Canadian Airgun Forum

A while ago, I had a nice Pentium 3 based laptop which worked perfectly, but it developed a problem with it's power jack, and so it couldn't stay on for more than a few seconds to a few minutes if I was lucky, because with the old battery dead, if the AC power was interrupted it would turn off.



The repair shop I sent it too, said it would go out of my $100 budget to fix it, so they let me take it back at no charge. The reason I gave them a max budget of $100 is because I know I could just buy another one for less, so at that point, it'd not make sense to fix it.

Anyways, I did buy another one, it's not Pentium 3 based, but it is late 90's Windows 98 (first edition, because it's from early 1999) era, which is really what I was looking for.

It's a Toshiba Satellite 2520CDS.

AMD K6-2 @ 300MHZ
RAM was upgraded to the maximum 96mb it can handle.
6.0GB hard drive
1.44 3.5" Floppy Drive
24x CD-ROM Drive
1 USB 1.01 pot
etc.
Toshiba specifications page for it: http://209.167.114.38/ISG/pastproducts/html/satellite/satellite_2520CDS_spec.html

It has an STN (passive matrix display) which is a long gone laptop display technology that was low quality, but much cheaper than the high quality TFT (active matrix) display of 90's laptops.

The STN display has bad contrast, is a little too bright is hard to see from certain viewing angles (but if you are looking straight at it, like you should bem it's fine), and there's a lot of motion blur.

TFT displays don't have any of these issues, they are essentially perfect, but were much more expensive back in the day, which is why there were options with STN displays, for lower cost laptops.

Thankfully it can also output to an external VGA monitor so for gaming or anything else which a good CRT or LCD monitor is required, it can do that. It also has a PS/2 port for keyboard our mouse, so I can essentially use it as a desktop if I want too.

I tested it and everything on it works as advertised, so I left the ebay a very positive review, and gave them 5 stars, even sent them a thank you message.

It costed me $79CAD.

As described in the listing when I got it, it had Windows 98SE installed on it, with all drivers, and the driver install software that was used, was housed in the my documents folder.

Being that this is a Windows 98 First Edition laptop, with the help of Windows 98 third party USB drivers, I copied all the drivers onto a USB, formatted the hard drive, and installed First Edition, then all the drivers.

I also installed so far:

- Microsoft Plus! 98
- Microsoft Office 97 (official legitimate CD copy my folks bought back in the 90s).
- Wheel of Fortune
-Winamp 2.0 (this was on the first computer I ever used (at home when I was 4) that also ran Windows 98, my older brother used it a lot, so now I just install it on every Windows98/98SE machine I have).

I do have a RBEM56G-100 10/100+Modem 56 PCMCIA card, that I can put in it, to be able to connect to the internet on it through my LAN, but I still need to find the drivers for it. It seems to be a popular card so it's just a matter of time I guess. There's a new tool out there called "the old net" which lets you look at old websites, as they were back in the day, on old computers, so I can't wait to check some out on this.

The warranty sticker on the bottom says "Valid Thru 04/19/2000" so this has already been out of warranty of 19 years lol.

I like everything about it, this was a good buy.

_________________
"Positive thinking and positive action add up to results." - Anton LaVey

"I went to god just to see, and I was looking at me" - Marilyn Manson, "The Reflecting God" (1996).

I don't know what you to use it for but, in terms of security and updated application you want to use, you'll going to have a hard time updating that to get your application to work.

^

Well obviously, but I use it for period appropriate games and other software. I have a modern computer too, (the one I'm on right now) with a 4ghz i7-4790k and 16GB ram, etc.

_________________
"Positive thinking and positive action add up to results." - Anton LaVey

"I went to god just to see, and I was looking at me" - Marilyn Manson, "The Reflecting God" (1996).

I got a nice IBM Thinkpad some years ago ~ works well!! However I put it aside in one drawer and don't remember where is it now... I doubt very soon, the computers may fade out however I still like to work on a real computer other than on the phones and pads...

Sent from my S8 via Tapatalk

_________________
~Plinkers~
FX-M3-22 Compact#PP700-Carbine#Diana48-177#XS28M-25@26fpe#HW45 Beast#AW-Custom Z-Killer DE
~Competitors~
FWB300SU#Tau-7#IZH-46M#FWB-65#CP88-C
~Target~
HW 30s/35e/97k/40+Extender/P3+Scope/70#CZ200s Laminated@10fpe#AA ProSport-177@12fpe

I have an IBM Thinkpad as well, it's a 380XD

has a pentium processor with MMX. It's from 1997, designed for Windows 95 according to the sticker, so that's what I installed on it.



also, got many other old computers, all the way from an eMac and things like this laptop I mentioned in the OP to 486,386,286 based machines, as well as a Macintosh SE from 1986.

Old & Vintage computers are one of my hobbies.

_________________
"Positive thinking and positive action add up to results." - Anton LaVey

"I went to god just to see, and I was looking at me" - Marilyn Manson, "The Reflecting God" (1996).

I got a netbook that I use for working with VW Vagcom, that's the only usage for the netbook.