The "Main" folder on the Toshiba laptop's start menu suggests that this laptop was originally equipped with DOS and Windows 3.1, but was later upgraded to Windows 95.
I only find late 90s to early 2000s laptops at my thrift stores, which are just not new enough and also not old enough to bother with, especially when they ask like $50 for one that's untested. If I wanted some laptops I now just go down to my local PC recycling warehouse store, where they sell a ton of pretty modern laptops for $5-$15 each. The laptops are labeled AS IS, but most of them tell you exactly what's wrong with them. Some of them even work perfectly, but just missing HDD and battery. I picked up a Dell Latitude D630, D820, Precision M4300 and M65 for $15 each and after adding HDD and batteries to them, they all worked perfectly fine with no issues. And these are all Core 2 Duos machines!
My dad bought the Inspiron 5100 back in Summer of 03. It was a bit different (16MB VRAM, 2.4GHz P4, 384MB RAM). It was his main computer from '03 to '08. What's interesting is that it used a Desktop P4, and I specifically remember the heatsink sticking to the CPU when I did an autopsy several years later. I miss old blue sometimes :3.
I had a Nintendo Gameboy Advance SP+ which had a battery that mystified me. Since I owned it I had never charged it (second owner) and it just seemed to last and last with no signs of fade. No warning to recharge. Nothing. Despite hours of gameplay. I suspect that modern batteries and their circuitry is designed to fail via software/hardware mechanisms. In other words, the batteries likely do last like we're seeing here, but they are induced to fail by some predefined algorithm, timing or other variable. Because as we know, once they failed it costs a fortune to replace them, which induces manufacturers favorite reaction -- replacement of the entire unit. Also EEVBlog man Dave Jones shows in his more recent video one of his old IBM laptops which he opens up and it shows a WDC (Western Digital) graphics chip. Great video!
I have the same cracks on one of my older laptops, and actually I'm pretty sure it's because the plastic is drying and losing some of its flexibility ... It's sad but I think theses old machines are slowly disintegrating
tien il y a fabien ;) moi j'avais un toshiba satellite l10 e l'ecran est tombé (plastique fissuré) donc c'est bete ce pc n'a plus d'ecran il aurais pu faire des effort au niveaux des plastique
The Satellite Pro series of the time, such as the Satellite Pro 410CS that I have, was based on the same chassis as this but added multimedia features: ESS-688 audio with a built-in microphone (behind that little grille on the LCD) and a built-in mono speaker with a volume potentiometer, headphone, microphone, and line-in jacks, and a removable drive that could be swapped between a floppy or a 4X CD-ROM drive. They also gave you an external drive enclosure for the floppy drive so that you could still use it while you had the CD-ROM drive installed. And finally I believe you could still order these machines with MS-DOS 6.2x and Windows for Workgroups 3.11 installed. And you forgot to close the Toshiba's LCD while it was running, so you can hear its PC speaker scream at you!
Hey I just wanna thank you, you are the one that led me to have a HUGE obsession in computers and now my friend and I are starting our own company where we buy and sell computers. So thank you!
Wow, the battery on that Dell is amazing. The last laptop I bought new, a circa 2008 HP 6735s (with it's own cooling issues) junked its battery with moderate use after 18 months. Also over the years it has needed 3(!) replacement AC adapters, but it is still going strong. I also have a circa 2007 Fujitsu-Siemens Esprimo V5535 laptop which still has the original battery and it will run for around 30 minutes on a full charge (with light use) which I thought was pretty impressive until I saw this video!
Ah yes, I have a few of the Pentium 4 era Dell Inspirons and boy they are fairly heavy. I do have 2 that actually work fairly well when given some upgrades like more RAM and an SSD. I find that many of these units also preform better if their vents are cleaned out and fresh thermal paste is applied. It really does help these machines last a bit longer.
I use to have this exact Toshiba model. It was my first computer purchase on eBay back in 1999 for $30 or so. The item description said "boots to blank screen/as-is, etc." When I received the laptop all I had to do was adjust the contrast/brightness and install windows 95 by copying cabs via laplink. Remember that program? This laptop got me through the first years of college. Cool video and great little laptop!
I watched a few of your videos now. Fantastic narration and quality (only thing that could make it better is a tripod). You kept my attention for almost this whole 50 minutes (I would have watched more if I didn't already know about how Windows 95 works), which is definitely a talent. Subscribed, and looking forward to seeing more.
Thank you for watching and commenting. It's one of my goals to respond to any comments posted when I've got something useful or informative to offer. I do have some camera tripods and probably should use them more often than I do.
+uxwbill The upside to the tripod is that you get the smooth, unmoving framing in the shot. The downside is that for different points of view you have to move the tripod and work around it. Rather than a 50 minute video being a 50 minute shoot, you then have to cut, move and then post correct everything. That's a lot more work, so if you can avoid it, it makes your life a lot easier. I think that the format works, like vwestlife's videos.
Dell laptops, I don't know why, are just really good laptops. The only thing that seems to die amongst them is the NVIDIA graphics cards in most of them, however this one has ATI which supposedly lasts exponentially longer. I have owned 3 dell laptops, an old latitude with win2000, a precision m60, and a latitude d620. They were/are all very reliable machines that really only break down when the user screws up on his part. People don't give Dell's the credit they deserve. I have to replace the screen in my precision m60, but that makes sense as it is about a 12 year laptop. I'm typing on a Dell desktop right now.
I read this comment on a Latitude e6410. It's not that bad, but Dell's items could use some fixing. From that computer explosion a couple years back, to my hard disk getting corrupted, it needs some help.
