Old School ThinkPad

I go through so many computers, that sometimes a machine will fall through the cracks. Although, I'll occasionally need to clean out "the crumbs", I'll also find that jewel as well. In this case, it was the titanium lidded Z61m that I had worked diligently on to bring back from "discarded project" of another ThinkPadder to become a "do-everything" mobile workstation. Unfortunately, it never fully came to fruition due to a locked BIOS. Now, I've dealt with other machines with the BIOS locked before, and in general it's not an issue, however this particular machine wasn't recognizing the wifi card. I tried a number of cards with the same results. It came down to that it was either a defect on the board with was highly unlikely, or that it was shut off in the BIOS somewhere. This is not a very good state of affairs for a mobile workstation! After a while it fell by the wayside, especially since around that time I fell under a proverbial avalanche of ThinkPads! On top of that, many of those machines were more updated (T61), or more powerful (T60p). So, it sat forlornly in the "boneyard" under the workbench. It even suffered the ignominity of giving up it's updated parts (T7200 CPU, 4Gb RAM, 80Gb SSD) to other "front-burner" projects. 

When things were looking it's worse, a plot-twist appeared. As part of my OTP (Old ThinkPad) Server project, I was reexamining my stock of IDE/PATA laptop drives and decided to clear them out while their value was high. I listed them on the ThinkPad forum, from which an acquaintance offered a trade for one of the 160Gb drives. Among the things he had to offer was a derelict, but working Z61m! A couple of nights ago, the working base of his Z61m got mated to my screen and other top parts. The parts box coughed up 4Gb of RAM that came out of my old X300, and a 160Gb Intel X18 SSD. 

Then this morning, after a BIOS "whitelist" hack, it got an Atheros 5418 "N" wireless card! This was the capper! The very reason that it originally ended up under the bench. Now, it can be a fully MOBILE workstation! Yeah, I gave up a nicer ATI Mobility Radeon GPU on the other board, but the reality is that, it's not something I'll really miss given what I'll be using this machine to do. What'll this machine be expected to do?

In a word..... "gruntwork", that's what. My primary portable computer is the uber-sleek ThinkPad X1, however, it's a sports car of laptops. You can haul tree branches in a Porsche, but you won't find it very enjoyable. The old red pickup (Z61m) of laptops, on the other hand, may not be very sleek, or up-to-date, but it can do pretty much anything...... not fast, or stylishly, but it'll do it without complaint.