Now the family christmas is done, I've been having great fun making 3 working laptops out of 4 non-working laptops I found on ebay recently for cheap. Out of 3 Thinkpad 600 laptops ( a 600, a 600E and a 600X), I've been able to make 2 working good ones, they just need hard drive covers to finish. Which I can do since I've got one for reference and a 3d printer. All 3 have working screens, which is great since the 600x laptop I bought a year or so ago had a bad screen and their LCD panels are very rare now.
I was going to 3d print repair parts for this PMD-5500 486 laptop, but decided that just squishing some Polymorph / whitemorph plastic in would be easiest, since hinges don't get too hot normally.
Then getting Windows 95 installed on the laptop, which sadly had a totally dead hard drive so I used a Toshiba 810mb drive, which is working great. Thankfully the drivers are the same as desktop ones, with the Terratec Maestro soundcard drivers working nicely for the CompuMedia ASC-9308 sound chip.
The Vanadium Lithium VL2330 rechargeable cell was bad and its low voltage stopped the laptop (with AMI WinBIOS) from booting. I'm genuinely surprised and really pleased that I had a spare VL2330 cell to replace it just in my box(es) of parts.
When I was repairing the screen, I was worried because the corner of the screen that I heated with a hair dryer to reshape the thermoplastic went white from the heat. But it went back to normal once it cooled down. Which is great, screens for computers this old are difficult to get.
Lucky find: searching for CD-rom drivers mentioned in the manual turned up a similar but older model laptop and its Windows 3.1 drivers, very handy! http://www.computernerdkev.heliohost.org/skd- … 00/skdspecs.htm
I'll have to get in touch with him and tell him that a similar manual is available since he was searching for it 4 years ago.