First post, by keenmaster486
- Rank
- l33t
I received this unit in the mail yesterday. Since then I've been playing around with it to see what I can make it do.
The machine is in immaculate condition, except for a hairline crack on one of the screen hinges, but it is barely noticeable.
(I will post pictures soon; right now the unit is taken apart on my desk due to cleaning and configuring it to my liking)
Specs:
CPU: Cyrix 486DX4 75 MHz (seems to perform only a little better than a DX2/66)
RAM: 8MB onboard with a 16MB stick added for 24MB total
HDD: Original was 540MB IBM. I put a 2GB CF card in there which I will probably stick with.
Video: CT65545 VGA
Screen: 10" 640x480 TFT
Audio: ESS 1688 (SB Pro II compatible)
Disk drives: Internal CD drive, external floppy drive
Battery: 2800 mAh NiMH pack
Extras: NE2000-compatible Ethernet PCMCIA card with dongle, 56K fax/modem PCMCIA card with dongle
So far I have noticed the following:
- The CPU is in what appears to be a Socket 3 with an extra row on the right side. A standard Intel 486DX/33 plops right in - would it work? I don't want to fry my motherboard, but I'm really itching to see if I can just up and place a real Intel CPU in this thing.
- The BIOS appears to detect the CF card correctly, although it complains about me not having used what I assume to be IBM's proprietary drive tool to make the partition. I may try a 16 GB card just out of curiosity to see what happens with that, but I'm not expecting much as this unit was probably made before the 8GB limit was broken. A drive overlay might fix that, though. It's kind of hard not having a working floppy or CD drive to boot from, but fortunately I already had DOS installed on my 2GB CF card.
- The battery appears to work - but the power meter is kind of wonky. The battery will appear to fully charge when you plug it in. But when you try to run it on battery power, it works perfectly, but the power meter begins jumping around in discrete steps: 75%, 50%, 25%, 5% - it will just sort of randomly jump around between these. If it hits 5% for more than about 20 seconds, the auto-suspend feature will kick in and the laptop will go into suspend mode. Last night I tried an experiment in which I just kept on waking it up from suspend, and I couldn't get the battery to ACTUALLY die. It just kept on going. Therefore I suspect the power meter circuitry, but I can't figure out what might be causing that odd behavior.
- The Trackpoint buttons are a little sketchy. You have to press pretty hard to get them to register. I will see about cleaning them.
- The CD drive does not appear to work. It won't even spin up; the light just blinks on and off at a constant rate and the drive will not read disks. I wonder whether I can fix this or if I will have to find a new drive. Question: can I replace it with an internal floppy drive, e.g. from a 365X? Or is it a specific interface? For one thing, I know that you can upgrade a 365X with the CD drive from the 365XD. Perhaps a "downgrade" could be accomplished. I'd rather have an internal floppy.
- When I plugged in the floppy drive I heard the Angry Whine of Death from the stretched-out belt inside. I tried to replace it with a rubber band that I had on hand but it twisted when trying to read a disk. I purchased a new belt online; hopefully that works.
- The keyboard is VERY NICE. Better than any other Thinkpad I have tried. Other laptop keyboards feel mushy in comparison.
- The internal speaker (mono) is the crappiest speaker on planet Earth. It's even worse than the little speakers you find in child's toys. I will be replacing it with something else, which I think I can place in the void left by the hard drive after I replaced it with the much smaller CF card.
I'd appreciate advice from anyone who's owned/does own one of these.
World's foremost 486 enjoyer.
