Hey Greg (Trailbeast) "you hate Thinkpads"

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They just give the impression of being an outdated brick even when they were new.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