Good idea for a thread. While the price of SB16s and Slot 1 motherboards has gone crazy on eBay it seems laptops of the same era are not worth very much.

About 12yrs ago I was given a broken Compaq M700 PII laptop. It was missing its hard drive, the battery didn't work and the screen was broken.

Managed to source from eBay a P3-450 motherboard, a replacement XGA screen and a new battery. Also installed a branch new 160gb HD and upgraded the RAM to 384mb. My Dad used it with XP for a while until he upgraded. It now lies unused in the loft. I installed Windows 2000, which is what it came with originally, but it takes forever to boot up. The optical drive is a DVD/CDRW.

The main issues I've had with it are finding a reliable battery. It's never made it past 2hrs, and a 'compatible' battery failed after only a few months of use. The battery takes up approx one sixth of the bottom chassis, and incorporates one of the rubber feet, so running it without a battery isn't an option. The replacement XGA screen was also far inferior to the 1600x1200 panel it originally had, but these are very hard to find.

Given the jigsaw of parts it's made from I never felt that the machine ran 100% perfectly, and it seems to run slower than a desktop machine with equivalent specs.

Given it contains a 4:3 display and a discrete ATI Rage 8mb graphics card I'm tempted to re-use it as a portable DOS gaming system - perhaps with a CF card in place of the HD. The only problem is that I don't have a floppy drive for it, but could probably set up DOS on my Pentium system and with a CF/SD card transferring files becomes easy.

My oldest is an IBM X20 running a 600MHz (I think, note to self really should power it up soon, its been a while) P3 with a massive 320MB memory (maxed out). Had to swap out the hard drive soon after I got it because it was making some very worrying noises. Got it for nothing at the end of a job when I was helping a company migrate to new hardware.

Works pretty well all things considered but reinstalling the OS is a major pain because it has no removable media to speak of, no optical drive or floppy. And it refuses point blank to boot from USB no way no how, believe me I've tried on several occasions. All the removable media stuff is a part of the docking station which I never received. Ended up having to resort to running 03 server in a VM with RIS just to get the thing back up and running.

OS wise I've had it running XP (works but having so little memory its a painful experience) and a couple of Linux distros which are much more forgiving on older hardware. Before you ask, no I didn't install Linux via RIS. I had to yank the HDD and install it in another box, install Linux then swap the drive back over again. A process which Windows seems to take great exception to hence need for the server VM.

I have 3 laptops with me right now (all my others are stored in my parents house in other city) so i will do an overview of all of them, but first the one i use the most, a thinkpad 755cd

1.) The laptop specs
Dos 6.22 and W.3.11fwg
Has a 486dx2 @ 100mhz
24mb of ram (8 on board + 16 weird card thing)
replaced noisy disk with a 2gb cf card with adapter.
Mwave DSP, soundcard and modem, has soundblaster 16 emulation, midi and joystick port
2X cd drive (according to some websites it's the first laptop with cdrom)
video capture and output
stereo speakers
2 16bit pcmcia slots.

2.) Your overall opinions of the system
It's a really nice laptop, i had to recap the thing but since then has been rock solid.
The things i don't like is the bios, crappy slow gui ibm bios, but it works.
also the midi and video capture inputs are proprietary.
No way to use floppy and cd at the same time (no big issue, but annoying)
Not a big fan of the keyboard hinge thing.
the keyboard feels really good!

3.) You opinions on the screen and speakers
The screen is fine, 640x480 and supports more than 256 colors, active display so you can play without issues.
Speakers on mine are kind of damaged so i can't say much
.
4.) Your thoughts on heat output
Its not really hot for being fan-less, so that's a plus, the screen gets kind of hot in some parts maybe also needs a recap.

5.) Your thoughts on battery life.
My battery was dead so the cells went to recicling, i don't use my retro computers on the go so no need for new batteries.