Thinkpad t42 Windows 10 upgrade Drivers

[kickaha13]

Does the T42 have driver updates to make it compatible with Windows 10?

[Majestic Community Moderator]

Welcome to the Lenovo Community !

Sorry to say due to the age of the T42 there are no available drivers for Windows 10.  At the link below there are some Windows 7 and 8 drivers which may work if they are installed in compatibility mode, but for the most part I suspect the T42 would use the native drivers built-in to the Windows 10 operating system. 

Here is a link to find the available drivers for the T42.....

https://download.lenovo.com/eol/index.html

[AtliJarl Guru]

Hello.

No, Lenovo don't, and won't have driver updates for these old machines if you plan to run Windows 10 on them. Machines like the Tx20 series haven't even gotten Windows 10 driver updates, albeit they function quite well running the older Win7 and Win8 drivers.

Getting new OS's to run on machines as old as the T4x series is totally a DIY matter, some models are easier to deal with than others, such as the T4xp subseries, but they all came with better GPU's.

I have successfully installed Windows 10 on T42p, T43 and T43p, but for the T42 and older, you will run into problems if you have the Banias CPU installed, as they lack PAE support, which is a requirement for Win8 and Win10.

What is the MTM (Machine Type - Model) number on your T42?

Cheers!
Atli Jarl.

[kickaha13]

Thanks for the quick turn-around!  T42 Model 2373VTK; 2GB RAM; Intel Pentium M 2Ghz processor.

[kickaha13]

Thanks for the link, I'll check them out!

[AtliJarl Guru · Accepted solution]

The 2Ghz CPU in a T42 is a Dothan one, so you should have no problems installing Windows 10, 32bit only of course, it will boot from USB and it should pick up the majority oft the devices during install. I recommend you use the inbox drivers from Windows instead of trying to force the very old drivers for the machine with compatibility / manual installation.

However, with the latest builds of Windows 10, the older Radeon Mobility GPU's, such as in the T4x/T6o series will result in a BSOD if you try to install the older Vista (modded Win7) drivers. I stumbled onto this a couple of weeks ago on a T60, and all my methods of having the machine accept the older drivers for it failed. You might be stuck with driving the display with the Microsoft Basic Display Driver, which does handle the basics though, and in correct resolution.

If you've got time and want to experiment on the venerable T42, I recommend it. It's great fun.

Cheers!

Atli Jarl.

[kickaha13]

Thanks again Atli!