Hey Greg (Trailbeast) "you hate Thinkpads"

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67Dart273

67Dart273

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LOLOL. I do have and have had a number of these. This last weekend I stupidly bought 2 more, 1 pretty much a junker A21e (W98 and with a floppy LOL) and a T40 in pretty decent condition, originally Xp

The T40 supposedly had a bad HD but it was just AFU. I got it running with Linux to check it out

ANYway, the T40 was evidently one of the earlier laptops that could boot from the USB. BUT LOL

The bios treats an inserted USB bootable "stick" AS A HARD DRIVE, and not a temporary USB device, and the bios by default puts it second in the list to the main HD but THIS DOES NOT SHOW UP in the optional "F12" boot menu.

God I fought the thing all Sunday morning LOLOL. What you have to do is, insert your USB, boot into setup, select the hard drive, expand it, set the USB device above the HDD, and of course this is with the boot order (separate sub menu) already set with the USB above the HD in priority.

THEN you exit, restart, bring up the F12 menu, and finally, select "boot from HDD" at which time it will finally boot from the USB stick.

LOLOL. I have NEVER run into this mess previously.
 
67Dart273 said:
LOLOL. I do have and have had a number of these. This last weekend I stupidly bought 2 more, 1 pretty much a junker A21e (W98 and with a floppy LOL) and a T40 in pretty decent condition, originally Xp

The T40 supposedly had a bad HD but it was just AFU. I got it running with Linux to check it out

ANYway, the T40 was evidently one of the earlier laptops that could boot from the USB. BUT LOL

The bios treats an inserted USB bootable "stick" AS A HARD DRIVE, and not a temporary USB device, and the bios by default puts it second in the list to the main HD but THIS DOES NOT SHOW UP in the optional "F12" boot menu.

God I fought the thing all Sunday morning LOLOL. What you have to do is, insert your USB, boot into setup, select the hard drive, expand it, set the USB device above the HDD, and of course this is with the boot order (separate sub menu) already set with the USB above the HD in priority.

THEN you exit, restart, bring up the F12 menu, and finally, select "boot from HDD" at which time it will finally boot from the USB stick.

LOLOL. I have NEVER run into this mess previously.
Click to expand...

Sounds about right, and is one of the reasons I never liked the Think Pads.
The Bios settings seem odd compared to others.
I guess I have a thing about the looks of them as well, even though that shouldn't have any stake in it.
They just give the impression of being an outdated brick even when they were new.

The SSD is something we talked about years before they came out as a good possible way of making older machines useful again.
I haven't used one yet, but from your posts it seems they do give a nice advantage over the old mechanicals.

I'm edging out of the computer business gradually, but it is a nice way to make a little extra money here and there.
Yet I'm not bored enough to mess with a Think Pad or Lenovo just for the fun of it even with the "Social Distancing" thing. LOL
I'd much rather figure out a good way to make the idle fuel restrictors on the transition slots adjustable from the outside on my newly acquired Street Avenger. :D
 
Either of you old enough to remember "reference diskettes"?

What a God-awful idea.

Take an expansion card out, and the machine won't boot until you insert the reference diskette.
(for that specific card and that specific model machine)
 
^^YUP^^ and I once had a what, 8088?? That generated lots of arguments, because it had a 1.4 floppy and "everybody" claimed that computer would not support a 1.4 floppy. Turns out it had a fairly rare controller card with onboard bios just for a hd floppy.
 
By the way Greg just did a search and turns out there's a bios upgrade, looks like "it might" fix this
 
YY1 said:
Either of you old enough to remember "reference diskettes"?

What a God-awful idea.

Take an expansion card out, and the machine won't boot until you insert the reference diskette.
(for that specific card and that specific model machine)
Click to expand...

I was still a mechanic during that.
Glad I was too. :D
I came into things in the Windows 3.1 era.
 
Some of my worst "times" was I caught the Magellan virus and didn't know it. It had to have come "from a friend" who gave me some floppies of stuff

Anyhow I kept having trouble. That thing gets into the lower levels of the hdd it does you no good to reformat the drive. And I wasn't smart enough to realize.......you put in a write protected floppy, you get an error it claims it can't read the floppy.

I finally "cured" it, I had bought a NOS Norton suite in a thrift store, in the W98 ish era. Put the virus protection on one computer and BLAM!!! Started catching old floppies that were infected.

I hated 3.x and pretty much went from DOS to W95. My first W95 was a free copy "upgrade." But I did not know the trick about creating 2 files to "fool" the upgrade, so for a long time kept a 3.x copy around to "upgrade" from. This of course was long before the www

In the era, mid 90's when I did the Motorola work, they were using NT in some of the dispatch computers. It was a big mystery. One time the company got a trouble call, and I had to do some follow up install work, so a tech and I went down to Davenport, WA to "fix" the thing. I think they had 3 consoles in dispatch. This is the 911 dispatch. The night shift dispatcher "got smart" and went in and reinstalled the games, and promptly locked up one of the consoles, THEN MOVED TO THE SECOND ONE and LOCKED IT UP. The county was AMAZED that we wanted to CHARGE them for that!!!!!
 
funny this post came up. I busted out an old Win7 Lenovo X100e netbook (on it now!) as my HP power supply is running a Dell for a linux install and its taking FOREVER..? Lenovo excels in build quality (full teardown specs in the users manual) but they blacklist certain wifi cards in the bios? 'UNAUTHORIZED WIFI CARD DETECTED < PLEASE REMOVE AND REBOOT' Lame....
So, I have a WWLAN slot in this that is unpopulated (only 2 slots: half height WLAN and full size WWLAN socket, neither used at moment. Can I run an uSSD in this full sized slot?
 
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