Old Dells were good, and Latitudes are still good, but modern Inspirons are junk. If you see one at a store, compare it to what's around it, and you'll see they're nothing but incredibly flimsy, bottom barrel trash. For business use, Dell still makes excellent computers, but I wouldn't recommend their home machines to anyone anymore.
Still use a 10-11 year old Dell Latitude D520 laptop except it has a ram upgrade from a WHILE back it's been over the heater DIRECTLY twice Thrown down the hallway so hard the battery fell out fell like two dozen times and slept/sat on several times LOL IT STILL WORKS THE SAME
Those computers are far more powerful than mine. I got a Core i7-3610QM Quad core processor dedicated 2GB AMD Radeon HD 7670M graphics 8GB DDR3 RAM. Windows 10 Pro RTM Man I really need to upgrade
windows xp 32bit, with firefox should still be able to be internet worthy at this time. "at this time" xp is on the fringes of its existence. I hope they keep internet browser support for it, because without it our old machines won't be able to access the web by normal circumstances. Fixing up an ibm x20 thinkpad right now. going with xp.
Awesome video. I was actually looking on eBay for some older Dell Inspiron's and the specs are almost laughable compared to today's systems. Even seeing something like an Intel Core 2 Duo seems distant. Still, if they powered workstations back then, there could still be some distant areas today running older hardware with no problems.
HAPPY 2016! Fuuuuuuuuck, just look at these DRAM thingies!!!!!!! Dude, can you sell that Toshiba? 'Coz yknow, no doubt in mind that this laptop can run DOOM, which is just OP for me!
I also have a Satellite 105CS: Sony CCD-TRV32 Video8 camcorder & Toshiba Satellite 105CS laptop And what's next in the uxwbill long video department: installing Windows 95 via floppy disks? :-P
Real trip down memory lane for me. My first laptop was a Toshiba Satellite T2100, 486SX, 8MB, and a 270M hard drive, with a smaller greyscale display. The system chassis and many other parts looked like this one, though, and I absolutely loved the built in power supply. Thanks for yet another great video, sir!
I've never understood the thinking of some people. Once someone gives away or otherwise disposes of an item for resale or disposal, the receiving party has no liability. Especially since the intent of donating to a thrift store is obvious. I have never, ever had this problem in Central Florida. The only problem is trying to be the one who gets to the computer first. They only last minutes on the shelves. There was a large local chain who refused to sell used drives because of that reason, however; once their businesses started losing sales, they flip-flopped on this and started selling every used part for 1 dollar, hard disks and windows COA cases as well. I filled up a 15 foot Budget truck for about $1,500.00 and after selling off only half of the items brought in nearly 5K. Too bad the days of reselling 1 to 3 year old PC parts is long gone in my area. I still sell a few things off now and again when i have a garage sale though.
***** Actually, donated property is considered abandoned and this has already been tested in the courts. I think the operators of the thrift stores in your area are probably just being cautious. We have a very large electronics/computer recycler here in central Florida called refresh computers. The place is awesome and you can even email them to look for a specific part and they'll notify you when they come across it. I needed the front panel for a creative Audigy2 Zs Platinum. People on ebay want way too much for them. Refresh found one and I got it for 10 bucks including the proprietary ribbon cable for 10 dollars. I seldom endorse people, but check them out.
I personally like the PCMCIA slots on the 266MHz/64Mb Powerbook G3 I had, there were 2 eject buttons above the slot that were next to the keyboard, which in Mac OS 9.0.0, you could drag the icon on the desktop to the trashcan, and thus they would pop out.
"I'm not sure that any of those machines are left running today" I'm laying next to my old Inspiron 1100 with a pentium 4 and 1gb of ram that I use to this day for old laptop games like the sims stories
Those old dell laptops were work horses and many of them are still around. I still have a dell latitude d620 with 3 GB RAM running windows 10, runs pretty good despite it's age.
***** Afro Head I think BizzareFurHead might just have a new kindred spirit - when he's not breaking down in a Buick. By the way, William I hope that you can get that Buick fixed. This video has wet my apetite for some Grey Toshiba-ing the now! I loved those old Windows 95 laptops
I used have one of those Toshiba laptops but got rid of it about 4 years ago. The grille on the front was a speaker, not a battery indicator and the floppy drive was removable and could be replaced with a 2x CD-ROM drive. Incidentally the battery on mine was. Li-ION battery and was still good in 2009-2010. The model number escapes me right now but it's appearance was identical to yours.
I can definitely second that Pentium 4 "room heater" comment from Bill. I had a Gateway M350WVN that had the 2.8 ghz P4, and it got rather hot after only a little while. One time I was using it on my lap and it blue screened after a little while due to overheating and never ran right after that. It served me well for my first year of college, though. I don't think I've learned my lesson about hot processors as I have an Asus N53SV with the i7 2670qm quad core!
+zhbvenkhoReload this guy isn't very good at these videos too much showing too much talking go straight to the goddamn action for crying out loud and turn the freaking laptop on!!!!! I on the happy side would just go straight using a laptop or computer or TV or whatever instead of showing you every single nook and cranny of the damn thing!!!
My Dad had bought an Inspiron 5100 like that back in 2004. Tough laptop, but the P4 meant it was so hot and noisy. It also had built in WLAN, which I thought was pretty impressive back then.
I have a Toshiba Libretto 50CT, and 23 years later, its Lithium Ion battery still lasts approximately 1 hour. Some companies just really managed to get it right with their batteries.
