Post by the wharf ratPost by Computer Nerd KevAnother laptop I make regular use of is my Toshiba 1910CS
from 1993. No really, I do. I used this at the local
library for
Well, I'm all for repurposing supposedly obsolete
equipment,
but, really, a 486? With, what, a whole 4 MB of ram? What
do you run on the thing?
Pah, 4MB RAM of course one could never put up with such a puny
amount. Naturally I have the 4MB RAM expansion that opens your
computing the world to the vast spaces of 8MB RAM.
Naturally with such vast amounts of working space, there are
practically no limits to what my 33MHz 486 can process. Forget
the dark days of DOS, that is relegated to a mere boot option,
now the wonders of Windows 95 can be thrust onto the "CS"
model's Colour Screen.
WordPad, IrfanView (ahh, beautiful pictures destroyed by a 16
colour display) and Tetris. Even a spell checker it took me
ages to find, all are at my fingertips as they rest on the
keys of this marvelous, cream coloured machine.
Post by the wharf ratIt's a PIA even getting Linux on
one of those because it's hard to find a useful
distribution that will boot from floppy.
I say, do you mean that such wondrous distributions such as
Basic Linux are of no use? Why, when booted from DOS, even the
4MB of a standard T1910 can support such wondrous applications
as terminal based word processors and Email software. It may
even bask the user in the wondrous World Wide Web in its text
mode rendition granted by the all powerful "Links" Web
Browser.
Not even an X windows system is beyond its reach! Err, as long
as you have a spare quarter hour for it to load.
Post by the wharf ratHey, here's a cheap way to boost disc space: get a
couple of those
old 1" Seagate or Hitachi compact flash format disc drives.
Yep, that can be a great solution for old machines, especially
where the HDD has died. But there are a few reasons why I
didn't do that with this machine:
1. I'm something of a collector of old computers, portables in
particular (earliest one is 1986, but I'd love to get and old
8-bit one). As a result, I like to use the original (130MB in
my case) HDD.
2. I use my trusty PCMCIA to CF adapter to keep large,
irregularly used programs and save documents. This way, it's
easy to share documents between computers and also change
software.
3. I've got 10MB left on the HDD at the moment. Now that may
sound appalling, but I'm only ever likely to add RTF when I
don't have a CF card, and on rare occasions, tiny, kilobyte
range, programs. This set-up has been the same for over a year
now and its worked fine.
Post by the wharf ratWhere do you get batteries for the thing???
Well I replaced the BIOS battery a few years ago with a new
NiMH coin cell that I bought from a specialty battery store.
That was quite a guessing game without the service manual I'll
tell you (I still wonder how you were meant to remove the
motherboard). There was also a "backup" battery that looked
like a AA rechargeable, but I couldn't find out the specs so I
couldn't replace it (turns out it was only needed for the
"resume" function anyway).
Now as for what you really mean, the main laptop battery, a
weighty NiMH. This was of course dead and I put it aside some
years ago for the aim of cutting it open, replacing the cells
inside (if they weren't too expensive) and gluing it back
together again. Problem is, I lost the battery and after some
years, I still can't find it for the life of me. Hence, I just
use the machine with the AC transformer. In fact the battery
in my ThinkPad R31 is dead too, so it can seem a strange
sensation for me to use a laptop without a cable running to
the wall.
Post by the wharf ratMy favorite obsolete laptop is a Tadpole, an actual
miniature Sparc
workstation with I think an 85Mhz SPARC running SunOS
4.2... The batteries are these giant NiCad rods... Long
ago kaput.
Oh, that does sound like fun. I have a business targeted x86
laptop from the same era with a 100MHz 486, but that
"Tadpole" really is something special.
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