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IBM thinkpad

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AZNBoiOnFIYA

Member
Joined
May 2, 2004
Location
Tucson, AZ
my dad just gave me his old (really old) ibm thinkpad from 4 years ago. it still runs pretty well considering that hes taken pretty good care of it. my problem is that when i try to run the recovery disk to reinstall win98 on it, it says the cdrom is not in high sierra or iso 9668 format or something. If anyone knows anything about this, please tell me how i fix this system reinstall. i called the ibm guys and basically they told me to find a copy of win98 and install it. however, if i do this, i wont have office 97 on it and cant use the word processor. i'm not limited to this option so i'm open to suggestions on other things to do with this thinkpad as long as i can use word processor.
 
You can always do a generic reinstall and download openoffice suite from sun microsystems for free:) it has all the bells and whistles and works well.

-Milkman
 
I second that, worse comes to worse you can do that. I just switched and never will I pay for Office again. But what is the real problem, 98 won't boot or you are trying to put 98 on it. Is there a working OS on it period?
 
there is a working win 98 os, but i want to do a system reinstall to get all the crap off the hard drive. its when i put in the recovery cd and when it's running that it says that the cd rom is not in a certain format.
 
AZNBoiOnFIYA said:
my dad just gave me his old (really old) ibm thinkpad from 4 years ago. it still runs pretty well considering that hes taken pretty good care of it. my problem is that when i try to run the recovery disk to reinstall win98 on it, it says the cdrom is not in high sierra or iso 9668 format or something. If anyone knows anything about this, please tell me how i fix this system reinstall. i called the ibm guys and basically they told me to find a copy of win98 and install it. however, if i do this, i wont have office 97 on it and cant use the word processor. i'm not limited to this option so i'm open to suggestions on other things to do with this thinkpad as long as i can use word processor.
Becareful reinstalling Windows on an old Thinkpad if you still want the sound/modem to work... Both old Thinkpad's I have owned have had problems with the Mwave drivers after I reinstalled windows. Infact, I can't get the stupid drivers to work on my Thinkpad 755cd at all right now :bang head
 
Reinstalling the OS won't really clean things up unless you do it fresh, AFAIK.

If you primarily just want word processing function, I would also download openoffice.org as that is what I use.

If you want to clean things up as best you can with what you have, I would download crap cleaner, and run some of the tools it has. When finished, I would then download jv16 powertools and run the registry cleaner - these are two VERY powerful utilities.
 
i think finding a version of win 98 and using openoffice is my best solution. this way if my notebook crashes on me i can just reinstall since i cant use my recovery disk. i dont know if im going to have problems like cyrix did, but i hope that i will be able to reinstall the drivers after im done.
 
Finding drivers can be tricky sometimes for older laptops, but a little research and patience and they can be found, I have never failed at finding them, a good thing to do is after you have all of them loaded either save them to a disk or write down all info and that way if you need to find them again you can google drivers:)

-Milkman
 
Milkman said:
Finding drivers can be tricky sometimes for older laptops, but a little research and patience and they can be found, I have never failed at finding them, a good thing to do is after you have all of them loaded either save them to a disk or write down all info and that way if you need to find them again you can google drivers:)

-Milkman
It's not hard to find the drivers, It's just hard to get them to work (atleast for me...)
 
yea, the drivers are really easy to find. they are all still supported by ibm and are on their site. the thing that pisses me off is that im stuck with 800x600 resolution so everything is huge. i cant swap out the graphics card because it doesnt have one. Does anyone know how i can increase the resolution with what i have right now?
 
AZNBoiOnFIYA said:
yea, the drivers are really easy to find. they are all still supported by ibm and are on their site. the thing that pisses me off is that im stuck with 800x600 resolution so everything is huge. i cant swap out the graphics card because it doesnt have one. Does anyone know how i can increase the resolution with what i have right now?
Did you get the graphics patch/driver from IBM?
 
will that help increase my resolution? ill have to check on my notebook but i think i have everything updated.
 
AZNBoiOnFIYA said:
will that help increase my resolution? ill have to check on my notebook but i think i have everything updated.
Should. It also lets you use 16-bit or 24-bit color depending on the LCD.
 
im pretty sure i have the most recent video display driver installed and im still stuck with 800x600 resolution. i guess my thinkpad is just too old to display higher resolutions.
 
Cyrix_2k said:
It's not hard to find the drivers, It's just hard to get them to work (atleast for me...)
Well what I meant was it's easier to find drivers when you either know what the hardware is or can google chipset marking to identify the chipset, you are right that with all the info gathered it's not too hard to find them at all.

-Milkman
 
AZNBoiOnFIYA said:
im pretty sure i have the most recent video display driver installed and im still stuck with 800x600 resolution. i guess my thinkpad is just too old to display higher resolutions.
If you're running on the LCD, I don't think it supports any higher resolutions than 800x600
 
what pisses me off even more is that now i want to use the ethernet card but ibm put up a consideration this year saying that the ethernet card wont work with my model thinkpad. therefore, i have to go buy a usb network adapter and go from there. the instructions in the manual are ****ing confusing too. man, i really hate dealing with old technology.
 
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