Rebadge of a ECS laptop?
As long as it doesn't heat like hell it's good.Also,make sure you check the caps in it,we all know that ECS uses crap G-Luxons in their boards.
The BIOS looks pretty neat.Nice to see a laptop using a desktop motherboard-style BIOS.
For the HDD,check if the laptop uses either IDE or SATA,yet I think it uses IDE,due to the small size of the drive.(40GB)

These laptops shipped new with Hitachi Travelstar HTS424040M9AT00 hard drives most of the time, so they used IDE. The BIOS is OK, but the lack of temperature readings in it is disappointing, and the "Advanced" menu really doesn't give that much information or freedom for customization. I'm pretty confident the caps are good on this one, since it got as far as possible into a Windows 7 setup routine without a hard drive, but I will check them when I change the CMOS battery.

I made a quick video of them, but it was kinda rushed due to me having to use my older camera, and its small xD card restricting the recording time.

nice one chap, I have an Advent laptop myself( model 7211 AL-096), mine is also 2006 vintage, uses a Celly M 450(yonah), it's a pretty decent machine mine uses a Ati chipset so the onboard video is pretty decent, think mine was also available as a Hewlett Packard as well. Got given it a few years ago with a dead drive, quick replacement and it's being working happy ever since, it's better on XP than Vista that it shipped with however.
Best of luck with the restoration, look forward to seeing how it goes 😀

BSA Starfire wrote:

nice one chap, I have an Advent laptop myself( model 7211 AL-096), mine is also 2006 vintage, uses a Celly M 450(yonah), it's a pretty decent machine mine uses a Ati chipset so the onboard video is pretty decent, think mine was also available as a Hewlett Packard as well. Got given it a few years ago with a dead drive, quick replacement and it's being working happy ever since, it's better on XP than Vista that it shipped with however.
Best of luck with the restoration, look forward to seeing how it goes 😀

Your Advent must've been a fair bit higher in the range then, given its much more up-to-date hardware and notably higher spec - I doubt there's even the slightest modicum of competition between the SIS chipset in mine and the ATI chipset in yours! That, and yours shipped with Vista, whereas mine shipped with XP Home (not even XP Pro).

Quick google check out of curiosity says that it can take a single gig of RAM. You can probably give it a pata ssd. I have an even older laptop (presario 3000) that I've fitted with one. With a light Linux Distribution it actually works quite well. The metal casing is really neat, I like rugged devices.

zstandig wrote:

Quick google check out of curiosity says that it can take a single gig of RAM. You can probably give it a pata ssd. I have an even older laptop (presario 3000) that I've fitted with one. With a light Linux Distribution it actually works quite well. The metal casing is really neat, I like rugged devices.

It will indeed take a single gig of RAM, although exactly how much I will throw in there depends on whether I end up dual-booting XP and 98 or not, and how much I can bother faffing around with the RAM fix for 98. As for an SSD, I can't really justify the cost of a 32 GB unit - I'm much more likely to get a 40-80 GB HDD for far less.

As to the casing, the top half is metal, but the bottom of it is plastic - although it is a very chunky machine.

Time for an update, I think:

Well, the battery is, unsurprisingly, as dead as a dodo. It indicates that it charges, but clearly isn't holding any charge whatsoever. A shame, particularly given that most of my PIII-era laptops have batteries that seem to hold at least a little bit of a charge...

The better of the two systems definitely needs a new CMOS battery. The only real "repair" I've done since the keyboard was to remove a small piece of fluff from the fan - this was stopping it from turning, and the system overheated whilst formatting a hard drive as a result (with a very loud beep)! Nothing was damaged, fortunately. The DVD drive is in very good shape, and the system appears to have no IDE controller issues; that said, it didn't seem to like the 6GB hard drive I used very much (which could be a drive issue, as I've not really used that drive properly elsewhere yet; I tried it in the Latitude C600, but that system really doesn't like Linux), but I was able to install Linux Mint 9 (twice... forgot the account details after the first install, which was a pretty big fail) and Windows 98 with it. Despite the dimensions of the system, it really doesn't weigh anything; the ECS 321 is supposedly 2.6kg, and the Advent 7094 2.8 kg, but as far as I can tell, it's more like 2kg (when compared to the 3.2 kg Vaio). The hard drive bay cover is metal, which is at odds with the rest of the base, which is plastic - not only that, but the hard drive bay doesn't sit flush with the rest of the system. And gets quite hot.

