The last thrift shop visit of the year did not disappoint!
Between the rubbishy Pentium 4 laptops, one lonely 1998 Toshiba Satellite Pro with its charger sat on the shelve for 15 euros, marked as tested and working.
It's a 470CDT, with a Pentium 200MMX, 32MB of RAM and a 2.1GB hard drive. It's quite a nice unit for DOS gaming, as lower resolutions are displayed without stretching on the active matrix display, and the audio being handled by a Yamaha OPL3-SAx chip. For that price, I couldn't say no.
The CD-ROM drive ended up being broken, but I swapped the ATAPI drive with a similar age Toshiba 24X drive from a Dell Latitude CPi laptop, which worked fine after performing a small solder bridge mod on the ATAPI connector board, as described here in a different VOGONS thread.
What's crazy is that the battery still holds a decent charge, and it's not the first Toshiba Satellite of this age I've had that still does (another thrift shop Toshiba CDT from the 300 series).
I'm used to lithium ions dying completely within the decade, this battery was presumably made when I was still in the womb and it just works!
Then, browsing the CDs, I found some nice classic PC CD-ROM games, at 50 cents per disc (two disc games thus costing 1 euro).
Pretty satisfied with the haul 😁
