Tempest wrote on 2020-08-05, 17:54:
I managed to find a working IBM Thinkpad 760EL. It appears to come with a floppy drive, PCMCIA ethernet card, 1GB HD, and 104MB of RAM. It has Windows 98 SE installed on it, but I'd like to do a fresh install. My questions are thus:
Nice! I bought one of these in 2002 and still have it. Windows 95OSR2.5 is closer to what these shipped with, and flies on them. I have the Pentium 120 model. I also have a 365XD which is the "budget" version of these.
Tempest wrote on 2020-08-05, 17:54:
1. What's the best way to hook up a CD drive to it? It appears to have parallel and serial ports, so I suppose I can go that route. This model doesn't have the built in CD drive unfortunately. Someone must have had a CD drive hooked up to it at one point unless they had a 3.5" floppy based version of Windows 98 SE (if it exists).
The floppy drive and the front bezel for the floppy drive snap out and get replaced by the cd-rom drive. This means you have to be creative when installing Windows since you can't have both in at the same time (boot from floppy, format c: /s, copy cd-rom drivers and mscdex, shut down, boot with cd-rom in). Note that these laptops cannot boot from cd-rom, even with Smart Boot Manager. I don't see any of the cd-rom drives for it on eBay (where I bought mine ages ago).
Since you have PCMCIA ethernet, I'd just use that from DOS to get the win95 directory from the cd-rom copied to C: (or if you insist, win98). I personally use a packet driver and Kermit, which may or may not be the fastest way, but I'm familiar with kermit. You could also look into ftp with MTCP. And then install from there. The only downside is these laptops are short on disk space, and the hard drive is proprietary so you can't do anything about it.
Tempest wrote on 2020-08-05, 17:54:
2. The battery of course is quite dead. Is there a source of new batteries for these?
Some other ThinkPads of this era had both NiMH and Li-Ion batteries available so look out for that. However, even when fresh the battery life on these is pathetic per modern standards, so I may not bother.
Tempest wrote on 2020-08-05, 17:54:
3. Is there anything else I should know about it?
I think it has a 64MB RAM cacheable limit. You may want to look into this and it may be worth taking the RAM down some especially if you do Win95. There is 8MB onboard RAM which is how you get oddball sizes like 104MB. Someone will join in with the best utility to check for this or opine on how bad it hurts performance.
The onboard VGA, Trident Cyber9320, works fine in Windows but is horribly incompatible with Linux, especially with the DSTN screen.
The onboard audio is ESS1688 or thereabouts, which has good Sound Blaster compatibility.
All the drivers are still online. You need to install the ThinkPad configuration utility before you can hibernate.
Being IBM, there are OS/2 drivers available for this. There are also Win3.x drivers if you want a superfast 3.11 machine.
