About OldThinkPad

Built from a restoration bench

OldThinkPad is made by Zac Walker, who has worked in technology for three decades with a ThinkPad close at hand for much of that time. Restoring several of the older machines meant hunting down their service information; this site collects it so that the next person does not have to.

The focus is the black-box era from 1991 to 1999, from the PS/2 L40 SX to the ThinkPad 770. The aim is practical: identify a machine, find the right service section quickly and get back to the source manual. The document library also keeps some earlier and later material for context.

Where the information comes from

Almost everything here comes from IBM’s own documents.

• Machine references are transcribed from IBM’s hardware maintenance manuals, one page per machine type (MT). An overview table lists the models each page covers, and most sections link to the manual page they came from.
• The document library holds those manuals as PDFs, together with IBM’s Personal Systems Reference (PSREF) books, user guides, brochures and advertisements.
• Experimental 3D models combine the manuals’ location drawings and removal order with hand-made estimates. They are visual aids, not measured drawings.

Before a repair or a parts order, compare the web reference with the original manual and your machine’s identification label. A shared family name does not mean that every part or procedure applies to every model.

What to double-check

This is a work in progress, not a complete or independently verified service database. Transcription can lose table structure, confuse characters in part numbers, or drop a diagram or a warning, and IBM revised its manuals between editions.

The 3D models’ dimensions, port positions and disassembly animations are approximate. Do not use them to make replacement parts or to plan a repair on their own; follow the safety notices and procedures in the maintenance manual.

OldThinkPad is not affiliated with or endorsed by IBM or Lenovo and is not an official support service. Product names and the original documents belong to their respective owners.

Help make the next repair easier

Found a wrong part number, a broken link or a missing detail? Open an issue on GitHub. A useful report includes:

1. the page address and the heading or part number in question;
2. the machine type and model, where relevant;
3. the source manual’s title, edition and page number, with a link if you have one;
4. what is wrong, and what the source says instead.

Please leave out personal details and serial numbers, and only share material you have permission to share. Improvements to the code and documentation are welcome in the OldThinkPad repository.