I have one of these Inspiron 5100s. While aging and heavy, it still gets almost daily use. Mine has BIOS revision A32, and is 2.8 GHz. The graphics in mine is much more beefy, I have 64 MB of VRAM. I think the display has more pixels as well. The fan operates pretty normally until you put it to sleep. Once you put it to sleep, it glitches out and only runs at a medium-speed until I manually change the fan speed. The batteries on some of these Dell Inspirons are quite impressive. I have an even older Inspiron 8100 which came out 3 or 4 years beforehand, and the battery still worked but didn't hold a charge for too long. I wouldn't be surprised if this is a new battery in this machine, especially with the new install of Windows. There is a hardware control for the volume, its one of the function keys somewhere on the right side, may even be page up/down if I remember correctly. The sound in mine is pretty bad, its clearer than some but there is nothing other than high ends coming out of it. I've heard people call them "Inspirations" as well, pretty funny! That is quite interesting to see "Made in USA" even if it is with foreign parts, I don't think I've ever seen a computer made in USA before. Built in power supplies are something I haven't seen in a long time as well. I'd guess they aren't seen much anymore for the same reasons you mentioned. I love the sound of these old hard drives. Those old ads on there are pretty neat. Some of them sound so outrageous compared to what we have today.
I am an old school computer geek myself and I enjoyed the look at your acquisitions. Mainly, I wish those who post videos on RUclips would find a way to mount their camera on a tripod or something instead of trying to use one hand all the time. I did select a 'like' for the video.
+uxwbill the one on the bottom of course. The one on top would take probably more than a "thousand years" to finish the installation. I had a version of the one on top, I was young and a noob and tried to put a desktop variant of the cpu in it and it never booted up again. It ran xp and I used it for serfing ebay and playing music. people take the life left in pc's for granted. my dell laptop which is just as old as that inspiron, runs windows 7 like a champ. every computer should have a purpose I feel.
I don't think Windows 7 is anywhere near as great as a lot of people do. It hasn't done well when I've run it on rather newer Pentium 4 era silicon (LGA 775, 3.4 GHz single core). These particular laptops also struggle with a thermal profile that's near the breaking point, since they're pushing a desktop P4 CPU. Adding extra load might prove fatal. (Truth be told, I'm surprised it's still alive.) The Toshiba computer remains in storage and sees only occasional use. As for the Dell, it sees quite regular use as a personal DVD player with some "added features".
***** a 775 cpu in a mobile seems interesting I would plop a old core 2 duo in there just to see what would happen. windows 7 for me runs on anything I plop it on even on 2.8ghz 478 northwoods, when I pare windows 7 with an old machine I notice that hard drive speed and graphics capability are what breaks or sets the stage of the old machines. I had windows vista running on tualatin celeron with sd ram just fine given I had enough ram and a dedicated graphics card. bottlenecking hardware is silly but it can be fun and interesting for people like us that have the parts to play with.
This particular machine is a Socket 478 design. I was talking of another computer (an Optiplex GX620 that is in fact running Windows 7 32-bit) when I mentioned LGA775. There's only 512MB of RAM in this laptop. Since it didn't cost me very much, isn't otherwise very interesting and works fine as-is for everything I want to do, I can't really justify putting any money into it.
The original Windows 95 didn't have a true 16/32 bit dither palette in the display control panel. It wasn't until later in the game that it was changed to resemble what is does in Windows 98 and beyond. It's probably a 1MB video memory chipset as well. Great video! I really love your vintage computer videos. I'd be interested in anything from the pre-2000 era that you have available for looking at.
***** I got GTA V to play on XP. I had to mess with the settings and install a 3rd party program so GTA would run. but it worked. I got half way through the game and it crashed. Don't know why it happened but when I started GTA back up it wouldn't run anymore.
That satellite is the reason that I watched. My father used to have two satellites that used that same Chassis. I think one of them was PII but the other might have been closer to the model in this video. Neither of them had internal power supplies though. I have always loved older computers, I may be rather young, but having a father in the IT world, I got my start with older computers. My first machine was a Sun SparcStation IPC (or IPX... i cant really remember without digging it out)
Dell Inspiron 5100. I had one of these running in a cheap client's office, upto late last year. It was set up as a dedicated scanning computer for a canon dr-7080c. Never had any issues with it. Only ever replaced the HD once preemptively and one battery. It was a work horse. 14 years of service.
Ahh the good old Dell Inspiron 5100. Got mine in late 2003 and managed to last a good 10 years with a replacement motherboard (after a time), a couple of hard drive upgrades, a DVD burner swap, and maxing out the RAM at 1 gig.
I love the blue color on that dell, combined with the silver it makes for a quite beautiful (but slightly chunky) and pretty powerful laptop. My parents upgraded from sony vaio's in probably about 2006 after hating them for awhile, my mother in particular had a dell inspiron 6000, which has been sold by now sadly, it was a very nice laptop (A completely silver color.)
Agree about the older Thinkpads. Have a like new T43 and a X60 that are miles ahead in quality over the e530 I am typing this on right now. The X60 with 3 gig ram will even run Win7 if inclined to 8-) THANK YOU for taking time to do these videos !!!!!
Ahh how I remember Microsoft works 4.5a :) from middle school. I have a brand new sealed copy with licence put up, I also had an old copy from long ago and shockingly runs fine on Windows 7! I love how old Microsoft products would accept the serial 1112-1111111 etc. Lol
MS Works was the bane of my existence back in the day. I was in charge of a small school computer lab and back in the early 2000's, most kids had home computers that came preloaded with Works while the school of course used Word. Can't tell you how many times I'd have to try to convert a Works file to Word for a kid so they could work on it at school. I eventually just had them save everything as an RTF file which would work no matter where they went.
