thinkpad

46 Articles

Windows 98 On A 2020 ThinkPad P14s Gen 1 Laptop

February 14, 2026 by 16 Comments

The lovely thing about the x86 architecture is its decades of backwards compatibility, which makes it possible to run 1990s operating systems on modern-day hardware, with relatively few obstacles in the way. Recently [Yeo Kheng Meng] did just that with Windows 98 SE on a 2020 ThinkPad P12s Gen 1, booting it alongside Windows 11 and Linux from the same NVMe drive.

Naturally, after previously getting MS-DOS 6.22 from 1994 running on a 2020 ThinkPad X13, the step to doing the same with Windows 98 SE wasn’t that large. The main obstacles that you face come in the form of UEFI and hardware driver support.

Both ThinkPad laptops have in common that they support UEFI-CSM mode, also known as ‘classical BIOS’, as UEFI boot wasn’t even a glimmer yet in some drunk engineer’s eye when Win98 was released. After this everything is about getting as many hardware drivers scrounged together as possible.

[Yeo] ended up having to bodge on a USB 2.0 expansion card via a Thunderbolt dock as Win98 doesn’t have xHCI (USB 3.0) support. With that issue successfully bodged around using a veritable tower of adapters, installing Windows 98 was as easy as nuking Secure Boot in the BIOS, enabling UEFI-CSM along with Thunderbolt BIOS assist mode and disable Kernel DMA protection.

Because UEFI-CSM implementations tend to be buggy, the CREGFIX DOS driver was used to smooth things over. Another issue is the same that we chuckled about back in the day, as Windows 98 cannot address more than 512 MB of RAM by default. Fortunately patches by [Rudolph Loew] helped to fix this and some other smaller issues.

Unfortunately neither Intel nor NVIDIA have released Win98 drivers for quite some time, so there’s no graphics acceleration beyond basic VESA support and the SoftGPU driver. Disk access goes via the BIOS too rather than using an NVMe driver, so it’s not as zippy as it could be, but for Win9x it’s quite usable.

Finally ACPI wasn’t recognized by Win98, but it’s only fair to blame that on the complete flaming train wreck that is ACPI rather than anything to do with Windows. This particular issue was worked around by configuring the BIOS to support S3 power state and with that making Win98 happy again.

It’s honestly quite a shame that UEFI-CSM is largely ignored by new systems, as it makes installing even Windows 7 basically impossible, and thus creating probably the largest split within the x86 ecosystem since the arrival of AMD64/x86_64.

Ruined 1993 ThinkPad Tablet Brought Back From The Brink

November 18, 2024 by 11 Comments

Collecting retrocomputers is fun, especially when you find fully-functional examples that you can plug in, switch on, and start playing with. Meanwhile, others prefer to find the damaged examples and nurse them back to health. [polymatt] can count himself in that category, as evidenced by his heroic rescue of an 1993 IBM ThinkPad Tablet.

The tablet came to [polymatt] in truly awful condition. Having been dropped at least once, the LCD screen was cracked, the case battered, and all the plastics were very much the worse for wear. Many of us would consider it too far gone, especially considering that replacement parts for such an item are virtually unobtainable. And yet, [polymatt] took on the challenge nonetheless.

Despite its condition, there were some signs of life in the machine. The pen-based touch display seemed to respond to the pen itself, and the backlight sort of worked, too. Still, with the LCD so badly damaged, it had to be replaced. Boggling the mind, [polymatt] was actually able to find a 9.4″ dual-scan monochrome LCD that was close enough to sort-of fit, size-wise. To make it work, though, it needed a completely custom mount to fit with the original case and electromagnetic digitizes sheet. From there, there was plenty more to do—recapping, recabling, fixing the batteries, and repairing the enclosure including a fresh set of nice decals.

The fact is, 1993 IBM ThinkPad Tablets just don’t come along every day. These rare specimens are absolutely worth this sort of heroic restoration effort if you do happen to score one on the retro market. Video after the break.

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Thinkpad 13 Gets NVMe Support With Three Jumpers

September 29, 2024 by 17 Comments

Hardware restrictions can be unreasonable, and at times, it can be downright puzzling just how arbitrary they are. Such is the case with the Lenovo ThinkPad 13 — it’s got a M.2 M-key socket, yet somehow only supports SATA SSDs in it, despite the CPU being new enough to support both SATA and NVMe effortlessly. [treble] got one of those laptops from a recycler, and decided to figure out just what this laptop’s deal is.

Armed with schematics, she and her friend looked at the M.2 implementation. The slot’s schematic sure looked ready to support either kind of drive, a surprising find. Here’s the catch — Lenovo only populated components for SATA drive support. All you need to switch from SATA to NVMe support is three magnet wire jumpers, or zero-ohm 0402 resistors, and voila; you can now use the significantly cheaper kind of M.2 drives in your ThinkPad.

All is documented, and [treble] even mentions that you could increase the link speed by adding more PCIe lane capacitors that Lenovo, again, left unsoldered. UEFI already has the modules needed to boot from NVMe, too – it’s an outright upgrade for your laptop with just a soldering iron’s touch required, and a reminder that proprietary tech will screw you over for entirely arbitrary reasons. Now, it’s not just laptops you can upgrade with a few resistors — same goes for certain electric cars.

