May as well keep using it as-is until/unless you notice signs of further damage?

Yeah, I pretty much intend on doing that; I'll leave the board alone until it has serious trouble.

While I have the whole case open, it's also time to sand off the old finish, fill any case cracks (there's a few, near the hinge), and then repaint the whole exterior. I'm gonna make this thing look new. I'll post pics when its done.

The headphone jack is all messed up. I've put in a replacement. This will be a great little retro-gaming machine. The internal speakers have trouble too, one is very burnt out. But I don't really care about that; I just use headphones anyway 😀

How fast is the CPU, and what kind of video hardware does it have?

Pentium III 900Mhz
Geforce 2 16MB dedicated

It's nothing really fast/special, but its something I've had a long time, that still mostly works, and fills a gap in my PC collection: I have a k6-2 450 running win98, and thats good for a lot of games, but the next step up I have is an athlon 64 running xp; There are some things too slow on the k6 but won't run on XP. I tried 98 on the Athlon, but since I got a pci-e video card in there, the drivers won't run.

i have laptop with the same specs. is it a satellite mine is, it's a 2805 s503. i've taken apart and rebuilt my share of 2805 series, not a bagillion but. about 10 maybe. what is your model number? any pics?

Actually those specs are really decent. My desktop in college was a PII-450 that I later upgraded to a PIII-550 using spare parts from a friend, and it was barely able to run Morrowind. At 900MHz you should be able to run a fair amount of stuff - in fact the GPU may be more of a limiting factor.

Also, I hate K6-2's - at least on VIA motherboards. They had terrible AGP performance issues.

Yeah, the k6-2 is not a speed demon. I think the mobo I have supports k6-3; I hear those have a bigger cache.

The k6-2 is sort of a nightmare system. It's VIA, K6-2, voodoo 3, SB 16. But just about everything pre-Quake 3 runs OK. Quake 3 is sluggy but playable; Quake 2 is ultra-smooth.

I was able to run Unreal Tournament 2004 on the PIII laptop even though it was below the requirements; It was at 640x480 with all the setting turned down, but it was about as sluggy as Quake 3 was on the k6.

Yeah my brother built a VIA K6-2 380 with Voodoo Banshee, SB Live Value and it was a dog compared to my PII-450, TNT1, SB PCI 128 (later PIII-550, Geforce 2 MX, SB Live X-Gamer).

well this laptop has 16mb v ram the only problem now is getting any installed operating system to boot.

In case anyone cares, I found a replacement video board for my laptop from a place called pchub (http://pchub.com/uph/) . It finally came in the mail, and now this laptop is (electrically) perfect. (I still kept in my 'fix' for the previous board by shimming some plastic between the video board and the motherboard; This second board can't flex at all now, so now it will never develop that particular problem.)

Now I can focus on the cosmetic issues; this laptop is still a bit fugly. Oh well, I'm starting to almost think it's cooler that way.

It's called patina. 😁 Adds character.