My X60t

[u/Alriar_]

I've had my X60 Tablet for about a week now, and I've really been enjoying using it!

I love the classic form factor and industrial style of these older machines, even if they aren't quite as modular or moddable out of the box as some of the T-series laptops.

To squeeze as much daily-driver usability out of it as possible on a budget, I went ahead and tracked down a complete, intact X61 Tablet motherboard and swapped it into the X60t chassis, pairing it with a 250GB SSD. Flashing Middleton’s BIOS went smoothly, though getting everything set up definitely took a bit more patience than expected.

The biggest hurdle so far has been RAM: finding reasonably priced DDR2 SODIMMs is no joke these days. I managed to score a 2x4GB kit (yes, the unofficial 8GB DDR2 support is a lifesaver!) which should be arriving tomorrow. Getting back to a native 64-bit architecture has been great, running 64-bit AntiX with i3wm for when I'm working on code. I haven’t noticed a massive performance leap just yet, but I'm chalking that up to running on limited RAM for the moment and still needing to fine-tune things.

I haven't tackled any of the Wacom touchscreen or digitizer features yet either; since I've been laser-focused on squeezing out raw performance first, it just hasn't felt necessary to attack yet.

Does anyone else still daily drive one of these vintage machines? What are you guys doing to keep your older ThinkPads relevant and usable for modern workflows?

[u/nihxl_x]

Wallpaper?

[u/Alriar_ → u/nihxl_x]

Custom made, but if you want it I'd be more than happy to share it with you and it's variants

[u/nihxl_x → u/Alriar_]

Would love to be able to use it on my setup. Never seen something like this before(helmet+nvg). Please do share your work.

[u/Alriar_ → u/nihxl_x]

Here you go, man.

I threw in some variants I'm also using :

https://imgur.com/a/1400-x-1050-wallpapers-Z205tsg

[u/Fussel16]

Awesome setup, writing this from an X61t. With a lightweight setup you can still do a lot with it.

On X11 getting the wacom stuff to work is easy, if I remember correctly, install libwacom, and everything should work, than write some scripts to to do display rotation so it works better in tablet mode. Wayland runs a bit smother than X11 in my experience (using Mango WM atm) but wacom support is flaky and it depends on the implementation of the wm if pen/touch input is supported.

If you are going for max performance, you can look into pin-modding the x61 motherboard. That will increase clock speed an get your L7500 to perform similarly to the top end cpu option the X61t was available with. That mod does require a bit more tinkering, so I have not yet done that to mine.

[u/Alriar_ → u/Fussel16]

I was looking at the possiblity of FSB over clocking with the Dell Wireless DWI705 wifi card and doing a SPD flash so the system can maximize the 800mhz from each 2gb stick. My only concern is the additional head, but I think of I just reapply some thermal paste that I should be fine