SE on it and it makes a nice Windows 98 machine. I did have to do quite a lot of odd repairs to it though. Part of the backlight was blocked, and the display hinges snapped. I managed to repair these to an extent though and it is now more-or-less usable.

After getting that, someone on IRC offered me a ThinkPad A31 which was going spare for free. When looking for packaging material at work, he found an old R40 and an R30 in the cupboard, so I ended up with not only the A31, but also an R40 and an R30 as 'filler' .

The R30 has a 1GHz Pentium III, but unfortunately doesn't work. The R40 has a 1.8GHz Pentium M and an ATI Mobility Radeon 7500 with 32MB and a 1024x768 LCD. Its battery also lasts quite a long time . This is a neat machine and I installed Windows 2000 on it.

The A31 however is a really good machine. It dates from 2002, has a Pentium 4 M 1.6GHz, 1GB RAM, an ATI Mobility Radeon 7500 32MB, a high resolution 1400x1050 LCD, 2 Cardbus slots, and two drive bays filled with a floppy drive and a CDRW/DVD drive.

Its 2" thick and weighs a ton. After attempting to carry it to a LAG meeting last year, I decided it would make a good weapon.

I've been using this machine quite a lot. I installed Windows XP, and Office 2000 and have used it for word processing and spreadsheets. Browsing works very well in the latest version of K-Meleon. Firefox also works, albeit slower. I do use a custom HOSTS file though which blocks most ad-servers. It can play DVDs and SD video. It struggles with 720p video though. I've also had it up in the loft a few times monitoring my PV inverter (I had solar power installed recently).

Here's some photos. The first is the 570 is a partially disassembled state, shown next to the A31. The second is the R40 next to the A31.

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