I've had this T60 since I bought it used around 2010, the reason I wanted the computer is that I had one of these when new as a work computer. My favorite thing about the computer has to be the keyboard, it has a long travel and a nice mechanical feel. It's not as good as a buckling spring keyboard, but it just puts modern machines to shame. Back in the day, I remember being impressed with the build quality and the software stability of the machine. The PC was just rock solid and I remember thinking how much better this PC was than the ones I'd used for work before.
For quite some time I ran this PC with Windows XP, but at one point a few years ago I got inspired to install an SSD, add a USB WiFi Dongle that supported better security, and load Windows 10 on it. Since this PC is hardware limited to 3GB of RAM I decided to load Windows 10 32 Bit on it. Getting Windows 10 to run well was a challenge. At first I was not able to get any video drivers working as this machine has an ATI Radeon X1300 chipset this not supported by any drivers that I could find. Here's the procedure I used to get this working...
1. Use the ATI Radeon legacy driver (Windows Vista 32 Bit) from the AMD website, not the Lenovo site...
https://www.amd.com/en/support/graphics/legacy-graphics/ati-radeon-x-series/ati-radeon-x1xxx-series
2. Install catalyst software, the installer fails to identify hardware but the files are left on the drive.
3. Go to control panel and open the Display Driver group.
4. Open the Properties for the Generic Microsoft Display Driver.
5. Choose the Driver tab, Click Update Driver, and choose "Browse My Computer", pointing at the directory where Catalyst installed the drivers, by default...
C:\ATI\Support\10-02_legacy_vista32-64_dd_ccc\Packages\Drivers\Display\LH_INF
6. The first Radeon X1300 driver on the list worked.
Note: In the future, don't ask or allow Windows to update the driver, or it will return to the generic driver.
I've also had some startup issues, and bluescreens when switching from AC power to battery power. I went into the Power Options control panel, and to advanced settings and made sure that all the battery settings matched the settings that are used on AC power, and that seemed to resolve those bluescrens.
There were also startup issues related to the power state. Startup completed just fine on AC power, but would not work correctly on battery power. I ended up disabling Fast Boot in the Power settings, and the system has been stable after that.
One remaining issue with my system is that the display driver doesn't seem to support anti-aliasing for fonts, so many of the fonts look pretty jagged on the screen, at least when compared to modern computers. Please let me know in the comments if anyone has figured out a way around this problem?
Also, another mistake that I've made was that I used to have Windows XP working on this machine, and I wiped the drive when I upgraded to Windows 10. In hindsight, I should have kept that Windows XP installation backed up on a different drive. Since then, I have gone back and re-installed Windows XP on the second drive. I purchased a drive caddy that sits in the CD ROM drive bay of this laptop, so I can dual boot back into the original OS for this computer.
The Thinkpad T60 Running Windows 10 in 2020.
One other lesson learned with this computer, I tried to upgrade this PC to fastest possible processor that was supported. This upgrade worked, but the cooling solution in my laptop was not adequate to keep the top of the line processor adequately cooled. The processor spent so much of it’s time thermally throttled that the stock processor ended up being a more usable solution.
So, there’s not much left on the “To Do List” for this computer:
Find a solution for the video driver problem (font smoothing not working)
Swap in another drive and load a Linux distro, perhaps Mint or Lubuntu, something lighter weight.
As with so many things in Computing, they are easy once you know how. It turns out that the Font Smoothing problem stems from the fact that Windows 10 has it's ClearType function disabled by default. After I enabled ClearType, the onscreen text looks as good as can be given the limited screen resolution.
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