[ltp] IBM Thinkpad T41 type 2373-7fu; recommendations for auction purchase and *nix type

Wed, 25 Aug 2010 13:23:52 -0400

Not being a fan of semi-commercial distros, I can't say I've tried Ubuntu on a 
T4x-series machine.  I have, however, used Debian on my T43p with great 
success.

ThinkPads tend to be primarily Intel hardware, and since they're pretty close 
to a "reference" system of sorts, they tend to be very well supported by Linux 
distros.  The T4x series is no exception to this.  Assuming you get an Intel 
WLAN card built in, about the only thing that I can think of that would give 
you driver trouble would be any machines that shipped with ATI GPUs.  While 
there are Linux drivers for the Radeon series, power saving support is nowhere 
near as good as with the Windows drivers, so they tend to run a bit on the hot 
side.

> I'm allowed to test them before I bid, is there anything specific I
> should be looking for?

Not that I can think of.  Just keep in mind that the T4x series is prone to a 
couple types of planar failure due to both heat and flex issues.

> What approximate maximum bid should I go to on these? Remember no
> harddrive and only 512MB of RAM, and I'm in the United States.  I expect
> to get 5 machines if I can afford it; though I'd like to get all of them :)

Personally I'd consider them at $80 to $150 depending heavily on the 
condition. 

> Several of the machine have their bios passwords set.  I need to find
> out the details, but if I remember correctly it is the password to get
> into the BIOS, not the password to boot the machine up.  I read in the
> manual that if the supervisor password is set, a board replacement is in
> order to get around this.  If there are enough machines without
> passwords, I won't be bidding on the ones with passwords.

IIRC it's actually possible to replace the chip that stores the password, but 
it's probably not worth the hassle.

> Where can I expect to purchase replacement harddrives and possibly
> upgrade the memory?  And how much do you think I'll be looking at as far
> as price for this?

Pretty much any PATA IDE drive will work just fine, although ones that aren't 
IBM-branded will give you a loud beep and a scary-looking (though mostly 
harmless) warning on startup.[1]

You might want to check out ThinkWiki.org, as it has a vast amount of 
information relevant to this sort of thing.

Cheers,
Rob

[1] http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Problem_with_non-ThinkPad_hard_disks
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