Thinkpad T43: About Computer Archeology, Collectibles, and Cakes

In 2009, I published a review of the ThinkPad 380ED laptop, which at the time was 12 years old. Why not continue the tradition and write about a laptop, which is about the same age as it is being played right now? It was decided, I thought, and went to look for a suitable model.

That is, no, it was not so. I just sat at the local e-flea market and watched what was on sale. The criteria were simple: Thinkpad, preferably still developed by IBM, and as cheap as possible. The first was the ThinkPad T40 for 20 euros (about him like some other time). The second was the T43 - for twenty-five, in a chic package with an IPS-screen. Buy a laptop for the price of a trip to a cafe - a great gift for yourself on New Year's Eve.

In this post there will be a story about the purchase and development of the old laptop in the “expensive diary” format, a comparison of the old ThinkPad with the new ones, as well as some sofa analytics about collecting, nostalgia and the evolution of technology.

UPD: Progress in their outdated research will be shared in the Telegram: https://t.me/emm386

Context

The Thinkpad T43 series was announced in January 2005, and at the end of 2004 it became aware of the purchase of the IBM personal systems division by Lenovo. The T43 is thus one of the latest laptops developed by IBM. A year later, the Thinkpad T60 was released, which for a long time became a cult among fans of the brand, thanks to the “correct” nameplate, a screen with a 4: 3 aspect ratio and suitability for upgrading: after a light (sarcasm!) File, you can put almost a Core i7 there fifth generation. T43 does not have such a status, which has a positive effect on the cost of using copies.
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Specifications

I got a model 2668-88u with the following parameters at birth:

• Single-core 32-bit Pentium M 750 1.86 GHz processor (the first Intel dual-core mobile processors will appear a year later)
• 512 megabytes of DDR2 RAM
• ATI Mobility Radeon X300 graphics card, 64 megabytes of its own memory. Performance - approximately 10% of the video capabilities integrated into modern Intel Haswell processors
• Hard disk 40 GB 5400RPM, IDE interface
• Intel 2200bg Wireless Module
• DVD / CD-RW drive
• Built-in modem and infrared port
• 15 inch screen, IPS, resolution 1400x1050
• 6-cell battery (3.8 hours of battery life, up to 5.7 hours with an extended 9-cell).
• PCMCIA II / III slot
• Two USB 2.0 connectors
• Weight 2.57 kg (and this is a “combination of power and mobility” series for frequent travelers!)

Full specifications are still available on the IBM website here . People from the future , let me know when this link dies, change to a web archive. Drivers for older IBM and Lenovo laptops are still available here .

Cost at the time of the announcement: $ 2349 in the United States or a little more than $ 3,000 modern dollars adjusted for inflation. In rubles it is 66030 at the rate of January 2005 or 172000 at the rate of January 2018. For 13 years, the cost of a laptop has dropped 100 times.

condition

A laptop used.


The crack on palmrest is the only serious cosmetic defect.


Not counting the scratches on the lid: on the firm rough coating, they are simply inevitable.


Very thick laptop. From above - my working 12-inch Dell. Not the most honest comparison, but still.


Thinklight bulb, finally cut, it seems, in the Lenovo Thinkpad X / T * 40 series. And no webcam. Privacy!


The insides. The cooler made death sounds, therefore it was temporarily replaced with an analogue from the T40 (until it arrives to replace the new one). The original videochip also closes, but here it is open (it does not overheat).


The battery is replaced by the previous owner of the extended non-original. Due to this, it preserved 75% of the capacity, while the original from the T40 shows less than 20% (but still works). Detecting non-original battery was not yet able.


But they were able to detect a non-original hard disk. Before me, the original 40 gigabytes were replaced by 30, and this was not an officially approved spare part. There is a separate setting in the BIOS about this: do not boot at all or squeak and complain. The patched BIOS found on the Internet has rid the laptop of complaints. As a result, a quieter 80GB hard drive was installed.


One RAM slot is available for user upgrades. The second is under the keyboard, but officially access was not approved. The maximum amount of RAM is 2 gigabytes, which is collectively tested on a very useful resource for ThinkWiki Linux users .

One button on the keyboard was glued with superglue, I had to rearrange it from another laptop. In the T40 and T43 series, 14-inch and 15-inch models were produced simultaneously. The keyboards are structurally the same, but the fastener is located differently and is not rearranged. The same is true for the mass of other small parts.


For example, for a touchpad: the devices are the same, the fasteners are different. The touchpad of this notebook was flooded with something sticky, the buttons were short, and this was the main reason for the low price: “slowly or in no way reacts to mouse clicks”. I had to rearrange the buttons with the T40, and pin mount. Over time, it is possible to replace the cracked palmrest with the touchpad.

Release T43 came at the beginning of the transition from the IDE interface to SATA. The hard disk controller is already SATA, but since at the time of production such hard disks were small and they were expensive, a chip was installed that converts SATA to PATA. A common modification of this laptop is to evaporate the chip and replace the connector for installing a modern SATA HDD or SSD (more here and here ). For my taste, this is a bust, it is easier to buy a PATA-mSATA converter and install an SSD in this way. Double conversion will turn out, and there may be a loss in performance, but does anyone really have to worry about performance in an ancient laptop?

