First post, by starhawk
So I'm looking at buying this Toshiba Libretto 50CT on eBay. I know it's got a bad display in... some way. The seller is trying to be helpful but I get the distinct impression that he's very much not a 'computer guy' and far removed from an 'electronics guy'. It also doesn't help that this thing is missing its power brick. From what I've seen and heard, the LCD panel is visibly intact, just that the dude can't bring up a display. In the past, it's made all the right noises for attempting to boot, but the screen remains dark.
I grew up in the 1990s and I learned computers and electronics at the same time. Glue logic chips are my programming language and I look at computers through the lens of electronics. I'm a hardware guy for DANG sure. Oddly, I'm not a gamer... I just know my chips and how they fall and how to make them rise again 😉 and I've got stuff in the closet that's as old as I am give or take a year or two, a goodly bit of newer kit, and one or two pieces that might be a few years older. Most of it at least tries to boot. Some of it's museum grade for sure. There's an NEC MultiSpeed EL that boots, last I checked, a Data General One of some version that needs power bricks (yes, bricks, plural!) but there's nothing obviously physically wrong with it outside of the old battery compartment (thank heavens!) so it probably works... and I have an original IBM MDA card, tested, working, known good! (Insert requisite 'Indiana Jones' "That belongs in a museum!" clip here...)
I know that Toshibas of this era can be a bottomless rabbit hole to another dimension 🤣 -- I've got a Banker's Box in there, in the 'not working' side of the collection, half-full of Portege T3400CTs, three of em, all parts machines. There's three FPGAs on the motherboard and they like to die, and given that the BIOS' error reporting is, it just freezes where it hits an error and you jam LEDs up into the parallel port and decode the binary... yeah, I was in downtown Durham NC for Hurricane Fran, way back when, and that wasn't a rainy enough day 😉 I asked the other nerdy guy I know IRL -- he has a fondness for Commodore, for what it's worth, having grown up on em, and now he runs the local tech shop -- how he'd troubleshoot that, and his reaction was just "I'd cry." I can't disagree.
So I could be looking at anything from 'it needs a backlight' to 'complete basketcase'. I've plenty of time on my hands, although not much money -- I'm actually on Disability, here in the USA, as although I'm quite nerdy, it's not in a way that's monetarily useful (I'm a pretty lousy troubleshooter TBH) and I adult about the same as I 'dance': I can flail about a-dork-ably and that's about as good as it gets.
I'm not afraid to post a troubleshooting thread, and component-level repair doesn't scare me. I have multiple (cheap) multimeters, and although I don't have a logic analyzer, I do have a logic *probe*, and I have an ancient oscilloscope I've literally no idea how to use -- it's a Tektronix 422, it was literally laid out three years before the moonshot 🤣... I also have a Hakko 926 iron, and I recently got a hot air pencil thing, although the latter is more useful, in my hands, for blowing important-looking grains of electronic rice off the PCB than anything else 😉 and the former has more than once made me consider changing my name to Jeff, given my proclivity for shorting IC pins in all the wrong ways... at least I'm sort of OK as long as I stick to through-hole work! I'm also not afraid of jank repairs. If you watch GamersNexus on YouTube -- all that proprietary stuff they say you can't reuse after the system's hosed? Yeah that line makes me giggle, unless it makes me cackle. Reusing all that stuff is actually my jam when it comes to more modern gear. It's hilarious how much low-end office stuff and older thin client gear I have around. You get used to doing all sorts of... junkyard engineering, I guess I'd call it, if you want to do computer stuff at my budget level. I'm hoping that this is merely a backlight issue, and I'm hoping that I can kinda-sorta make the backlight from one of those busted T3400CTs fit in there somehow. It ain't regulation, but what works, works, you know?
But my big concern is, how much info is out there on these? Coz what I can't do is operate in a vacuum. If I've got a service manual that gives me port pinouts and component layouts that's one thing. If I've got schematics, that's a whole lot more. If there's a community out there, even a smallish one, that I can talk to, *and* there's good documentation or there's been a reverse-engineering effort and known-good docs have come out of that, that'd be amazing... but if all I've got is a user manual that tells me not to try and stick 5.25in floppies in a 3.5in floppy drive and whatever the equivalent was, in that time, of "Your CD drive tray isn't a cupholder, Threepwood!" (what a ridiculous name for a pirate... or really anyone at all...) then... man, I don't know if I want to dive that deep all on my own. I'm not certified on scuba gear, you know 😉
To be clear -- I'm NOT looking for advice on whether or not I should buy the laptop. I'm NOT looking for advice on what may or may not be wrong with it, or whether I'm getting a good price on it (which is why I've not mentioned that part!).
All I want to know is, what documentation is out there, what information is out there, what resources are out there for a home hobbyist wanting to repair a machine known to be in a damaged condition, as identified in the thread title and the initial sentence of the post. So, like they say (or so I'm told) on that dumb cartoon TV show with the chronically cosmically drunk Doc Brown knocokoff -- "Show me what you gooooooooooot!" 😀
