Found an old Packard Bell laptop on my shelf today, and decided to get it up and running again. It is from 2003/04 and build for WinXP. Drivers were not to be found on Packard Bell website, so I had to use a hardware tool from Ultimate Boot CD, in order to get vendor and device ID. Then looked the numbers up on a website with a database.

It is an Sempron-M 3000+ with K8T800 or something chipset. S3 gfx, 20gb HDD and 1gb Ram. Not the most exciting. But I managed to hunt down Win2K drivers and now it is up and running again with Win2K SP4. I was not able to find the modem drivers, but that is something nobody really uses here anymore.

Installed MS Office 2K, Alcohol120 and Winrar as well. The issue now, is that I have no use for it. Was fun to set up though.

Charging a Fujitsu P-Series (Centrino-based) currently running 98, with a number of vintage office apps for general work on-the go, as it's on the small side. The Fujitsu's battery is effectively unavailable online. I have a poor track record at getting these glued battery containers open in a less destructive way, but I have hope I'll figure it out.

It is a tad on the heavy side for my intent, which is having it with me to do writing on the road/when I'm resting on walks/wherever. It weighs about 3 lbs and has a 10.6" screen.

The Fujitsu also runs 98 pretty well, which means I can run most of the DOS apps I want for this little project. The original battery life was 7.5 hrs, this one seems to be between 1 and 1.5 hrs. So, a bit reduced.

If I figure out how to rebuild the original with 3500mAH 18650s (a total hack job as it looks like the originals are 18350s or something similar, and so I'd be using 3 long batteries in place of two rows of 3 short batteries. There's enough room in theory if I get the wiring right the first time. 😀 Also a 7.5 hr battery could be a 17 hour battery when I'm done. If it works (if I do it) I'll probably get hooked on rebuilding batteries. A 17 hour win98 laptop?

I think I'll put that 139th in line on my project list, right after fixing the screen on the Toshiba T1200.

Edit: It occurs to me that building a battery bank to replace the wall power (in this case 16V / 3.75 A) might be an order of magnitude less complex. Probably doesn't even need 3.75A if it's not charging another battery. This could easily apply to other more vintage portables. Tenergy made a "universal" laptop power bank from 5 to 19 volts, but it appears to have gone the way of the dodo.

Was working on an old/not-so-retro build today and decided to run 3DMark 2003 to test out the 11 year old graphics card. Half way through benchmarking it "died" and upon rebooting the PC the BIOS was beeping away to indicate no graphics card detected. I tried reseating it several times, to no avail.

Fearing the card was toast, I decided to test it on another PC. It was working! Tried a different card on the new build and that was working, so I put the original "dead" card back in and... that's now working again too and this time it passed 3DMark 2003!

Very weird. I can only guess that the card may not have been seated 100% and the PC's BIOS got stuck thinking there was no card installed even after reseating several times.

Pooped down to Bunnings on the '76 CB550F and got a 30w soldering iron and solder sucker. Obviously over priced at just under 50 NZ pasoes. Just what what I needed as the tip on my current one is down to a wee stump. Far cheaper to buy the set than get the individual components.

Hi! Hi! Hi! Ho! a soldering I'll go.. With a sucker and a bit and a girl in the ......................Hi! Ho! Hi! Ho! Hi Ho!

I just fired up Amulets & Armor, a quasi-3D RPG that would have competed with the first two Elder Scrolls games back in the day. It became abandonware for a long time, before the developer rescued it and updated it a bit, with some polish, before abandoning it again several years ago, right before Windows 10 was released. Before that happened, he had talked about converting the game to OpenGL or porting the game to Unity Engine and open-sourced the code, though nobody has picked it up and done anything with it, as far as I know.

Soldering up my 68040-->68060 adapter. About 90% done. Just have to do the 6 pin and punch out the interposer socket pins that need to be removed.

Where can I find more of these PGA puller tool? Had one or two and was very useful.

Cheers,

Found mine on ebay for $7 a few months ago.

Cleaned a smoker's board.
Used dishes' soap, a brush and a lot of elbow grease. Water came out brown.

Surface was still filthy. Used some degreaser. Water came out dark brown.
Rinsed. New round of degreaser, light brown.

3d round water came out clear. Rinsed. White plastic is yellowed beyond cleaning but everything else is nice and shiny.
Even solder joint don't have that layer of tar that made it so "it's toasted" 😀

Smoker's stuff is the worst. I recently cleaned the insides of a CRT that was owned by a heavy smoker and despite having little use and the tube being almost new, it was absolutely filthy. It took me days to clean all that crap, now it looks good but if I get close to it there is still a faint smell that won't go away.

Fixed the 40EC but the new power-board for the screen smells like 30 year old clams when fired up, so nix that. I think I'll be using a NL6448AC30-10 power board and replaceable CFLs in it, since I have quite a backstock - will just future proof the thing. With the new board it's running great.

Got the KXL-D20 PCMCIA card, will need to either get the breakout box or spend some time late at night figuring out the Pinout with a speaker and the Akalabeth setup going (repeated digital and MIDI loops while I carefully tap pins with the other side grounded out). It did prove useful for one thing though - diagnosing the port/resource wackiness with my WiFi adapter and the WSS.... seems I can't pull OPL and ADDR settings with WiFi installed, and it seems there's a conflict with WSS as well - which might explain 7th Guest puking up when selecting WSS as the sound board in setup, and not finding it when sndsys.com is kicked in....hmm....so I'm working on that, might end up killing three birds with one stone with one card.

