VOGONS


First post, by kleung21

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I took a chance and picked up a Toshiba portege 660cdt laptop from ebay - as is/untested. Worked perfectly after a bit of cleanup (cosmetic).

If anyone has manuals/drivers/further information on this laptop; please point it out to me. I know the drivers at least should still be on the Toshiba website.

There is very little information on this series; hardly any youtube videos so I'll make some comments here.

Pentium 150; 16mb ram; 1.3 gb hard drive. Lithium battery (main). Cmos/memory backup = NiMH rechargeable
- built in floppy uses a citizen drive with a selectbay connector. It didn't work for me as the belts on these things just die (same experience with the Compaq LTE line).
- managed to swap in a newer toshiba floppy drive but they are thicker/bigger so needed to dremel out the holder to fit

REMOVE THE CMOS BATTTERIES ASAP if you get one of these laptops working. I almost didnt' bother to check (out of laziness) but on disassembly; I could tell they had already been leaking. A tiny bit had tracked along the wires to the motherboard but luckily; hadn't damaged anything yet.

I had an extra EDO sodimm I was able to install so the memory is now 16 mb base +32 sodimm == 48 mb.

Planning to install windows 95 on this machine. Although 98 MIGHT work on 48mb ram without patches.

Great little system though. The plastic has gotten brittle though .

Reply 1 of 6, by SanguineBrah

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Minus Zero Degrees have the maintenance manual for the 620CT (http://www.minuszerodegrees.net/manuals/Toshi … ce%20Manual.pdf), which isn't exactly right but it's from the 600 series so I'm guessing much of it is applicable.

Reply 2 of 6, by Thermalwrong

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The plastic is just as brittle on my Portege 320CT - something about Toshiba's grey plastic from around 97 to when they started using the darker grey, is just very fragile.
One of the display mask clips broke off because I was working on its display yesterday, so I decided to see what kind of force is required to break the plastic into smaller pieces - it reminded me of chocolate, maybe a daim bar.

Somehow the 660CDT just doesn't have service manuals available - they might be on the 97 release of the Toshiba ATLAS software, but I can't load it to check.

Reply 3 of 6, by kleung21

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Thanks for the the replies. The 660cdt is a new motherboard design and changed from 610/620/650

As for the plastics. I'm going to use crazy glue to reattach plastic but need to handle it to gently

@thermalwrong. Appreciate it the tip. It gives me a place to look further.

@all. Still looking for info

Reply 4 of 6, by Thermalwrong

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Just loaded up Atlas 97 successfully on a Windows ME computer since it can't run in Windows 10.

Looking through the list of data for this model, it looks like the Portege 660CDT may have been too new for the maintenance manual to be ready for it. The maintenance manual is there for lots of other models like the 650CT, but the 660CDT only has the exploded parts view and the specs document.
The online service manuals we can get now for these older Toshibas all came from the Toshiba ATLAS cds. Some good people extracted them from the ATLAS software, made them into PDFs and shared them, prior to that I think they've been quite hard to get hold of or would be purchased.

My Tecra 750DVD also falls into this grey area where it's after the available ATLAS cds were made, but Toshiba don't offer any support materials for it. There are some online that you can purchase it looks like, but for general documentation, the online help that you install on the laptop is probably the best documentation you'll find outside of purchasing service manuals.

Reply 5 of 6, by PC Hoarder Patrol

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Found this on the Toshiba Europe archive...

Filename
port_660-tech.doc
File size
288 KiB
Downloads
67 downloads
File license
Fair use/fair dealing exception

...it was attached to one of the side-tab pages on this link - https://web.archive.org/web/20001215232900/ht … 60cdt/index.htm

Not a manual sadly, but a more detailed spec file for the model (compared to the PDF version from Dynabook - https://support.dynabook.com/support/staticCo … omTOCLink=false)

Even the archive file library only seems to cover as far as the 650CT - https://web.archive.org/web/19961207153252fw_ … files/index.htm

Reply 6 of 6, by kleung21

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Thank you all for the help and the explanation. It seems that this was a (relatively) low production volume model. It's a shame as it's a VERY compact Pentium 150.

The drivers are still available online at Dynabook / toshiba site.

I appreciate all the help

In case anyone is wondering; I managed to get a syba ide=>cf adapter working on this with a 4gb compactflash.

Caveat ; the syba adapter requires 1 pin to be snipped off but is a good deal at $13 cad off amazon

Silent system and faster as well.

I ended up choosing to install win95b on this 48mb ram system. Everything seems to be working..

I would suggesting formatting fat16 as some vintage programs (ie: ? Leisure suit larry) seem to have some trouble recognizing fat32.