Hey folks. Usually I dont really go near laptops for gaming of any kind. But when hunting down my next haul of retro goodies. I got offered firstly this Toshina Sattelite 220CS, the usual for the model 133MHz Pentium CPU, with the pants 2mb "GPU" yeah.. i had to use the commas as it barely describes its meh'ness. but it turns out it has a great dos compatable OPL3 souncard. shame the screen sucks being of the DSTN variety that I almost forgot how terrible these were. Still fitted with its OG 1.4gb HDD and a whole whopping 80mb of ram. In fairly good cosmetic condition. the usual CMOS battery error on boot, but loads win 98SE promptly from the time it came from after hitting F1 and End.

Thats the good things.. the not so good. no battery at all, no i dont mean its flat, or wont charge.. its just not there, but it runs fine on the charger. this cost me a big fat zero, got it along with some other desktops for nada. the other stuff is mostly junk, dead, or only useable for parts. but this gem works, in a fashion. The floppy drive throws a "A:\ is not accessible the device is not ready" error, now I only have a couple of floppies handy, from a sealed 3 disk Win NT boot disk pack I had around, and these could be toast, but visually are fine, the drive lights up, but no click n whir you usually get, so im thinking the belts gone, or something worse. has anyone fixed these external toshiba floppies? I have yet to test the CD drive.. I really should. Now after a cursory search im led to believe that it MAY be possible to swap out the DSTN screen for a TFT from a similar model, one of the CT or suchlike variants, so if anyone knows what model i can get the screen and gpu from as I believe you also need this but luckily its seperate from the main motherboard, and ups the VRam to a whopping 4mb! and with that done it might be possible to use this thing to play some DOS games. shame theres no gameport! Ive attached a pic so you can see what im wittering on about.

Ok secondly ive aquired cheaply a pair of Dell Inspiron 8600 laptops. One boots, one dont. The working one I believe has a Nvidia Geforce FX Go5650 128Mb, and im unsure what card the knackered one has. Im hoping its a Radeon 9600 Mobility 128mb, or at least another FX Go5650. My plans are to try and make at least one good, fully working, decent looking machine from the pair. or to see if I can rescue the non booting one. so at least I know its a good spares source, and preferably a second working machine. Has anyone carried out a GPU swap, or upgrade on these from the 3 cards they seem to have been specced with? I know the cards are a prorietry form of AGP, but can you swap out the NVidia cards for the ATI, or the Geforce 4 Go 4200 64mb for the FX Go 5650 128mb. Id also be looking at putting in a Sata SSD, cleaning up the insides a bit and regreasing the CPU, bumping up the ram if I can to 2gb or so, I think they came with 512mb. Id also like to dual boot them to Win 98SE.. if I can find all the right drivers, and XP SP3.. with suitable workarounds to add trim, to 98 and XP, and to let 98 work with more than 512mb. as I reckon set up right this thing could fly with 1996-2004 era games. im still waiting on these being delivered. so I will add some pics once I get to inspect and check, ive also been offered a docking station, and an external housing with various CD/Floppy/DVD drives, but unsure if these will work with the 8600.. yet.

Depending on what works and dont, and the overall cosmetic condition, i may need to do a dismantle and repaint on them, as i trully hate having scabby looking chipped n dinged stuff. so id be looking at a full cosmetic redo if they turn out to be more than just needing a wipe down. so anybody done a retro laptop refurb? how easy are they to paint, and get a good finish on? something that will last.