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The "Old-school ultraportable laptop refurbishment" thread.

C

cheesehead

Lifer
My NC4010 is now gone, and Geeks.com has made an error with my store credit. (They're a great vendor, but customer service is lousy.)

Anyway, I've just snagged a ThinkPad 240.

The thinkpad 240 was something of a white elephant: An ultraportable with abysmal battery life. (1 hour? WTF?) Although its successor, the 200x, which shares everything but the logic board was an excellent performer with 3+ hour battery life, the 240 is not terribly practical.

However, it's not going to be a 240 for long. It's going to get a LOT of upgrades, replacements, and hacks. Although this is what I'd like to do, the order is likely going to vary.

So, here's on the list:

1. New lithium-ion cells for the battery. I've got experience with LiIon cells, and should be able to avoid blowing myself up. And, if I can figure out how the controller works, I might be able to upgrade the cells to more recent higher-capacity models. I might also snag one of the high-capacity models; I've heard you can get 6+ hours of battery life if you can deal with the extra half-pound of battery.

2. Another 128mb of RAM.

3. A 240x motherboard with a 500mhz PIII. It's not going to be easy to find, but a 500mhz PIII is just enough to run a copy of Mepis (the only Linux distro I've managed to figure out how to use). Sadly, the 240x is limited to 192mb of RAM instead of the 256mb+ maximum on the 240, but the better battery life is worth it.

3. A wireless Mini-PCI card. I just wish I could figure out which ones it supports.

4. A new wireless patch antenna. A big one. (Yay, Wifi!)

5. A custom paintjob. Duplicolor Mirage + some sort of durable gloss-coat.

If I could fit more RAM in one of these things, I'd replace the HDD with a 4GB Microdrive, and just run everything from RAM. Battery life would go up, and weight would go down, if only a little bit.

So, anyone else got any wild ideas, stories, and tips for using the greatest laptops of yesteryear?
 
I hope you don't end up being penny-wise, pound-foolish. Exotic laptop parts aren't cheap. I had an old thinkpad whose motherboard crapped out. A new motherboard would have cost $100 off ebay and a new battery another $100. The performace I would have gotten out of the computer did not justify that price (especially since there would not be a warranty). I ended up splurging and bought a 700m for $800 shipped with a three-year warranty and I have not regretted it.

As for your choice of distro: you might want to look at a slimmer one like DeLi Linux. Mepis, IIRC, installs KDE by default, and the installer just does it without asking. KDE is a resource hog. So is gnome, although less so. I have played around with a 500mhz PIII/256mb RAM box; XFCE would run, but I found fluxbox to be much more responsive. If you *need* a desktop environment (not just a window manager), I would look into the ROX desktop. Otherwise, fluxbox should be fine. There are many other lightweight WMs as well; I am just not familiar with them all.
 
Originally posted by: Zirconium
I hope you don't end up being penny-wise, pound-foolish. Exotic laptop parts aren't cheap. I had an old thinkpad whose motherboard crapped out. A new motherboard would have cost $100 off ebay and a new battery another $100. The performace I would have gotten out of the computer did not justify that price (especially since there would not be a warranty). I ended up splurging and bought a 700m for $800 shipped with a three-year warranty and I have not regretted it.

As for your choice of distro: you might want to look at a slimmer one like DeLi Linux. Mepis, IIRC, installs KDE by default, and the installer just does it without asking. KDE is a resource hog. So is gnome, although less so. I have played around with a 500mhz PIII/256mb RAM box; XFCE would run, but I found fluxbox to be much more responsive. If you *need* a desktop environment (not just a window manager), I would look into the ROX desktop. Otherwise, fluxbox should be fine. There are many other lightweight WMs as well; I am just not familiar with them all.
Click to expand...

Thanks!

I've seen a couple places selling motherboards for under 50$, so I should be okay. My budget for this machine is about 150$ after all upgrades.

Laptop: 55$
Wireless card: 5$
New battery, or re-celling old battery: 30$
RAM: 15$
New motherboard: 50$

I already have a 30GB HDD handy if more storage space is needed.

Sadly, I think I'm going to be limited to 192mb of RAM, so Fluxbox looks like the way to go. I'm a linux newbie, but I'm going to yarf if I have to use Windows again. (so much lost homework....)

EDIT:

D*mn Small Linux looks like a great distro for an underpowered laptop.

DS Linux homepage

192mb of RAM and a PIII 500 is overkill. Plus, it's designed to boot off of a flash drive, and because it uses a tiny amount of RAM, I might be able to get away replacing the hard drive with a CompactFlash card, reducing the weight even more and improving battery life.

(Then agian, with the "extended" battery, these can get 6+ hours. What's not to like?)

Further edit:

Someone's already done this!

http://www.jshegarty.com/
 
I think your prices are off. Even if they aren't you're spending over $200 on old outdated laptop, which is half the price of a budget laptop on sale. I hope you have fun, but I don't think it's worth it.
 
Originally posted by: BladeVenom
I think your prices are off. Even if they aren't you're spending over $200 on old outdated laptop, which is half the price of a budget laptop on sale. I hope you have fun, but I don't think it's worth it.
Click to expand...

