Lenovo ThinkPad T-series T60

6owners with an opinion

80%of verdicts positive

2/1positive/negative since 2024

8 yrslongest happy owner

1happy after 3+ years

Praised for repairability and durability; criticized for reliability.

What people wrote

Likes itOwned 8 yearsStill going

Thinkpad T60 from 2007. Even the 9 cell battery is still "fine" with about 70% of its maximum capacity left. I recently upgraded to the T440s/T450s generation, but the T60 is still working (though the display backlight is really dim meanwhile).

Neutral

Edit timeout reached so replying to my own post. Installed on the Thinkpad T60 using the 'kitchen-sink' option to the install script following the instructions on the tribblix Web site. Left the USB stick in and rebooted and it did some first run stuff (you have to leave the usb stick plugged in at this stage). Alas, it turns out that neither the ethernet nor the wifi are supported (dladm show-phys returns nothing and ifconfig shows loopback devices only). The xfce desktop installation is quite nice, with emacs, vim and helix editors and Abiword/Gnumeric. Palemoon and Netsurf are available as graphical Web browsers. xfce4 extras are not installed so automounting of storage does not work. An Oracle Solaris page mentioned rmmount so I was able to workout how to mount a usb stick at least. Sometimes it is good to try something that works on a different basis to what you are used to - the contrast illuminates (lol) what you usually use.

Likes it

I used to really like the keyboard on the old think pad t series, like the T60. But it seems that everyone is doing 'island' keys these days.

Doesn’t like it

I experienced similar headaches, putting Coreboot on about 10 laptops. A few things to add: * For laptops that require extensive disassembly, once you realize that one day you might have to recover a bad software-based flashing, requiring disassembly again, you might be willing to cut a hole in the laptop: https://www.neilvandyke.org/coreboot/#cutouts * Something like an IBM/Lenovo Hardware Maintenance Manual is a big win. Lately I even label removed screws with the page or section number of the manual that described their removal. https://www.neilvandyke.org/coreboot/#intro * The flaky in-circuit reading&writing of the flash chip with hardware probes ranges from frustrating to maddening, for software person me. For example, I had an "assembly line" for Coreboot-ing seven ThinkPad X200 units, but in-circuit reading and writing failed different ways, multiple times, with pretty much every unit. And I fried a rare-ish variant of the ThinkPad T60 motherboard (I guess when current took a path it really wasn't supposed to). * Had I only needed to do one laptop, afterwards I'd think that was rough, but that it would go much smoother next time, once I knew what I was doing. Not so. I never knew what I was doing. I did about 10 laptops, and each one was a pain. Maybe an EE/CE would do it much better, with better technique, or better tools? * I really like the idea of open source boot firmware (and I hate UEFI complexity and dodginess). Now, if I could just get Coreboot…

Likes it

A few months ago I installed the venerable OPENSTEP 4.2 on an old Thinkpad T60 using a T7200 CPU and a PATA SSD, with about 950MB of usable RAM. On top of that I installed as many flagship applications as i could find to get an idea how working in such a vintage environment would feel like. The applications included FrameMaker, WordPerfect, the complete Lighthouse Suite of word processors and spread sheets, and a few dozen more applications. The execution speed and general performance of these very capable applications on that old vintage Thinkpad was absolutely amazing. If this environment would be capable running on a more modern machine there wouldn't be much to miss, as these old applications are already sophisticated enough to get real work done. And definitely at a much more snappier pace than all those contemporary software behemoths we are blessed with today.

Likes it

I was a 100% Thinkpad fanboy up until the T410S finally pissed me off enough with battery life and keyboard changes to move to Apple. The T series was built like a tank - a WWII era tank that could take a beating, have bits and pieces crack and break, but chug along until you could get the (cheap!) replacement part shipped. I have a stack of T60 series laptops I think I could keep going for another 50 years just by robbing parts from donor laptops as needed. The repairability just was second to none. Both in parts availability and design of the laptop itself. A cracked bezel happened, but was a 10 minute and $20 repair. I started my first real "professional" job in tech, and while packing/moving for said job I somehow had an entire gallon of windshield wiper fluid spill directly into the (running) fan port of my work-issued T42 I had left on the floor of my minivan. I pulled the battery in a panic, but after taking everything apart and drying it all out - it worked fine for at least a decade. I was hooked on the series ever since.