The Thinkpad 600x is a laptop computer, introduced in late 1999, by IBM. It came equiped with some variant of the Intel Mobile Pentium III Processor and 64MB of Memory by default, it had a Neomagic MagicGraph256ZX GPU that fed a 1024x768 Screen

Thinkpad 600x

I bought this Thinkpad in 2021 on ebay for a cheap price and it came in a condition that reflected that price, the first thing you would have noticed is the packaging, it came in a pizza carton that was actually used and a few layers of bubblewrap. Besides that the screen was thoroughly cracked, maybe by a impact from the back side, sice the chassis has a small crack there too, the harddrive was defective, and the cmos battery was unsurprisingly empty. The CD-drive is barely working and i didn't even bother trying the battery. It is currently (2022-01-06) running NetBSD 9.2 and being used to write parts of this page, including this paragraph.

Restauration

When it arrived at my place the Thinkpad 600x was in a bad state, dirty and broken, so the first task was to clean it, especially since it came wrapped in a pizza carton, that, as i said, had been used for it's intended purpose before. I nearly fully disassembled it, blew all the crud out of it, then i took the keycaps of the keyboard, gave them a nice bath with some dishwashing soap, and then cleaned the inside of the keyboard with some cotton swabs. After this it at least was not a biohazard anymore.

The next part, of course, was to replace the broken parts with working ones. For the screen i had a lot of luck and got a working one on ebay for a price i was willing to pay the first time i looked, the hard part was actually replacing the sceen, a problem that i probably was fighting with for weeks, since, it turns out, someone had glued the front bezel, that supposedly slides off, to the frame, which, of course, confused me a lot. Obviously not wanting to break my precious "new" device i was too careful to even get to the point where i noticed the glue (or was it double sided tape? I don't remember), but when i finally noticed that i managed to get the bezel off with some persuasive violence and isopropy alcohol, and finally could put in the replacement screen that i had ordered, and that, at this point, had been laying on my shelf for quite some time.

The next problem to tackle was electricity, the laptop came without power supply, so i got one of those, and, expecting the probable, a new cmos battery as well. At this point months had passed since i originally got the thinkpad, so i was quite relieved to see it post when i put the cmos pattery in and connected it to power.

At this point i decided that i couldn't be bothered to deal with the speed and sound of a two decade old hard-disk and a i got an adaper from ide to msata, since i had a "unused" msata ssd in my old laptop, which turned out to be a good decision in more than one way. When trying to actually try some modern OS on the thinkpad my suspicion that the cd drive was borked in some way, that i had since first removing it from the rest of the machine and noticed that it made a sound like a small loose ball bearing was rolling around inside. The cd drive manages to boot some operating systems just fine, while failing in one way or another with every linux distro i tried (i might document this in detail sometime), my attempts to get an replacement have not been met with sucess until now, i got one that was sold as "working" but it turned out to be even more broken than the one i already had, in that it didn't even spin up properly.

The remaining problems that i identified until now are: broken clips on the bottom of some keycaps, a broken lid-switch, an aftermarket battery that i didn't even try yet, and i didn't get the souncard working yet, probably an issue with the firmware, or possibly the loading process.

last changed 2022-01-11