Used to have a bunch of vintage ThinkPads, but I sold 'em along with all the parts, guts, whatnots. I had:
- 2x 755CX, both dead to some extent
- 2x 760EL TFT
- 760EL DSTN (never again)
- 380ED with combo CD/FDD and Chinese keyboard (allegedly rare, got a good price for it)
- 560
- 560E
- 2x 560X
- 2x 600E
- 600X
It was fun stacking them all and making a metre-long tower of power in the storage 😁
Thermalwrong wrote on 2022-02-14, 10:27:
I wonder if that's why I'm so fond of the Thinkpad 240 series? They were really manufactured by Acer and don't have the rubberised coating ...
My favorite model to use on a "daily" basis and not to power on once a month, gaze at and shove it back into storage were the 560 series. Swift, portable, the batteries weren't dead, played a lot of games on them too depite the LCD not being able to scale pixels properly. On the other hand they wouldn't accept an IDE-SD adapter nor did I have that proprietary external floppy, so the one in the worst shape was my go-to retro machine for about 2 years... without screws for easy access to hard drive 😁
The 380ED was like a bigger 560 and not as comfortable to use due to it being bulky, the 755CX always booted up with a random problem, and the 760s - while arguably the cooles of the bunch, with a separate status LCD, flip-up keyboard, modular expansion system, but the keyboard itself was so awful it turned me off. The 600s were solid, though the rubber coating was not pleasant, and they all had to have their hard drive connectors fixed due to a "Fabrikfehler", so to speak.
I ultimately just kind of lost the bug for them? The more I used them the more of their drawbacks I noticed (limiting hardware, poor LCD scaling, comfort issues, various bugs and issues such as your screen suddenly becoming garbled and having to work on them for the next few days), and since I wanted to primarily play games and enjoy what hardware I've been missing on, I started getting into the standalone PC platform. Using my friend's Pentium machine with a Voodoo 1 and a soundcard with an AdMOS wavetable daughterboard was pretty eye-opening and a final nail in the coffin. I put all my laptops on auction sites shortly after.
That being said, my workbench machine is a docked X220 with Ubuntu, I used to use a T450s for about a year, and had both the X270 and the P53 for a few days. And I sure would like another ThinkPad in the future, even if it's one of those new ones that all the diehard fans rant about... They're still good, durable, longlasting laptops.
I'd like to get another 600, or an XP-era ThinkPad to incorporate into my retro PC network at some point in the future, albeit after IBM switched from the numerical to the new naming scheme I can't distinguish between all the models. I've heard the T43 and R51 are good all-rounders.