You'd be right, but this is an ultraportable. A "budget laptop" priced 400$ would not stand up to what I put a laptop through, and they'd weigh far too much for me to use them. Furthermore, most laptops under 400$ have a battery life of two hours or less; I need at least three.

Sure, it's not as fast as a modern laptop. It doesn't need to be. Word processing is not very hardware-intensive, and neither is listening to music. If I want to make Skatalites/Los Amigos Invisibles mix CD's, I'd do that on the beefy desktop I'm going to buy with the money I save.

And, in terms of quality, the 240 series is hard to beat. Plus, if I drop it, a new screen is only 40$!
 
Keep in mind, Damn Small Linux cripples some of its programs to get it that small. It also uses either a different compiler or some weird flags for gcc. I'd shy away from it if your laptop can handle it. On the other hand, I did used to dual-boot with DSL because it can load entirely into RAM, create a ramdisk, and unmount the hard drive for even more power savings. If I had 2gb of RAM, I would definitely do that again because I could load DSL, copy one or two movies into the ramdisk, and still have half a gig of ram to run on.

My distro of choice is Gentoo, however, that won't fly on a slow computer (imagine compiling X11!). My fallback would then be either Slackware or Debian; Slackware because it doesn't assume that you are a retard, or Debian, because of the huge number of packages available for it, and apt is awesome (although I am not sure if that has been phased out... it has been a while). In either case, my issue with DSL is that I am not sure if you can install other programs easily, and you don't want to be compiling them on your machine. Ultimately, here are the prgrams I would get in your situation:

Base installation
X11
Fluxbox or ROX desktop
Abiword
Gnumeric
XMMS
Mplayer
Pysol
Firefox
Thunderbird
Gaim
 
Originally posted by: Zirconium
Keep in mind, Damn Small Linux cripples some of its programs to get it that small. It also uses either a different compiler or some weird flags for gcc. I'd shy away from it if your laptop can handle it. On the other hand, I did used to dual-boot with DSL because it can load entirely into RAM, create a ramdisk, and unmount the hard drive for even more power savings. If I had 2gb of RAM, I would definitely do that again because I could load DSL, copy one or two movies into the ramdisk, and still have half a gig of ram to run on.

My distro of choice is Gentoo, however, that won't fly on a slow computer (imagine compiling X11!). My fallback would then be either Slackware or Debian; Slackware because it doesn't assume that you are a retard, or Debian, because of the huge number of packages available for it, and apt is awesome (although I am not sure if that has been phased out... it has been a while). In either case, my issue with DSL is that I am not sure if you can install other programs easily, and you don't want to be compiling them on your machine. Ultimately, here are the prgrams I would get in your situation:

Base installation
X11
Fluxbox or ROX desktop
Abiword
Gnumeric
XMMS
Mplayer
Pysol
Firefox
Thunderbird
Gaim
Click to expand...


The problem is that I don't know much about linux. DSL is designed to work with laptops, requires very little CPU power, and is all set up and ready to go.

You're also assuming that this is going to be a high-powered work machine: I isn't. The only compiling I'll be doing is for ATMEL microcontrollers, assuming I can learn how to program them, and seeing as how program size is limited to 4k anyway, I don't think it's going to tax the CPU too much.

In fact, I think this is a big problem with how people see laptops: Portable desktops. I don't need to burn CD's, edit video, or even do any graphics work. All I really need is OpenOffice (or Koffice, or another word processor), Firefox (or something similar), and, if I can get it to work, EaglePCB.

That's the point of this project: To build a laptop that's easy to set up, easy to use, and practical. Strictly speaking, 99% of my requirements are satisfied by a PalmPilot with a keyboard; however, having tried to use a PalmPilot as a laptop, I can certify that the tiny screen will give you a killer headache.
 
Firstly, I'm not assuming that this is a "high-powered work machine." I have no idea where you got that. Quite the opposite; YOU WANT ABIWORD/GNUMERIC RATHER THAN OPENOFFICE/KOFFICE! Abiword is a word processor. Gnumeric is a spreadsheet. Both are lightweight.

Secondly, you don't want DSL as a permanent primary install if your computer can handle it. Here is why:
  1. Upgrade path. How well does DSL support getting updates and bug fixes? For instance, current DSL has issues with unionfs. Also, having just looked at it, DSL does not support/will not support the 2.6 kernel. FROM PERSONAL EXPERIENCE, I FIND THE 2.6 KERNEL TO BE MUCH BETTER FOR LAPTOPS.
  2. New programs. It looks like DSL does have apt, so you may be able to get new programs, but they may not work properly since DSL is not "pure Debian based" according to the site.
  3. Crippled programs. When I last used Damn Small Linux, they stripped a lot out of Firefox to get it small. This may have been changed, but from the looks of it, many of the things they did to make DSL small have crippled it in the sense that it isn't very flexible/expandable.
I think you would be better off using a regular distribution of linux like Debian, and just installing the lightweight packages. You don't need to go for a tiny footprint, which is DSL's primary goal. You just don't need the fluff which many of the easy distributions provide without asking. It is possible to install Debian and go from the ground up. This is not the easiest route to take, but you will end up with a system that has the programs that you need, a system that will be easier for you to debug (because you learned how to configure things as you were setting it up), and you will have also gained linux mastery.
 
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