I’ve always liked the Thinkpad X series laptops – they’re light,  compact without being tiny, great keyboards, good battery life, and reliable. I’ve purchased several X40, X41, X60, and X300 models for staff over the years, and my X40 2371-8LU that I purchased in 2004 is still going stong.

The one gripe that I’ve always had with it is the slow hard drive performance due to the then-innovative 1.8″ HDD unit that they used in the X40 (later models went back to a standard 2.5″ unit). I took another look around recently and discovered that not only are solid state drive (SSD) units cheap enough now, there is in fact a drop-in replacement specifically designed for the X40.

It took a little bit of poking around, but once I figured out the right model number, I ordered a 32GB KingSpec 1.8″ PATA/IDE SSD, which arrived very quickly. The tricky bit was getting an operating system onto the SSD, since 1) the Thinkpad doesn’t have a CD drive, and 2) I don’t have a copy of XP except for the one on the Thinkpad’s system restore partition, and 3) the 32Gb SSD is smaller than my 40Gb HDD. I tried several times to clone the HDD using things like Clonezilla and Partition Master, but I never ended up with a bootable SSD.

In the end I gave up on XP and installed a fresh copy of Windows 7 RC1 using these instructions to make a bootable Win 7 installation on a USB drive. Basically (using my old XP on HDD) I downloaded Win 7, put it on a 4Gb USB drive, then shut down, replaced the HDD with the SSD, booted off the USB drive, and installed Win 7 from USB to SSD. I would have installed Win 7 directly to the SSD connected externally (via USB) itself, but Win 7 doesn’t allow itself to be installed to a USB-connected drive, so I had to use the intermediate step of the 4Gb USB drive (luckily I happened to have one with me!). Note: in the tutorial on making a bootable Win 7 USB installer, make sure to run “bootsect /nt60 X: /mbr” instead of ”bootsect /nt60 X:” to ensure that it’s actually bootable.

Once I installed Windows 7, everything worked perfectly (and Windows 7’s built-in Wifi manager is so much better than the janky combination of XP and Thinkpad “connections manager” or whatever that was), except that the video was plain old VGA. Clearly, Win7 was missing the driver for the Thinkpad’s video controller. I dug around and, as always, someone smarter had already found a solution, and now I have all the usual video modes, including 1680×1050 on an external 22″ widescreen monitor. I hope that Windows 7 final release will have the necessary drivers built in.

Anyhow, now my solid old X40 is much faster, quieter, and even uses even less battery. Awesome!

Update Oct 28 2009

Now working on installing Windows 7 from retail DVD via USB. Helpful to remember that F12 brings up the “Boot Device List” when starting the machine. I also had to disable Autoplay on my main XP machine to get the Windows 7 DVD to load up without crashing.