I purchased a refurb T490 a month ago. Fortunately, unit looked almost new, and the battery had only 8 cycles on it. I also did the 16 gb dram and 1 Tb NVME SSD upgrade. I ordered a second T490 to replace my wife's T530, which will leave me with the T530 to tinker with. It has a dead battery, a centrino 2200 wifi card, and only 4 GB of DRAM. At minimum, I'd like to mod the bios to bypass the battery and wifi white-lists. Maybe even replace the bios with Coreboot, which exists for this model. I'm happy to have new toy to experiment with. I use Linux Mint as my daily driver, but use Debian when I need something more specialized. I was just given a ThinkPad R50 (2004) that runs fine, and it's been fun trying out various 32 bit variants of puppy and antix to see if it can be made to play RUclips decently. I think the answer is no. Anyway, I'll be sure to check out more of your videos.
+1 for coreboot! I am keeping an eye on the project although I haven't used it personally yet. Well done for maintaining your R50 in a working order! Have you considered using the Raspberry Pi OS for PC on it?
@LeonAnavi I had no idea there was a Raspi OS for x86. I will give it a try. I just got the R50. I replaced the CMOS battery (peeled the tabs+wire off the old cell, and attached them to a new 2032 cell).
@vibrolax yes, it is called Raspberry Pi OS Desktop and Mac. I use it on an EeePC and it performs pretty decently on old machines. www.raspberrypi.com/software/raspberry-pi-desktop/
![Felix "Unfair" | [Stray Kids : SKZ-PLAYER]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Oswujxm2Ag0/mqdefault.jpg)
I purchased a refurb T490 a month ago. Fortunately, unit looked almost new, and the battery had only 8 cycles on it. I also did the 16 gb dram and 1 Tb NVME SSD upgrade.
I ordered a second T490 to replace my wife's T530, which will leave me with the T530 to tinker with. It has a dead battery, a centrino 2200 wifi card, and only 4 GB of DRAM.
At minimum, I'd like to mod the bios to bypass the battery and wifi white-lists. Maybe even replace the bios with Coreboot, which exists for this model.
I'm happy to have new toy to experiment with. I use Linux Mint as my daily driver, but use Debian when I need something more specialized.
I was just given a ThinkPad R50 (2004) that runs fine, and it's been fun trying out various 32 bit variants of puppy and antix to see if it can be made to play RUclips decently. I think the answer is no.
Anyway, I'll be sure to check out more of your videos.
+1 for coreboot! I am keeping an eye on the project although I haven't used it personally yet.
Well done for maintaining your R50 in a working order! Have you considered using the Raspberry Pi OS for PC on it?
@LeonAnavi I had no idea there was a Raspi OS for x86. I will give it a try. I just got the R50. I replaced the CMOS battery (peeled the tabs+wire off the old cell, and attached them to a new 2032 cell).
@vibrolax yes, it is called Raspberry Pi OS Desktop and Mac. I use it on an EeePC and it performs pretty decently on old machines. www.raspberrypi.com/software/raspberry-pi-desktop/