486 Desktop is up and running and all software is installed in 95....but I'm now getting tempted to move my xfer work over to DOS/WFW because I'm missing using that - plus I might want to play with more hackery in Opera 3.65 (I'm tempted to see if I can pull some tuning from RetroZilla into Opera). I also may toss Windows 2000 SP4 on it again on a huge SATA drive.......for experimental reasons, that and to maybe capture running Firefox on it (yes, I got Firefox to run on a 486 a couple years ago.....it was insanely slow, but it worked)....and I'm tempted to try i486 based Ubuntu or Slackware on it (Core).

Really fishy smell might mean it's burning teflon/ptfe somewhere, which ain't good.

BitWrangler wrote on 2021-08-13, 19:38:

Really fishy smell might mean it's burning teflon/ptfe somewhere, which ain't good.

What's weird is that whole laptop smelled like that all over, making me wonder if someone spilled their dinner. If it's a PTFE then I think we really should avoid Ultralite Versas then because none of my other four have that problem. Actually most of them don't smell like anything, 🤣. Actually surprising is none of the newer models have more than two Electrolytic capacitors in them either, SMD or DIL. Probably why they still work so reliably.

Either way, I have a cache of NL6448 boards to use and about six spare CFLs, I'm sure I can spare two CFLs and one of the connector boards. Eventually that PC and the others will be getting the LED upgrade done to their displays, both to take weight off the batteries and to remove one more failure point - those upgrades also use a lower-power board to drive the LEDs obviously.

Oh yeah you know what, cheap CFL household light bulbs smell a bit like that when they burn out their ballasts.

Installed a standard 1GB CF card in my Toshiba Satellite Pro T2150CDT in a dual CF-IDE adapter since the industrial cards don't work with the dual CF-IDE adapter (not sure if it's a voltage thing or something else).

Formatted the 1GB CF card and copied all of the files from my main laptop to the CF card and it works.

Just going through my computer "stuff" out in the garage and rediscover an NEC PowerMate from the early 2000s. Has a Celery cpu of some type iirc. It belonged to an ex-work mates daughter who sadly past away in her mid 20s . He bought it to me because he couldn't get it fired up to the desktop for some reason, ran Win98, and he wanted to grab as many files as he could off it. Long story short a ram stick so replaced that without any cost and gave the system back in fully working condition.

A few months later he showed up at the door step asking if I could get his daughters MS Works files off it. Said I'll have a go. Had a bit of a think about the easiest way to do this. Converted all the text files from the word format to rtf, put them on a CD and he was happy . When I'd finished he said I could keep the system. I asked him if he was shaw? Knowing how sentimental some folk are about a deceased loved ones possessions he may change his mind. Confirmred I could keep the system and brought around all the CDs, booklets, disk etc his daughter got when she originally purchased the system. I said thanks and we had a cuppa an nattered for a while.

A couple of days later I pulled the original drive with data on it and put that in storage. Installed a spare 40gig in and installed Xandros Linux 2.5 on it, which picked up all hardware in the system, then put in the garage. Had completely forgot about it until this morning. I pulled the cover off a luckily enough I had written the Xandros root/user password on the optical drive with a permanent marker. Very dust free inside. I was at the bottom of a stack of some other systems under a heavy old woolen blanket. All going good I'll fire the NEC PowerMate up sometime tomorrow to see if it is still healthy.

Nexxen wrote on 2021-08-12, 20:37:

Cleaned a smoker's board.
Used dishes' soap, a brush and a lot of elbow grease. Water came out brown.

Brush *and* paper towels.

Scrub Free with Bleach
Scrubbing Bubbles with Bleach
Clorox Foamer with Bleach

Or something like that.

Wear clothes you can throw away, don't do it on a tablecloth or finished wood. 😀

I have cleaned a few absolutely mad smoke-infested systems, including laptops, and it wasn't even that much work. You do have to disassemble completely. I'm really sensitive to cigarette smoke, too.

Merovign wrote on 2021-08-14, 05:35:

Brush *and* paper towels. […]
Show full quote

Nexxen wrote on 2021-08-12, 20:37:

Cleaned a smoker's board.
Used dishes' soap, a brush and a lot of elbow grease. Water came out brown.

Brush *and* paper towels.

Scrub Free with Bleach
Scrubbing Bubbles with Bleach
Clorox Foamer with Bleach

Or something like that.

Wear clothes you can throw away, don't do it on a tablecloth or finished wood. 😀

I have cleaned a few absolutely mad smoke-infested systems, including laptops, and it wasn't even that much work. You do have to disassemble completely. I'm really sensitive to cigarette smoke, too.

I'm saving this.
Thanks for the advice!
It's impressive how it coats everything, everywhere.

Tested, cleaned and retrobrighted a box of old (1995 - 2001) beige cd drives / writers I got the other week. Not a bad haul in the end as there was only one failure out of 9 so I ended up with 5 ATAPI (4 drives + 1 writer) and 3 SCSI (2 drives + 1 writer). Funnily enough the failure is my 2nd of this exact model in recent times - a Creative (Goldstar OEM), and dead as a doornail just like the other.

Testing my midi thru box prototype pcb, for my 'midi module tower'.