Usage scenarios

In 2009, I tried to push even the out-of-date Thinkpad 380ED: I built such a torrent torrent (though adequate to the then Internet channel). Since then, much has changed: there is no point in using the T43 for something really useful that no longer exists. If you have a little money, more powerful used computers and laptops are not much more expensive. If you're home Kulibin and sawing all sorts of file balls and mail servers, there are Raspberry Pi and similar minicomputers, with similar performance and much lower power consumption.

About 7 years ago such a laptop could be recommended for simple tasks: office, internet, cinema. Now an inexpensive tablet is better for movie films. The Internet is incredibly heavy, not even on traffic, but on various autorun videos and other javascript. YouTube on T43 can only be viewed in 360p resolution, and only in single-tasking mode (offline video 720p and higher is not supported at all). As for the office, from an unsupported and unpatched Windows XP, it is better not to access work-type resources. Not safe. Windows 7 (and 10) will work on T43 too, but they will slow down already. As a result, something is missing all the time: either the cores, or the memory, or the speed of the hard disk. Is that the screen of this model is very good, and is inferior only to 4K displays.


Comparison with modern 12-inch IPS FullHD display. The screen of the new laptop definitely wins in brightness. Perhaps the reason for this and run down luminescent backlight T43. The color rendition of the old laptop is really warm-tube, it also warms up when turned on, changing the shades of colors. The advantages of a 4: 3 screen when viewing photos are quite obvious here.

Okay, you can say that the further, the more problems with the launch of the old software and operating systems. At the end of last year, for example, Intel decided to abandon the BIOS in favor of pure UEFI, which will finally close the topic with the launch of Windows XP natively. I do not think that this is an argument for buying the old hardware with the aim of launching old programs. Yes, there may be problems on new systems, but this does not mean that they are not on older systems. Emulation is much more convenient and practical, at least for DOS, at least for Windows 98, at least for XP. Why then do we need old computers? Yes, just because I want to.



Therefore, I will use the T43 as a working museum piece. I installed adequate software on it, downloaded old games, copied music from CDs, which I recorded back in the early 2000s for my MP3 / CD player. I will sometimes include it and recall youth, in such a geeky context. In contrast to the modern environment, in which almost all data is in the cloud, everything will be available at any time offline, as befits the era of the beginning of the two thousandth, the era before Facebook. The main thing to remember is to periodically back up your hard drive to some more reliable media.



The ThinkPad T43 supports the Dock II docking station, which is equipped not only with a full set of ports, from serial to DVI, but also with a PCI card slot. An interesting way to experiment, say, with old sound cards.

Old and new ThinkPad, or talk about cakes

Lenovo continues the IBM tradition and announces new ThinkPad models in January. This year it is a new ultra-portable ThinkPad X280 (alas, without a removable battery and with a limited number of ports) and notebooks T480 and T580, direct descendants of Thinkpad T43.


There was no photo of the Thinkpad T580, so here's a picture of the ThinkPad T570.

The times have changed: if in the announcement of 2005 there is a huge sheet of technical characteristics, now there are only beautiful words about mobility, speed, lightness and productivity. Words for 13 years have not changed at all, and the characteristics at the time of the preparation of the material was not at all publicly available. Last year's Thinkpad T570, a direct analogue of the T43, weighs 2 kilos, comes with a dual-core processor (there should be four cores in the T480), costs from $ 1,000, comes with a FullHD screen, which is slightly better than the T43 display, or 4K.

It is clear that productivity has grown by an order of magnitude, but what about ergonomics and convenience? The T43 has another “ta” correct seven-row keyboard, thick plastic, a small but comfortable touchpad. Among the fans of the series, it is widely believed that laptops are no longer the same. In a sense, this is true, laptops "now" and "then" are very different devices in terms of consumer qualities. But after a week of acquaintance with a 13-year-old laptop, I can not say that it is much more convenient. It is heavy, it has sores corrected later (a crack on the palmrest - it is not from inaccurate use, but from a lack of construction), and even the keyboard (forgive me) is too noisy for my taste, although it is pleasant to the touch.

ThinkPad T43 belongs to the era when the laptop was something special, such a triumph of technology. Now it is business as usual, an industry with a small margin, where the flight of an engineer’s fantasy can easily reset the annual profit. This business cynicism actually helps: modern laptops are more convenient, more practical and more functional if you need to work, and not indulge in memories.



But still, the T43 caused me as many positive emotions as any new laptop is no longer able to cause. Apparently, this is a sign of impending old age. I appreciated the convenience of the screen with classic proportions, versatility, incredible maintainability and a lot of small things that increase reliability.

It seems to me that in another 5-10 years laptops will finally become niche devices for professionals. They will again be expensive, as they will be sold in thousands, not millions. So, there will be more opportunities to produce models on requests of those who are willing to pay. Then I can get a new laptop with modern iron, but a classic keyboard and a 4: 3 screen, with a set of ports and batteries for my discerning taste.

But I want it?