LHN91 wrote:Picked up a trio of as-is old laptops from a semi-official "Ewaste drop off that also allows you to buy parts and pieces from th […]
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Picked up a trio of as-is old laptops from a semi-official "Ewaste drop off that also allows you to buy parts and pieces from the skids of parts people dropped off" I found near work. Spent 20 bucks CAD.
Got a Toshiba Satellite T1910CS, a Toshiba Satellite 110CS, and a Compaq Presario 1200.
The two Toshiba's worked right away - the T1910CS is a 33mhz 486 with 4 MB of RAM and the 110CS is an early Pentium with 40 MB of RAM. Hard drives and 3.5" drives in both work great.
The Compaq... well the Power Cord attached light comes on, so at least that circuitry works... but no other signs of life just yet. I'll pull it apart and see what I can find - this one'll be nice if I can get it working, nice 1998-1999 era laptop I can use for mid 90's portable gaming.
Well I've got the two Toshiba's set up - the 486 I put Dos 6.22 and Windows 3.11 on, the only thing I'm missing is the graphics driver. It works on the generic ones, but from what I can tell there is some kind of specific driver somewhere.
The Pentium 1... well I put myself through a 21 Diskette install of Windows 95A. That was.... fun? 😵 It's only a 2 GB hard drive and no USB so I didn't see a need to go to 95B or C
Batteries are toast in both, although the one in the 486 seems almost like it wants to charge. Can't get more than a second or two out of it so far.
Both laptop's hard drives check out with a full surface scan - even the 200 MB, likely original one in the 486.
The one thing I'd love to find is a PCMCIA sound solution for DOS/Windows 3.1/Windows 95. Neither of these laptops have sound on-board, but with an external monitor they'd make pretty passable little vintage gaming machines. Not sure where I'll ever find one of those though, or even if they exist.