I have an IBM thinkpad R51 that has that same video chip. I reflowed the board in august of 2013. That board has not failed yet. The battery also holds a charge for about an hour.
I recycled took one a part to recycle it. I was amazed to find the Toshiba has a gold plated heat sink and the CPU is mounted on some kind of mylar. If you remove the heatsink you can see all the gold wire is going to the chip. It was the coolest thing I've ever seen. I still have the motherboard because I can't bring myself to destroy it.
Those plastic cracks are very likely the result of shrunken plastics due to age. They've got several failure points, and the hinges are one of them, unfortunately. I've seen a few that have been ruined by this because they eventually break apart. Amazingly I have owned three Toshiba laptops in that grey case, all of which used in an environment using fluorescent lights exclusively, and not one of them had hinge cracks. I did have a 440CDX at one point that had cracks on the bottom and the sides all over, but the hinges were still fine. I always found these older Toshiba BIOSes to be difficult to work on, since they don't tell you much of anything about the installed peripherals. I also found that the scaler option acted strange on a few of these machines. The two Toshiba Tecras I have stretch out the text as well as the spacing with that option enabled, while my 420CDT only seems to stretch the spaces between the text. Maybe it has something to do with different scaling technologies, a newer BIOS, or display size, I don't know. If you ever have to change the hard drive for any reason, watch out for the blue crud (!!!) around the screw terminals of the hard drive, as it can make a mess out of everything if you aren't careful. I don't know what it is, but it looks like some kind of glue or rubber or something like that.
old laptops are really interesting to me, glad I have a few. The "best" one I own is an IBM 380XD from 1997. Or at least the best one that's completely working. I have some which are either not working, or have passive matrix displays, only a floppy drive, etc.
I have the 5150 (similar to the 5100) Check on the panel for the ram and make sure one if the tabs is snapped off. From what I understand, the placement if the tab can break the solder joints of an IC and cause booting issues.
Ya know, all things considered, for a Dell laptop from 2004 this thing was probably a more expensive unit when it was new. You bought it essentially for $5 but in 2004 it was probably an $800+ laptop, easily. Its amazing when you think about that. I have my old IPod in a drawer and I haven't used it in years (it cost me a decent amount of money back then) but now its just obsolete. I remember seeing the first generation of IPod and at the time I thought it was amazing. Now my phone plays music, games, surfs the web, has widgets/apps, and even serves as a flash light too. I wont lie though, I like Windows 7 but I still miss Windows XP a lot. I wonder what kinda tech we'll be looking at in 20 years....
the first laptop i owned was a toshiba satellite that looked like that. it had a 50mhz slc processor and 8mb ram. it never had an issue and i wish i had never got rid of it. these are museum pieces
I have a laptop that's basically that, but it's grey, and has a Celeron instead of a P4. The power jack has broken off of the motherboard pcb EDIT: This laptop is actually the inspiron 1150 mentioned at 6:00, works perfectly fine (except for the DC jack and the battery obviously) and it still turns on if i pend the connector a certain way. So there's at least one (mostly) working 1501. It has the same port layout other than the new dell plug and the removal of the FireWire port. I plan on getting it working, and you bet I'm gonna use one of those laptop cooling pads on it because i like my house. taking the battery out too. Odd that this laptop is the one that was known for fires, yet it's not a P4, it's a Celeron, must be a P4 antecedent My laptop does have the wireless option
I actually had a Dell Inspiron laptop. We threw it away back before 2009 (I believe) because the charging port kept on jiggling around and it would never sustain a perfect charging connection. So the charging indicator would turn on and off every time you would move the laptop or the charging port or cable.
You're lucky. Here in Britain a lot of thrift stores don't sell anything electrical. Those that are willing don't sell anything electrical very often. This is because in Britain it is illegal for any shop to sell used electrical items unless it has been electrically tested by a qualified electrician or by a person qualified to use a PAT test machine. Which of course, costs money. The only computer I have managed to pick up from a local thrift store was an old Apple imac. I still have, collecting dust in my closet and it still works.
I think the volume controls are on the "Page Up", "Page Dn", and "End" keys (via function key) that's how they are on my dell which has an identical keyboard.
I recently got ahold of an old Inspiron 1150 which I think is nearly identical to this machine, I think the difference between the 1100/1150 and the 5100/5150 is that the 5100 series came with dedicated video and the 1100 series used Intel extreme graphics, and with my machine I was also surprised when I plugged it and the battery started taking a charge and holds a good charge still. The 5100 would probably bee good for playing games from the early 2000s on eBay you can get The FX5200 Go or Radeon 9000 GPU modules to upgrade the GPU for $8-15.
I really enjoyed this video it was fun I had a toshiba thinkpad and I think it is still in storage I really like how you go through everything and are so animated as you explain things
You should have checked out the screen savers on the Toshiba! It could have had that awesome Shooter screen saver that they made :P (You know with the flying laptops and balloons to shoot ;D ) Additionally, on the subject of old laptops: My first laptop was a laptop made by Ultra! The only trace of the model number I can find is on the bottom which reads "6020", and it doesn't display a serial number. When I search Google for the make and model, I get nothing of interest. Another interesting feature is on the battery - there is a button which, when pressed, tells you how much charge is left in the battery. The button unfortunately no longer functions (probably because there's actually no charge left in the battery lol).
When you mentioned the built-in PSU thing on Toshibas and Compaqs, I just looked around to my Armada 1530, which also has a built-in PSU :) The BIOS entry method on the other hand is better than on my Armada, where one who wants to access the BIOS has to have a boot diskette with the setup utility. Fortunately the hardware changes (like the HDD replacement) is recognized by the BIOS automatically, so it's not really a necessity to have that diskette around at every hardware change.
