IBM ThinkPad 240 is an ultra-portable laptop computer designed and produced by IBM from June 1999 to 2001. It is one of the few

ThinkPad ThinkPad is a line of business-oriented laptop computers and tablets designed, developed and marketed by Lenovo, and formerly by IBM until 2005, when IBM's PC business was acquired by Lenovo. ThinkPads have a distinct black, boxy design la ...

200 series models made available in America and was the smallest and lightest ThinkPad model produced to date. The 240 series was discontinued, and it (as well as the 570 series) was replaced with the ThinkPad X series in 2000.

Features

The first 240 series models included the 300 MHz Mobile Celeron processor, 64 MB built-in

RAM Ram, ram, or RAM may refer to: Animals * A male sheep * Ram cichlid, a freshwater tropical fish People * Ram (given name) * Ram (surname) * Ram (director) (Ramsubramaniam), an Indian Tamil film director * RAM (musician) (born 1974), Dutch * ...

and one slot for memory expansion (maximum 320 MB). The laptop also was one of the first to feature the

Mini PCI Peripheral Component Interconnect (PCI) is a local computer bus for attaching hardware devices in a computer and is part of the PCI Local Bus standard. The PCI bus supports the functions found on a processor bus but in a standardized format t ...

card slot. No built-in optical drive or diskette drive was included due to size limitations. External drive access was via a

USB Universal Serial Bus (USB) is an industry standard that establishes specifications for cables, connectors and protocols for connection, communication and power supply (interfacing) between computers, peripherals and other computers. A broad ...

1.0 port and/or the IBM external floppy drive connector. The unit shipped either with a standard 6 GB

hard disk drive A hard disk drive (HDD), hard disk, hard drive, or fixed disk is an electro-mechanical data storage device that stores and retrieves digital data using magnetic storage with one or more rigid rapidly rotating platters coated with magne ...

or with the 12 GB upgrade option. All 240 series models feature a 10.4 TFT display, and the first models featured NeoMagic MagicGraph128XD graphics chips with 2 MB of video memory. The 240 is capable of displaying up to SVGA (800x600) on the TFT display, with XGA output available to an external monitor. All 240s also have audio controllers and

VGA Video Graphics Array (VGA) is a video display controller and accompanying de facto graphics standard, first introduced with the IBM PS/2 line of computers in 1987, which became ubiquitous in the PC industry within three years. The term can no ...

ports to connect to external display devices.

Models

Reception

A review from the South China Morning Post in December 1999 appreciated the compactness and portability of the ThinkPad 240. It also noted the short battery life and that it only has a single Type II PC Card slot.

Transmeta Crusoe

At the June 2000 PC Expo in New York, IBM demonstrated a ThinkPad 240 with a

Transmeta Crusoe The Transmeta Crusoe is a family of x86-compatible microprocessors developed by Transmeta and introduced in 2000. Instead of the instruction set architecture being implemented in hardware, or translated by specialized hardware, the Crusoe runs ...

. In November, it was announced that IBM would not be using the Transmeta CPU in a 240. According to a source close to Transmeta, this was due to pressure from Intel.

Features

Models

Reception

Transmeta Crusoe

References

Further reading