sf78 wrote:

Someone dropped this at work. Looks pretty neat, but the awful Toshiba 4200 rpm HDD with that stupid LIF connector makes upgrading it a pain in the ass and not really worth the effort. Also I think the RAM limit is 2 Gb, but should be enough for XP.

dell.jpg

https://www.cnet.com/products/dell-latitude-d420/specs/

Is it a 40-pin ribbon cable that connects to the hard drive? That's Dell for you. Looks like eBay has a bunch of the ZIF/LIF SSDs on there.

sf78 wrote:

Someone dropped this at work. Looks pretty neat, but the awful Toshiba 4200 rpm HDD with that stupid LIF connector makes upgrading it a pain in the ass and not really worth the effort. Also I think the RAM limit is 2 Gb, but should be enough for XP.

dell.jpg

https://www.cnet.com/products/dell-latitude-d420/specs/

Don't know about this model, but many motherboards and laptops will say "2GB limit". I have been able to upgrade many boards and systems to 4GB with no problems that say 2GB max. Usually recognizes 3GB to 3.5GB total once the 4GB is installed. You just have to try per system and see what happens.

The system has 512MB soldered onto the motherboard and only has 1 slot for the RAM according to the documentation.

sf78 wrote:

... Looks pretty neat, but the awful Toshiba 4200 rpm HDD ...

Not shocking; there is anti-virus software and torrents and who knows what else on there. :p

Reformat and reinstall with a smaller load of software, pay attention to startup processes, defrag once in a while and it should be OK... still somewhat laggy compared with a regular 2.5" HDD but undoubtedly better than it is currently.

sf78 wrote:

Someone dropped this at work. Looks pretty neat, but the awful Toshiba 4200 rpm HDD with that stupid LIF connector makes upgrading it a pain in the ass and not really worth the effort. Also I think the RAM limit is 2 Gb, but should be enough for XP.

dell.jpg

https://www.cnet.com/products/dell-latitude-d420/specs/

I have one of those, it's not the fastest thing in the world but it has a great keyboard and a pencil-eraser trackpoint thing which is pretty neat on a non-Thinkpad. Never noticed the HDD slowing things down, to be honest. You can get PCI slot docks for them dirt cheap. I'd probably still be using mine regularly if the LCD inverter hadn't died; great little laptop.

AFAIK the D420 can "unofficially" go up to 2.5GB - put a 2G stick in the single slot. The D430, which I have, has 1GB onboard but is limited to 2GB.

bjwil1991 wrote:

The system has 512MB soldered onto the motherboard and only has 1 slot for the RAM according to the documentation.

ah, i see.

xjas wrote:

AFAIK the D420 can "unofficially" go up to 2.5GB - put a 2G stick in the single slot. The D430, which I have, has 1GB onboard but is limited to 2GB.

My mistake, this is actually D430. There was a typo when I searched for the specs.

Regarding the HDD upgrade...If it doesn't boot in 30 seconds it's too slow. 🤣 The interface used is the limiting factor, you can't get best speed even if you swap a modern flash drive and adapter inside. It might shave off 20 seconds of the boot, but I'm not really looking to spend 20-30e on a system that is borderline useless in anything but retro things. Well, I might be able to run 720p clips on YT. 😀

Sometimes you still find treasures. I haven't found much this year. I found just 30 minutes ago a sound blaster in local recycling center that has a SCSI. Never seen a sound blaster with that before.

I hope it works. Can you use scsi hard drives connected to it or is it just for optical drives?

Optical drives, I'm afraid since there's no way to boot off of a hard drive connected to it, however, somebody with more experience with SCSI drives can provide a better answer than me.

Oh, you can put anything on that card. Even hard drives. You just can't boot from it.

Didn't know that. That's rather interesting.

That sound blaster card I found seems to be working otherwise, but my SC-55 doesn't seem to like being connected to it for some reason. Power won't turn on in my sc-55 if it is connected to that card. If I disconnect the midi cable SC-55 turns on. If I connect midi cable while it is turned on, it plays midi fine. But because of that issue I did put back my old sound card back there.

During the same trip to the recycling center I also grabbed this radeon agp card, but back home I noticed faint smell that might indicate that it isn't very likely to work. Not sure if it is worth testing.

Baoran wrote:

Sometimes you still find treasures. I haven't found much this year. I found just 30 minutes ago a sound blaster in local recycling center that has a SCSI. Never seen a sound blaster with that before.

I watched an idiot totally smoke the SCSI cable hooking it up backwards on CT1770. Wild seeing 45-50 bare wires in the air with the insulation burned off.

Strangely, the card still worked after that-- I thought it was a goner.

AlaricD wrote:

Baoran wrote:

Sometimes you still find treasures. I haven't found much this year. I found just 30 minutes ago a sound blaster in local recycling center that has a SCSI. Never seen a sound blaster with that before.

I watched an idiot totally smoke the SCSI cable hooking it up backwards on CT1770. Wild seeing 45-50 bare wires in the air with the insulation burned off.

Strangely, the card still worked after that-- I thought it was a goner.

Perhaps it is a good thing that I don't own a SCSI drive yet 😜
Actually never touched SCSI stuff yet, except one controller card I have somewhere...

That story REALLY seems farfetched. I dare say impossible.

AlaricD wrote:

Baoran wrote:

Sometimes you still find treasures. I haven't found much this year. I found just 30 minutes ago a sound blaster in local recycling center that has a SCSI. Never seen a sound blaster with that before.

I watched an idiot totally smoke the SCSI cable hooking it up backwards on CT1770. Wild seeing 45-50 bare wires in the air with the insulation burned off.

Strangely, the card still worked after that-- I thought it was a goner.

What were you doing looking at that idiot anyway, without even trying to interrupt him? 😜

Baoran wrote:

That sound blaster card I found seems to be working otherwise, but my SC-55 doesn't seem to like being connected to it for some reason. Power won't turn on in my sc-55 if it is connected to that card. If I disconnect the midi cable SC-55 turns on. If I connect midi cable while it is turned on, it plays midi fine. But because of that issue I did put back my old sound card back there.

During the same trip to the recycling center I also grabbed this radeon agp card, but back home I noticed faint smell that might indicate that it isn't very likely to work. Not sure if it is worth testing.

radeon1.jpg

I tested the radeon video card and it seems to be radeon 9800XT and it works, but I don't think it is usable because the fan is about to fail. The fan makes lots of nasty noises when rpm goes even bit higher and it even stalled for a second few times, so I didn't run it more than 10 minutes.

See if you can pump the bearings full of oil based lubricant (I used petroleum jelly). I did that with a seized Radeon 9100 fan and it's been resurrected for years.

gdjacobs wrote:

See if you can pump the bearings full of oil based lubricant (I used petroleum jelly). I did that with a seized Radeon 9100 fan and it's been resurrected for years.

Would gun oil have too low viscosity to be used in something like that?

Baoran wrote:

gdjacobs wrote:

See if you can pump the bearings full of oil based lubricant (I used petroleum jelly). I did that with a seized Radeon 9100 fan and it's been resurrected for years.

Would gun oil have too low viscosity to be used in something like that?

Gun oil might be kinda thin. I always use 5w-30 or 10w-30 full synthetic motor oil. Haven't had to re-oil a single fan in years. Best to take the fan apart and clean all the dried up oil and dirt out first though.