The "Main" folder on the Toshiba laptop's start menu suggests that this laptop was originally equipped with DOS and Windows 3.1, but was later upgraded to Windows 95.
I only find late 90s to early 2000s laptops at my thrift stores, which are just not new enough and also not old enough to bother with, especially when they ask like $50 for one that's untested.
If I wanted some laptops I now just go down to my local PC recycling warehouse store, where they sell a ton of pretty modern laptops for $5-$15 each. The laptops are labeled AS IS, but most of them tell you exactly what's wrong with them. Some of them even work perfectly, but just missing HDD and battery. I picked up a Dell Latitude D630, D820, Precision M4300 and M65 for $15 each and after adding HDD and batteries to them, they all worked perfectly fine with no issues. And these are all Core 2 Duos machines!
Wonderpierrot what thrift store do you go to?
@@gamerplush7824 -that's your funny typo-
one day people will also lough on your 16gb ram and core i7 processor
lol wut
Did u say i7 quadcore?
I have an i7
i7 M620 @ 2.66 Ghz
From 2011/2012 I think.
+Fiber Silkington Def from 2011
yeah like my computer is a all around the board 2009 gaming computer and i made it for 200£
My dad bought the Inspiron 5100 back in Summer of 03. It was a bit different (16MB VRAM, 2.4GHz P4, 384MB RAM). It was his main computer from '03 to '08. What's interesting is that it used a Desktop P4, and I specifically remember the heatsink sticking to the CPU when I did an autopsy several years later. I miss old blue sometimes :3.
I had a Nintendo Gameboy Advance SP+ which had a battery that mystified me. Since I owned it I had never charged it (second owner) and it just seemed to last and last with no signs of fade. No warning to recharge. Nothing. Despite hours of gameplay.
I suspect that modern batteries and their circuitry is designed to fail via software/hardware mechanisms. In other words, the batteries likely do last like we're seeing here, but they are induced to fail by some predefined algorithm, timing or other variable. Because as we know, once they failed it costs a fortune to replace them, which induces manufacturers favorite reaction -- replacement of the entire unit.
Also EEVBlog man Dave Jones shows in his more recent video one of his old IBM laptops which he opens up and it shows a WDC (Western Digital) graphics chip.
Great video!
Every couple of months/years I come here and watch this video. I don't know why it's so.. welcoming and calming
I have the same cracks on one of my older laptops, and actually I'm pretty sure it's because the plastic is drying and losing some of its flexibility ...
It's sad but I think theses old machines are slowly disintegrating
tien il y a fabien ;)
moi j'avais un toshiba satellite l10 e l'ecran est tombé (plastique fissuré) donc c'est bete ce pc n'a plus d'ecran
il aurais pu faire des effort au niveaux des plastique
I remember when I was excited to see this UXWBill video first come out. Three years later, and I'm still giddy for UXWBill videos.
The Satellite Pro series of the time, such as the Satellite Pro 410CS that I have, was based on the same chassis as this but added multimedia features: ESS-688 audio with a built-in microphone (behind that little grille on the LCD) and a built-in mono speaker with a volume potentiometer, headphone, microphone, and line-in jacks, and a removable drive that could be swapped between a floppy or a 4X CD-ROM drive. They also gave you an external drive enclosure for the floppy drive so that you could still use it while you had the CD-ROM drive installed. And finally I believe you could still order these machines with MS-DOS 6.2x and Windows for Workgroups 3.11 installed.
And you forgot to close the Toshiba's LCD while it was running, so you can hear its PC speaker scream at you!
one of my earliest videos is a demo video from a 400cdt which is pretty much the same.i miss that thing
Hello
@@Leonard_MT Hi.
Hey I just wanna thank you, you are the one that led me to have a HUGE obsession in computers and now my friend and I are starting our own company where we buy and sell computers. So thank you!
That P4 Dell Laptop will soon become a usable George Foreman grill.
Wow, the battery on that Dell is amazing. The last laptop I bought new, a circa 2008 HP 6735s (with it's own cooling issues) junked its battery with moderate use after 18 months. Also over the years it has needed 3(!) replacement AC adapters, but it is still going strong. I also have a circa 2007 Fujitsu-Siemens Esprimo V5535 laptop which still has the original battery and it will run for around 30 minutes on a full charge (with light use) which I thought was pretty impressive until I saw this video!
My sister was bought a Toshiba laptop with a Pentium 4 D processor. You can image the heat that thing kicked out when playing The Sims 2!
Ah yes, I have a few of the Pentium 4 era Dell Inspirons and boy they are fairly heavy. I do have 2 that actually work fairly well when given some upgrades like more RAM and an SSD. I find that many of these units also preform better if their vents are cleaned out and fresh thermal paste is applied. It really does help these machines last a bit longer.
It is kind of sad that I bought a laptop for my niece last year on Black Friday that has much lower specs than this one. It came with Windows 8.
I use to have this exact Toshiba model. It was my first computer purchase on eBay back in 1999 for $30 or so. The item description said "boots to blank screen/as-is, etc." When I received the laptop all I had to do was adjust the contrast/brightness and install windows 95 by copying cabs via laplink. Remember that program? This laptop got me through the first years of college. Cool video and great little laptop!
I watched a few of your videos now. Fantastic narration and quality (only thing that could make it better is a tripod). You kept my attention for almost this whole 50 minutes (I would have watched more if I didn't already know about how Windows 95 works), which is definitely a talent. Subscribed, and looking forward to seeing more.