The second system suffered the misfortune of being taken apart by me. And it has to be one of the stupidest designs of a laptop ever; there are about 5 times more screws than the system ideally needs, the only location for any disassembly information came from this forum post, the keyboard fitting is a bit ridiculous, and the system actually appears to be impossible to fully disassemble; the silver cover won't come cleanly off the rest of the base, at least not without me breaking something. And to make things worse, that top silver panel is all one unit... deep joy. Oh, and that CMOS battery? Hidden away under various different things - you can get at the connector easily, but getting to the battery itself is nigh-on impossible when the top cover won't come off... compare that to the Vaio, which just needs the keyboard, power button faceplate and DVD drive removed for easy access to the CMOS battery, or the Compaq Armada M700, which locates the battery under the modem. Much easier to work on.

Oh, and that broken hinge isn't actually broken at all; part of the plastic of the hinge cover/black fascia had snapped off. So it may well be that I am able to rebuild both systems. Sadly, although I did buy a whole bottom assembly casing for about £8, the buyer refused to honour the transaction as it wasn't enough money to cover what he'd agreed to sell it for. Annoying, as that had all of the missing panels on it, another battery (which even if it held a little charge would be fantastic) and the casing itself was in decent shape - although considering that I can't manage to take the system apart, it would be hard to have swapped the motherboard and such into it!

CMOS batteries in laptops are a bitch of an itch to replace. I have a presario 3000, nice machine as far a pentium 4 laptop goes, don't know what to do with it, but anyway it's CMOS was dead, I had to disassemble it completely just to get to this itty bitty coin cell. Crazy. It was like a jigsaw puzzle. I had to find a manual that described how to remove each component to get to the battery socket.

One of the reasons I hate laptops, everything is sacrificed for portability.

I wouldn't hate all laptops because of that. Rather blame HP/Compaq. Dell laptops are alot better for repair.

DosFreak wrote:

I wouldn't hate all laptops because of that. Rather blame HP/Compaq. Dell laptops are alot better for repair.

As I said, in the case of the Armada M700, it couldn't be easier to replace - so Compaq aren't all that bad. In fact, it's easier to replace it than in some desktops, simply because I've known some ATX boards to be really reluctant to release the battery (and have broken at least one holder trying to remove a battery). Dell's don't seem to be so bad, but I need to figure out why neither of my Inspiron laptops appear to like their DVD drives - they power fine, but don't show in BIOS. I haven't yet looked for the CMOS batteries on those systems (or on the Toshiba, which I haven't bothered disassembling for the simple reason that it didn't need any repair work) - simply because I haven't needed to yet, as they're back in the repair queue.

EDIT: Having looked at the Latitude C600, I'd definitely agree with you on the Dell's being easy-ish to work on front. Although that battery doesn't really want to come unstuck from the chassis!

Alright, I take it back, I suppose, like everything else, it really depends on the model and manufacture.

So. I've got a 40GB hard drive for the better of the two Advents, and have installed XP SP2, and some of the drivers. Still haven't ordered a CMOS battery yet, but at least it is working fine. I'll also be ordering a bigger RAM module for it.

Changing the CMOS battery is basically impossible, as the system doesn't want to be taken apart fully, there's a shield in the way of the ports, AND the plug connector gets stuck on a chip on the motherboard right behind it. And when you do finally get the connector lined up, the socket on the motherboard for it fails and lifts up partially. Nightmare. And the other one appears to be dead.

Lukeno94 wrote:

zstandig wrote:

It will indeed take a single gig of RAM, although exactly how much I will throw in there depends on whether I end up dual-booting XP and 98 or not, and how much I can bother faffing around with the RAM fix for 98. As for an SSD, I can't really justify the cost of a 32 GB unit - I'm much more likely to get a 40-80 GB HDD for far less.

98 doesn't need a RAM fix for 1GB, it's when you hit 2GB.
(although I've did see 98 react horribly to some higher capacities with certain systems).

In regards to the dead battery, you can always open them up and put new cells in-- or get a company to do it.

Since I'm now selling this laptop, the dead battery is going to cost too much to fix, so it won't be being done. I'm now using a Sony Vaio PCG-FX601 as a Windows 98 laptop. 😀