Thinkpad Repair Notes:

This machine was a Thinkpad 390x with a Celeron processor. It was purchased used 
for $20 minus a hard drive.

Lesson Learned:

I installed a used hard drive I had on my shelf, reloaded windows and its 
software, optimized the disk after installing the hardware, then installed the 
wireless card. Upon rebooting the computer, the hard drive died, and the machine 
stood there with the hard drive clicking while it tried to seek.

Lesson learned, used hard drives can work, but will not necessarily be reliable.

A new hard drive, a new Seagate 20 Gigabyte drive was purchased on eBay for 
about $22, and when it arrived, was installed, booted fron floppy and ran fdisk 
to low level format it, formatted the drive, then Windows was again reloaded, 
followed by software installation, and final configuration.

The machine originally came with only 128 megabytes of PC100 ram, split up into 
two chips with 64 megabytes on each. While Windows XP will run on 128 megabytes, 
it will run very slowly. At the same time as I ordered the hard drive, I ordered 
2 sticks of 128 megabyte PC100 100 mhz. RAM to replace the existing two sticks 
of 64 megabyte RAM.

Mistake 2:

When updating RAM, never forget to remove the power supply and the battery from 
the computer. I was in a rush when the RAM finally arrived, and neglected this 
very important step. With the new RAM installed, while the charge light was on, 
pressing on the on button would do nothing. I was very afraid I had destroyed 
the motherboard after all my work.

Not so, as I discovered the next day, much to my relief. You can do a reset on 
the power system by following the steps which follow.

IBM Power, no Boot

1) remove the power cord
2) Allow machine to cool down overnight before a restart attempt--the power 
problem seems to be linked to the machine overheating
3) Remove the battery
4) Press and hold down the power button for 25 seconds
5) Re-insert the battery and re-start

After doing this I found the machine would boot into BIOS, but not into the hard 
drive. Shutting it off, and sliding the hard drive caddy out and back into the 
machine restored the hard drive bios setting. 

Booting it back up, all booted normally, the hard drive detected and working, 
and the new 256 meg of RAM working. While Windows XP would still prefer more 
than 256 megabytes of RAM, the computer is working great, and will be presented 
to the young fellow it is going to in a few days. It is now a great machine for 
a very small cost.

Notes on software:

Installed on the machine are Open Office, 2.4.0, the free versions of a popular 
antivirus and sypware removal program, the Adobe Reader, manuals for the machine 
downloaded from the IBM site, and a number of other useful free or shareware 
programs. 

A PCMCIA Wireless card has been added for wireless connectivity.