Thank you for watching and commenting. It's one of my goals to respond to any comments posted when I've got something useful or informative to offer. I do have some camera tripods and probably should use them more often than I do.
+uxwbill The upside to the tripod is that you get the smooth, unmoving framing in the shot. The downside is that for different points of view you have to move the tripod and work around it. Rather than a 50 minute video being a 50 minute shoot, you then have to cut, move and then post correct everything.
That's a lot more work, so if you can avoid it, it makes your life a lot easier. I think that the format works, like vwestlife's videos.
love all the old stuff to Bill thanks watching all you old posts
Dell laptops, I don't know why, are just really good laptops. The only thing that seems to die amongst them is the NVIDIA graphics cards in most of them, however this one has ATI which supposedly lasts exponentially longer. I have owned 3 dell laptops, an old latitude with win2000, a precision m60, and a latitude d620. They were/are all very reliable machines that really only break down when the user screws up on his part. People don't give Dell's the credit they deserve. I have to replace the screen in my precision m60, but that makes sense as it is about a 12 year laptop. I'm typing on a Dell desktop right now.
I read this comment on a Latitude e6410. It's not that bad, but Dell's items could use some fixing. From that computer explosion a couple years back, to my hard disk getting corrupted, it needs some help.
Old Dells were good, and Latitudes are still good, but modern Inspirons are junk. If you see one at a store, compare it to what's around it, and you'll see they're nothing but incredibly flimsy, bottom barrel trash. For business use, Dell still makes excellent computers, but I wouldn't recommend their home machines to anyone anymore.
Here,here.
Owner of a 12 year old inspiron 1300 we've own since new. Also has a used inspiron 6400 that's still going strong.
Still use a 10-11 year old Dell Latitude D520 laptop except it has a ram upgrade from a WHILE back
it's been over the heater DIRECTLY twice
Thrown down the hallway so hard the battery fell out
fell like two dozen times
and slept/sat on several times
LOL IT STILL WORKS THE SAME
No joke, I actually used one of my old p4 pics as a room heater recently. It actually worked quite well!
i didnt know microsoft made windows xp home heater edition
That dell P4 was running windows xp professional, you can tell by the blue loading bar on startup.
I used to have that exact same blue Dell Laptop.
Those computers are far more powerful than mine.
I got a Core i7-3610QM Quad core processor
dedicated 2GB AMD Radeon HD 7670M graphics
8GB DDR3 RAM.
Windows 10 Pro RTM
Man I really need to upgrade
***** ohhhhhh you just told him...
The White Wolf 1v1 my i7 2670QM and 525M
Get an SSD
Alex_2259 I don't think they make 44 pin SSD's.
mAsTeR98ofu Yes they do. www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA0AJ2C43055&cm_re=2.5%22_PATA_SSD-_-0D9-000D-00002-_-Product
windows xp 32bit, with firefox should still be able to be internet worthy at this time. "at this time" xp is on the fringes of its existence. I hope they keep internet browser support for it, because without it our old machines won't be able to access the web by normal circumstances. Fixing up an ibm x20 thinkpad right now. going with xp.
Awesome video. I was actually looking on eBay for some older Dell Inspiron's and the specs are almost laughable compared to today's systems. Even seeing something like an Intel Core 2 Duo seems distant. Still, if they powered workstations back then, there could still be some distant areas today running older hardware with no problems.
That DELL runs Half-Life 2 very well.
Very interesting video. The thing I love about you is the ramble. All kinds of fun history and facts comes out. Keep it up.
HAPPY 2016! Fuuuuuuuuck, just look at these DRAM thingies!!!!!!!
Dude, can you sell that Toshiba?
'Coz yknow, no doubt in mind that this laptop can run DOOM, which is just OP for me!
I've been going on a binge of archeotechnology videos. This one is amongst the best so far.
I also have a Satellite 105CS: Sony CCD-TRV32 Video8 camcorder & Toshiba Satellite 105CS laptop
And what's next in the uxwbill long video department: installing Windows 95 via floppy disks? :-P
VWestlife What about installing xp on cassettes
Real trip down memory lane for me. My first laptop was a Toshiba Satellite T2100, 486SX, 8MB, and a 270M hard drive, with a smaller greyscale display. The system chassis and many other parts looked like this one, though, and I absolutely loved the built in power supply. Thanks for yet another great video, sir!
Wow those old dells were built like TANKS!
Tanks that blow up by themselves...
64bittinen
lolz :D
64bittinen in the words of stuart k Reilly. Phhh hahaha.
Now in my words. I see what you mean
Lol
So true I used to KICK an old delldsektop with windows xp out if anger if the internet not loafing when u was like 9 lol
dumb.
I think it's kind of cool to see old laptops actually run. My first laptop was a DEC running windows 2.11 and oddly enough someone stole it.
Have you gotten any more computers from that shop
I have a Toshiba Satellite L955D 107 now in use.So wonderful to see the difference between the old and the new
I've never understood the thinking of some people. Once someone gives away or otherwise disposes of an item for resale or disposal, the receiving party has no liability. Especially since the intent of donating to a thrift store is obvious. I have never, ever had this problem in Central Florida. The only problem is trying to be the one who gets to the computer first. They only last minutes on the shelves. There was a large local chain who refused to sell used drives because of that reason, however; once their businesses started losing sales, they flip-flopped on this and started selling every used part for 1 dollar, hard disks and windows COA cases as well. I filled up a 15 foot Budget truck for about $1,500.00 and after selling off only half of the items brought in nearly 5K. Too bad the days of reselling 1 to 3 year old PC parts is long gone in my area. I still sell a few things off now and again when i have a garage sale though.
