Cacheless Celerons were never used in laptops.

And the CPU is not Slot 1, or Socket 370, or anything else even remotely resembling a desktop processor. That machine appears to use an MMC1 board, which has the CPU, northbridge and some other stuff all mounted onto a daughterboard. Those boards are interchangeable, but the fastest ones made were PII 400s and Celeron 400s (and those are both pretty rare), so there's not a whole lot of room for upgrading.

Oh thank you Old Thrashbag, you ruined my doubts!

$66? Way too expensive for this if you ask me.

Without the battery, $66 is way too much. A new battery alone would cost more than that. And just how useful is a laptop without a battery?

I'd say it's too expensive, may 20-30$ would be ok. But I don't know about the availability in your country.

Graphics seem to be Silicon Motion Lynx E SM 811. Video RAM 2.0 MByte.
Nothing special, probably okay for 2D Windows, no 3D (too little video RAM for that anyway).

The resolution is probably 1024x768, I suppose no support for scaling so you'd better only use the native resolution on the internal display.

Uses for it:
- Later DOS games (either 1024x768 or external display, though. Problems with the video chipset possible)
- Windows 3.x (if can find drivers for this chipset)
- Win9x stuff (2D or software 3D only, the machine probably has not very much memory and it would be hard to justify a RAM upgrade except you have the modules already)

the machine probably has not very much memory and it would be hard to justify a RAM upgrade except you have the modules already

Unless it's been upgraded, it probably has 32 or 64MB. That was kinda the standard at the time it was made. But it should take regular PC66/PC100 SODIMMs, which are common and inexpensive. Even if you don't have any of those already laying around, you should be able to get it up to 256 or 512MB (depending whether it has one slot or two) for $10-15, maybe even less. However, that would be additional cost on top of an already pretty high price, so it's something to take into consideration.

I got it 😀 The reason it's worth $66 is very good condition, "no fancy crap", as Toni Cipriani used to say. A good bag came with it as well. Even if it came with a battery, it would be lame to expect it to run for more than half an hour.

From what I've seen, people here ask $100 for whacked up 486 toshibas, others combine 2 or 3 of them to get something close to normal condition - the old plastic is no good. But this one is really good 😀

Now the specs!
Celeron 300Mhz Mendocino
192MB SDRAM in SODIMM package
Silicon Motion Lynx E SM 811 2MB
10GB IBM hard drive
13.3" 1024x768 display with no scaling support
Windows XP + Windows 2000
CD drive
Floppy drive

That's just as much info as I could gather without any special software.

It came with Sitecom Fast Ethernet 10/100 LAN card. Unfortunately, it came without a dongle... I will have to find another PCMCIA card for cheap, it seems to be better than crafting or buying a dongle.

Concerning the battery - I thought I sould buy 8 rechargable 2500 mAh AA batteries and a holder to wire up to the power connector, but a friend of mine told me to look for a pair of more effecient accumulators in a local shop. He said cardiostimulator batteries would do (what else to expect from a medical engineer?)... What do you think?

What do you think I should do to deal with screen scaling? Is there any TSR/utility that cuts off the edges of the screen so that only the middle 640x480 or 800x600 is displayed? The laptop itself does not seem to have such an option.

P.S. It runs XP surprisingly fine, but I think I should go for 98 anyway.

RacoonRider wrote:

I got it 😀 The reason it's worth $66 is very good condition, "no fancy crap", as Toni Cipriani used to say. A good bag came with it as well. Even if it came with a battery, it would be lame to expect it to run for more than half an hour.

From what I've seen, people here ask $100 for whacked up 486 toshibas, others combine 2 or 3 of them to get something close to normal condition - the old plastic is no good. But this one is really good 😀

Well, 486 notebooks are much more rare.

RacoonRider wrote:

What do you think I should do to deal with screen scaling? Is there any TSR/utility that cuts off the edges of the screen so that only the middle 640x480 or 800x600 is displayed? The laptop itself does not seem to have such an option.

I have an old notebook with similar specs, Trident chipset though. That one has a BIOS option for either stretching the screen (ugly) or having black borders. If I use an external monitor I have to disable the internal display, otherwise the monitor will display the ugly stretched image as well.
Maybe there is a hidden setting in the BIOS you could access with some utility.

RacoonRider wrote:

P.S. It runs XP surprisingly fine, but I think I should go for 98 anyway.

Of course, for Office work XP might be useful, but not very interesting for gaming.

Thank you idspispopd, it was just as you said, the BIOS had "Enhanced screen" option, enabled by default, which was responsible for this ugly stretching.

After several hours of googling I managed to get drivers for LynxE SM811 (a lot of sites wanted money for download, agrhh), I would be happy to add it to Vogons Driver Library, but I don't know how it's done. Any leads?

PM SquallStrife and ask him to create you an account.

No battery would be a big issue for me. Even if it came with a dead battery, at least you'd have the shell and guess what? You can rebuild a lot of laptop batteries yourself because they use standard NiMH cells that you can buy from any electronics shop inside the battery shell.