Thinkpads Forum

Hi, I have a neat old IBM Netvista X40i All-in-one computer. It's been a workhorse, used it in my garage for several years as a music station, my mom used it for light web browsing and playing kpatience after I installed Manjaro on it to wring a little more performance out of it. It was surprisingly useful with the palemoon-sse browser and xfce desktop manager, but the web has moved on and gotten so much heavier, and as of version 28, the SSE port of palemoon has been discontinued, and a 1Ghz Pentium III with 512mb of RAM just doesn't cut it anymore. I've been toying with the idea of stripping out the internals and doing a micro install of something more modern in it. To do that I'd need to solder together some kind of connector for the monitor, but I'm having no luck tracking down any specs for the pin out on the internal cable. Has anyone seen this info anywhere?

Maybe consider replacing the display panel entirely? You can most likely fit a better panel than 15" 1024x768 in it. The best panel widely and cheaply available might be one of those TN UXGA 15" LCDs you can get off eBay like the LQ150U1LH22B, or maybe a FlexView UXGA or QXGA panel if you have the budget.

If you're dead set on using the original panel, try disassembling it, looking for a model number on the display, and searching for a datasheet.

That is definitely the direction my thinking has headed as well. Lots of 30 pin displays and control boards out there, just trying to decide what kind of motherboard I want to stick in there with them. Embedded processor would be dead easy, but I could squeeze one of the cheap mini itx x99 boards in there with a low profile cooler. Just trying to decide how much I want to invest in what is essentially just me playing around.