Running Stock MS-DOS On A Modern ThinkPad

August 22, 2024 by 33 Comments

It might seem like the days of MS-DOS were a lifetime ago because…well, they basically were. Version 6.22 of the venerable operating system, the last standalone release, came out back in 1994. That makes even the most recent version officially 30 years old. A lot has changed in the computing world since that time, so naturally trying to run such an ancient OS on even a half-way modern machine would be a waste of time. Right?

As it turns out, getting MS-DOS 6.22 running on a modern computer isn’t nearly as hard as you’d think. In fact, it works pretty much perfectly. Assuming, that is, you pick the right machine. [Yeo Kheng Meng] recently wrote in to share his experiments with running the final DOS release on his Intel-powered ThinkPad X13 from 2020, and the results are surprising to say the least.

To be clear, we’re not talking about some patched version of DOS here. There’s no emulator at work either. Granted [Yeo] did embrace a few modern conveniences, such as using a USB floppy drive emulator to load the disk images instead of fiddling with actual floppies, and installing DOS onto an external drive so as not to clobber his actual OS on the internal NVME drive. But other than that, the installation of DOS on the ThinkPad went along just as it would have in the 1990s.

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Assembled FPC PCB panels of the project

Give Your Thinkpad X1 Nano An Internal USB Port

June 2, 2024 by 16 Comments

How hard could it be to add an extra USB port inside your laptop? As [Joshua Stein] shows, it can be decently hard, but you will have fun along the way. His journey involves a Thinkpad X1 Nano, and his tech setup means it’d be most comfortable for him to have a USB port inside its case, for a Logitech mouse’s USB receiver. It wasn’t smooth sailing all throughout, but the end result is no doubt beautifully executed.

M.2 B-key, A-key and E-key slots have USB 2.0 available on them – you’d think that’s perfect for such a receiver, and there’s even plug and play adapters for this on places like eBay. Unfortunately, none of these, as Lenovo implements wireless card whitelists to this day. Tinkering with the whitelist on [Joshua]’s laptop resulted in BIOS digital signature check failures, and the USB-connected fingerprint reader was ultimately chosen as the most viable path.

Initially, he’s tested the fingerprint reader with an FPC breakout, having the USB connection work – many a hacker would stop here, pulling a few bodge wires from the breakout. [Joshua], however, raised the bar, creating a flexible PCB that would pull the fingerprint connector signals to a spot in the case where the USB receiver could fit neatly, with a 5 V step-up on the board, too.

[Joshua] tops it off by showing a 3D-printed spacer that goes into now-vacant spot where the fingerprint reader used to be. This mod is not open-source as far as we can see, but it’s definitely an inspiration. Want to put even more USB devices inside your laptop? Perhaps a tiny USB hub would help, in line with the EEE PC mods that aimed to stuff the tiny laptop with the largest amount of USB devices possible.

Printing A Replacement Case For The ThinkPad 701c

May 29, 2024 by 11 Comments

Even among ThinkPads, which are nearly universally loved by hardware hackers and Linux tinkerers alike, the 701c is a particularly rare and desirable machine. Best known for it’s “butterfly” slide out keyboard, the IBM-designed subnotebook from the mid-1990s has gained a following all its own, with active efforts to repair and restore any surviving specimens still out in the wild.

[polymatt] has already taken on a number of 701c restoration projects, but the recent release of a 3D printable case for the vintage laptop is arguably the most impressive to date. After spending an untold number of hours with an original case and a pair of calipers, the final design has been released under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license — in other words, you’re free to print one to spruce up your 701c, but don’t run off a stack of them and start trying to move them on Etsy.

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The Thinkpad in question, with a Linux shell open on its screen, showing that the device mode has been successfully enabled

ThinkPad X1 Carbon Turned USB Device Through Relentless Digging

March 1, 2024 by 15 Comments

In what’s perhaps one of the most impressive laptop reverse engineering posts in recent memory, [Andrey Konovalov] brings us an incredibly detailed story of how he’s discovered and successfully enabled a USB device controller in a ThinkPad X1 Carbon equipped with a 6th gen Intel CPU.

If you ever wanted to peek at the dirty secrets of a somewhat modern-day Intel CPU-based system, this write-up spares you no detail, and spans dozens of abstraction layers — from Linux drivers and modifying NVRAM to custom USB cable building and BIOS chip flashing, digging deep into undocumented PCH registers for the dessert.

All [Andrey] wanted was to avoid tinkering with an extra Raspberry Pi. While using a PCIe connected device controller, he’s found a reference to intel_xhci_usb_sw-role-switch in Linux sysfs, and dove into a rabbit hole, where he discovered that the IP core used for the laptop’s USB ports has a ‘device’ mode that can be enabled. A dig through ACPI tables confirmed this, but also highlighted that the device is disabled in BIOS. What’s more, it turned out to be locked away behind a hidden menu. Experiments in unlocking that menu ensued, in particular when it comes to bypassing Intel Boot Guard, a mechanism that checks BIOS image signatures before boot.

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