IBM ThinkPad R50e (1834K3J)
Just randomly picked this thing up at HardOff on the weekend.
Says no RAM and no HDD (and has no Alt-Key).
I thought for 1.1k Yen, I'll take it home and see what it does.
The manual is on archive.org - nice.
I found some RAM (1GB) and an old IDE HDD (from a broken G4 iBook) and threw it in.
I use a variable PSU at 16.5V - power on and all is working fine!
Well, the Bios backup battery is of course dead. I'll have to replace it, if I want to keep this thing.
Then I remembered, that somewhere in my parts bin should be a Pentium M CPU that I could screw in for a nice upgrade. It came with a Celeron 1.3GHz and I upgraded it to a Pentium 1.7GHz.
Next I grabbed the Recovery CDs and installed XP. Unfortunately I don't have the original Japanese CDs, but only the German ones - but they did the trick.
XP runs fantastic on this old machine, but there is only so much one can do with XP.
I did the whole shenanigans with legacyupdate and upgrade Windows as much as possible.
Then I removed a bit of bloat-ware (Norton 2004, really not what I want to deal with).
Next I ran a geekbench2 benchmark : 1151 - what a beast :)
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