What are the most powerful “old-style” Thinkpads?

Buying Advice

I bought my first Thinkpad a couple days ago, a T43 with the 2.00GHz Pentium, 2gb RAM and a Mobility Radeon x300. It’ll be here tomorrow and I’m looking forward to experiencing WinXP again for the first time in 17 years or so, playing some light old games, running some software that lost support after WinXP/ Is 32bit only, and generally just admiring the heck out of it.

But I’ve been wondering, if I wanted the best of the best that isn’t single core, has a dedicated GPU, supports XP, still has the “old” non-slim keyboard, and a 4:3 screen, what would I be looking for?

I make music and I’m looking to install some abandoned VSTs and software that doesn’t work on modern Windows (Like Albino by Rob Papen) and essentially having a silly little audio workstation circa 2007. That means as fast of a CPU as I can get, the GPU is just gravy that I can use for XP games.

Posted Jul 29, 2025, 6:09 AM UTC

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