*****
Actually, donated property is considered abandoned and this has already been tested in the courts. I think the operators of the thrift stores in your area are probably just being cautious. We have a very large electronics/computer recycler here in central Florida called refresh computers. The place is awesome and you can even email them to look for a specific part and they'll notify you when they come across it. I needed the front panel for a creative Audigy2 Zs Platinum. People on ebay want way too much for them. Refresh found one and I got it for 10 bucks including the proprietary ribbon cable for 10 dollars. I seldom endorse people, but check them out.
I personally like the PCMCIA slots on the 266MHz/64Mb Powerbook G3 I had, there were 2 eject buttons above the slot that were next to the keyboard, which in Mac OS 9.0.0, you could drag the icon on the desktop to the trashcan, and thus they would pop out.
"I'm not sure that any of those machines are left running today" I'm laying next to my old Inspiron 1100 with a pentium 4 and 1gb of ram that I use to this day for old laptop games like the sims stories
+Oohiyall11 You are statistically unique and quite lucky.
My Inspiron 1300 and I are curious if your machine is still alive?
Those old dell laptops were work horses and many of them are still around. I still have a dell latitude d620 with 3 GB RAM running windows 10, runs pretty good despite it's age.
You got yourself a new subscriber :)
***** Afro Head I think BizzareFurHead might just have a new kindred spirit - when he's not breaking down in a Buick. By the way, William I hope that you can get that Buick fixed.
This video has wet my apetite for some Grey Toshiba-ing the now! I loved those old Windows 95 laptops
I used have one of those Toshiba laptops but got rid of it about 4 years ago. The grille on the front was a speaker, not a battery indicator and the floppy drive was removable and could be replaced with a 2x CD-ROM drive. Incidentally the battery on mine was. Li-ION battery and was still good in 2009-2010.
The model number escapes me right now but it's appearance was identical to yours.
XP is love, XP is life...
Windows 7 is love, Windows 7 is life
Windows 7 is not compatible with other operating systems though.
I enjoy using Windows 95 software on my laptop that has XP as its operating system.
XP, Windows 7 dual boot is true love, XP, Windows 7 dual boot is Zen life
@Ellis Williams No thanks. Yes with sp2 Vista isn't so bad but I'd still take xp or 7 over sp2 Vista.
I can definitely second that Pentium 4 "room heater" comment from Bill. I had a Gateway M350WVN that had the 2.8 ghz P4, and it got rather hot after only a little while. One time I was using it on my lap and it blue screened after a little while due to overheating and never ran right after that. It served me well for my first year of college, though. I don't think I've learned my lesson about hot processors as I have an Asus N53SV with the i7 2670qm quad core!
It's basically archeology
agreed brother
+zhbvenkhoReload this guy isn't very good at these videos too much showing too much talking go straight to the goddamn action for crying out loud and turn the freaking laptop on!!!!! I on the happy side would just go straight using a laptop or computer or TV or whatever instead of showing you every single nook and cranny of the damn thing!!!
Silas McGee i only watch the first 2 minutes, then a minute or two in tje middle and never tje end lol
Lisa Adler I use a 10 year old laptop it works just fine
sushi dream sweet what engine is it running?
My Dad had bought an Inspiron 5100 like that back in 2004. Tough laptop, but the P4 meant it was so hot and noisy. It also had built in WLAN, which I thought was pretty impressive back then.
They look like Nintendo DS's with keyboards.
-every laptop ever-
I have a Toshiba Libretto 50CT, and 23 years later, its Lithium Ion battery still lasts approximately 1 hour. Some companies just really managed to get it right with their batteries.
Ahh the Pentium 4, you run like an oven and heat up the room and thats fine with me as long as it gets done what it needs ro get done.
I have one of these Inspiron 5100s. While aging and heavy, it still gets almost daily use. Mine has BIOS revision A32, and is 2.8 GHz. The graphics in mine is much more beefy, I have 64 MB of VRAM. I think the display has more pixels as well.
The fan operates pretty normally until you put it to sleep. Once you put it to sleep, it glitches out and only runs at a medium-speed until I manually change the fan speed. The batteries on some of these Dell Inspirons are quite impressive. I have an even older Inspiron 8100 which came out 3 or 4 years beforehand, and the battery still worked but didn't hold a charge for too long. I wouldn't be surprised if this is a new battery in this machine, especially with the new install of Windows.
There is a hardware control for the volume, its one of the function keys somewhere on the right side, may even be page up/down if I remember correctly. The sound in mine is pretty bad, its clearer than some but there is nothing other than high ends coming out of it.
I've heard people call them "Inspirations" as well, pretty funny!
That is quite interesting to see "Made in USA" even if it is with foreign parts, I don't think I've ever seen a computer made in USA before.
Built in power supplies are something I haven't seen in a long time as well. I'd guess they aren't seen much anymore for the same reasons you mentioned.
I love the sound of these old hard drives.
Those old ads on there are pretty neat. Some of them sound so outrageous compared to what we have today.
Er. Mah. Gherd. **Grabs the popcorn**
I absolutely despise those Dell Inspirons. They were terrible.
I am an old school computer geek myself and I enjoyed the look at your acquisitions. Mainly, I wish those who post videos on RUclips would find a way to mount their camera on a tripod or something instead of trying to use one hand all the time. I did select a 'like' for the video.
hell that 10 year old laptop is windows 7 worthy.
Not in a thousand years!
