Both the Thinkpad I bought used, and the Zip drive work. I bought them both on ebay. I got the Thinkpad connected to the net earlier this morning and am updating its Windows software. This old thinkpad was not connected to the net by the previous owner and the thought occured to me to keep this computer off the net but first I will update it. It might be possible to only use it on the net when installing software updates.

I have discovered some issues with installing Debian on it concerning the rescue boot disk and can not find a previously ftp available version of the rescue floppy for this model Thinkpad. There is another way of installing Debian from CD and the instructions on how to boot into the CD are available but I will have to wait for the CD drive to arrive. I will also wait for a second hard drive to install Debian on and wait for a 32MB RAM upgrade.

I did not work on this laptop project much yesterday. Mostly I worked on it this morning. Besides a short break for legal studies and one for reading today's newspaper I have been working on the computers for most of what is now almost a 20 hour day.

Yesterday I tried out the Iomega zip drive in my Thinkpad T30. It works fine. This means I have saved 200$ on the purchase of this IBM accessory. From there I copied files off a zip disk then tried to get my old back up 20GB IBM drive to work in my USB external enclosure. It worked a little but the Thinkpad T30 would not see the format on the hard drive. In my attempts to get this working I used the installed Virtual PC and installed Win98 on the virutal PC. This didn't work and I spent time updating this virtual install of Win98. I had yesterday morning tried to install Debian on the virutal PC but was unsure about partitioning so stopped myself.

I then put the DVD drive back in the T30 and explored old back up CD's. I had some success in importing email from old email stores from April 2001 to April 2002. I also copied lot of old work files to the newer T30. So back ups were proving effective. I also want to do this email process with my Mac so I can have all my email on two newer computers that I use regularly.