So, I decided to fix my old Thinkpad T42, the fan was blowing at full speed no matter what the CPU temp was. I loaded the sensors package to check out the
fan speed and used cpufreq-info to tell me what the current speed was. At 600 mhz, it was turning 3200 RPM.

Open the system up, accidentally strip one of the screws. Find a spare screw I pulled from a dead Thinkpad, proceed. go at the CPU fan with a toothbrush and canned air. Some dust, not too much built up. I've seen worse.

Go into the BIOS and check the rev - I've got the newest. Reset to defaults, and UH OH.

1802 - non-authorized card in Mini-PCI slot. Remove and reboot.

I bought a Dell-branded Intel 3945 ABG card to replace a wonky 2200BG card that wouldn't stay connected. I had to run a BIOS program in the past to hack the BIOS.

Remove the wristpad, the PCI card, run No-1802, put everything back together and now I'm back up and running.

The fan alternates between 0 and 2900 RPMs now - 350 RPMs less. it's a lot quieter, and I suspect I'll get better battery life, too.

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Re: Old laptops...
By: Poindexter Fortran to All on Sun Apr 06 2014 01:21:07

The fan alternates between 0 and 2900 RPMs now - 350 RPMs less. it's a lot quieter, and I suspect I'll get better battery life, too.

Nice! I was starting to think the way that your post was going that you were going to have a lot of wasted time & effort there. It was nice to
see quite the opposite. Kind of makes me think about trying a little bit
more hardware work on laptops myself now, too. I've pretty much stuck to standard size systems work to this point. All of the proprietary crap and everything sometimes being stuck on one board has kept me away from working
on laptops to this point.


-- guh up the effbomb down wif yr bad self


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Re: Old laptops...
By: Poindexter Fortran to All on Sun Apr 06 2014 01:21 am

Open the system up, accidentally strip one of the screws. Find a spare
screw I pulled from a dead Thinkpad, proceed. go at the CPU fan with a toothbrush and canned air. Some dust, not too much built up. I've seen worse.

Go into the BIOS and check the rev - I've got the newest. Reset to
defaults, and UH OH.

1802 - non-authorized card in Mini-PCI slot. Remove and reboot.

I bought a Dell-branded Intel 3945 ABG card to replace a wonky 2200BG card that wouldn't stay connected. I had to run a BIOS program in the past to hack the BIOS.

Remove the wristpad, the PCI card, run No-1802, put everything back
together and now I'm back up and running.

The fan alternates between 0 and 2900 RPMs now - 350 RPMs less. it's a lot quieter, and I suspect I'll get better battery life, too.

i had a laptop that wouldnt stay cool BECAUSE the fan wouldn't spin enough. i clipped a wire so it ran at 100% all the time and it fixed that issue. it was a republic of gamers asus laptop.
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Re: Old laptops...
By: Khelair to Poindexter Fortran on Sun Apr 06 2014 07:22 am

stuck to standard size systems work to this point. All of the
proprietary crap and everything sometimes being stuck on one board has kept me away from working on laptops to this point.

Yeah, but old thinkpads.

Built like tanks, with quirks, but they last forever and they managed to keep the same charger for years, so those are cheap.

The IBM-branded ones last forever, and there are *cheap* parts on eBay for them. When Lenovo started branding them, they took a step back. The T60 has some odd design flaws (like using SATA drives running through a PATA bridge, slowing the drive to PATA speeds) and the aforementioned BIOS complaining about non-IBM hard drives and network cards.

The newer T4XX series are nice - the T410 has the last real keyboard, whereas the T420 went to a chiclet.

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Re: Old laptops...
By: Poindexter Fortran to Khelair on Mon Apr 07 2014 12:59 am



More BatShit Crazyness(tm) with old Thinkpads:

Two things that drove me crazy with old thinkpads - older Pentium M CPUs don't report that they support PAE, although they do. Most new Linux distros don't support non-PAE, and the installers will fail. You can either spin your own installer, or install an old version like Ubuntu 12.04 and run through a bunch of upgrades.

You can upgrade from a 1.6 Ghz Banius Pentium 4-M chip to a 2.1 Ghz Dothan Pentium4-M, which gives you twice the cache, lower power usage and may support PAE, for $30.

The second PITA is that they have PATA drives but have a SATA controller with a PATA to SATA bridge. Some people have figured out a way to solder directly to the SATA controller and install an MSATA card into the drive bay.

So, for a bit of change I could get about as fast as you can get with a single core and go from a PATA hard drive to SATA SSD speeds.

Yes, I could get a new laptop, but I like the 4:3 screen and love the keyboard.

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