IBM ThinkPad R51: A setting sun on IBM's PCs.

In April of 2004, at the time of the IBM ThinkPad R51's introduction, the average customer of IBM's PC division probably wouldn't assume that the division was going to be sold to Lenovo in less than 18 months. Many who were familiar with the market would know IBM struggled heading into the second half of the 90's, evident by being one-upped by Compaq and Dell, having made clones of their own computers and later, Microsoft refusing to grant IBM a license to sell Windows 95 on their computers until 15 minutes before the OS' release.

But the ThinkPads persisted as IBM's bread and butter, later accompanied by the ThinkCentre desktops. Due to IBM selling their PC business to Lenovo (which was strategic, as China wanted their domestic corporations to expand to global markets at the time), this places models such as the R51 and later models, unrelated to this video, such as the T43, in an interesting predicament - As they were still manufactured and sold in the time IBM sold their PC business, some models down to the serial number, like this one, built in May of 2005, were technically sold by Lenovo, though built by IBM.

So how well does it hold up? I like it, despite being worn down over time and having not been able to do a performance test in this video. Probably should've put Windows back on it. -_-

I've recently been enjoying my own personal laptop, a more modern Lenovo ThinkPad T480, which itself could be great video material, but for today, and for now, I want to focus a lot of documenting hardware that's been in my possession for quite some time before looking at other things or newer acquisitions. On that note, I recently got my hands on a Compaq Evo that may be in a similar case, but with HP's acquisition of Compaq. We will have to look at something else in a few weeks, but that's not today.

I hope you enjoy this video. I'm going to skip next week, mainly to focus on school work and to focus on getting October videos out at a more comfortable time.

The first proper 1080p60 timestamps here, I need to save disk space and don't see why I should keep putting out stuff in 4K:
0:00 - Introduction
0:33 - History
3:38 - Exterior and Hardware
8:08 - Software (and why there's no performance test)
11:23 - Conclusion

Credits: https://pastebin.com/4g1VPd0G

Disclaimer: This video is not designed for people under the age of 13. Discretion is advised for younger viewers.

#thinkpad #retrotech #linux

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