+uxwbill the one on the bottom of course. The one on top would take probably more than a "thousand years" to finish the installation. I had a version of the one on top, I was young and a noob and tried to put a desktop variant of the cpu in it and it never booted up again. It ran xp and I used it for serfing ebay and playing music. people take the life left in pc's for granted. my dell laptop which is just as old as that inspiron, runs windows 7 like a champ. every computer should have a purpose I feel.
I don't think Windows 7 is anywhere near as great as a lot of people do. It hasn't done well when I've run it on rather newer Pentium 4 era silicon (LGA 775, 3.4 GHz single core). These particular laptops also struggle with a thermal profile that's near the breaking point, since they're pushing a desktop P4 CPU. Adding extra load might prove fatal. (Truth be told, I'm surprised it's still alive.)
The Toshiba computer remains in storage and sees only occasional use. As for the Dell, it sees quite regular use as a personal DVD player with some "added features".
***** a 775 cpu in a mobile seems interesting I would plop a old core 2 duo in there just to see what would happen. windows 7 for me runs on anything I plop it on even on 2.8ghz 478 northwoods, when I pare windows 7 with an old machine I notice that hard drive speed and graphics capability are what breaks or sets the stage of the old machines. I had windows vista running on tualatin celeron with sd ram just fine given I had enough ram and a dedicated graphics card. bottlenecking hardware is silly but it can be fun and interesting for people like us that have the parts to play with.
This particular machine is a Socket 478 design. I was talking of another computer (an Optiplex GX620 that is in fact running Windows 7 32-bit) when I mentioned LGA775.
There's only 512MB of RAM in this laptop. Since it didn't cost me very much, isn't otherwise very interesting and works fine as-is for everything I want to do, I can't really justify putting any money into it.
The original Windows 95 didn't have a true 16/32 bit dither palette in the display control panel. It wasn't until later in the game that it was changed to resemble what is does in Windows 98 and beyond. It's probably a 1MB video memory chipset as well. Great video! I really love your vintage computer videos. I'd be interested in anything from the pre-2000 era that you have available for looking at.
Imagine playing GTA V on XP.
***** I got GTA V to play on XP. I had to mess with the settings and install a 3rd party program so GTA would run. but it worked. I got half way through the game and it crashed. Don't know why it happened but when I started GTA back up it wouldn't run anymore.
+ERROR 301 kali? oh god...
it will not work you pc will melt like a potato in fire...... AND THEN YOU HOUSE
DeadLYcaT shit
95 was cool on release
That satellite is the reason that I watched. My father used to have two satellites that used that same Chassis. I think one of them was PII but the other might have been closer to the model in this video. Neither of them had internal power supplies though.
I have always loved older computers, I may be rather young, but having a father in the IT world, I got my start with older computers. My first machine was a Sun SparcStation IPC (or IPX... i cant really remember without digging it out)
my goodwills sell computers but theyre all broken
my goodwill sells a crap load of monitors for 3$
***** If you are interested, you could take'em home and fix them up.
I just bought 2 flat panel displays at my goodwill
The flat screen monitors at our goodwill are like 20 bucks each and are really overpriced
mine cost 5 bucks and 10 bucks
Dell Inspiron 5100. I had one of these running in a cheap client's office, upto late last year. It was set up as a dedicated scanning computer for a canon dr-7080c. Never had any issues with it. Only ever replaced the HD once preemptively and one battery. It was a work horse. 14 years of service.
8MB RAM, and here I am sitting with 32GB. How times have changed.
The Inspiron 1100, 5100 and identical looking models had the best hinges. Also the HP Pavillion ZE series laptops had a reset button too.
More videos or I'll cry
Ahh the good old Dell Inspiron 5100. Got mine in late 2003 and managed to last a good 10 years with a replacement motherboard (after a time), a couple of hard drive upgrades, a DVD burner swap, and maxing out the RAM at 1 gig.
Oh look new uxwbill video,nice.It'll be a couple minutes,but it's still good.
*sees 48 minutes* Aww hell yeah
Loads of fun! I got back in time when I was using my first PC with Windows 95, a Commodore with a Cyrix 166Mhz, 16 mb of ram and 1go hard drive. :)
My laptop is 7 years old
I got mine today alien ware 14
+Anime4 Mii its all about the Lenovo T420
+Anime4 Mii or the HP AMD A6 series
Lucky, mine's 5.
Anime4 Mii lol, so much for affordable
When we completed our A+ computer repair class training the teacher gave us a Toshiba Sattellite very similar to this one.
My Inspiron 8200 and my ThinkPad T23, both from 2002, both have serial, parallel and PS/2 ports :D
no way.. i have the same toshiba laptop, working orded too, found it in a dumpster like 9 years ago, you wouldn't belive what people throw away
Oh yes I would. I've seen it firsthand.
I love the blue color on that dell, combined with the silver it makes for a quite beautiful (but slightly chunky) and pretty powerful laptop. My parents upgraded from sony vaio's in probably about 2006 after hating them for awhile, my mother in particular had a dell inspiron 6000, which has been sold by now sadly, it was a very nice laptop (A completely silver color.)
Great Journey music! I have the album Infinity on vinyl. Lights is one of my favorite Journey songs!
Agree about the older Thinkpads. Have a like new T43 and a X60 that are miles
ahead in quality over the e530 I am typing this on right now. The X60 with 3 gig
ram will even run Win7 if inclined to 8-) THANK YOU for taking time to do these
videos !!!!!
I seriously enjoyed this video more than the first 48 minutes of Tron. And I do love a healthy dose of Tron.
Great video!
Ahh how I remember Microsoft works 4.5a :) from middle school. I have a brand new sealed copy with licence put up, I also had an old copy from long ago and shockingly runs fine on Windows 7! I love how old Microsoft products would accept the serial 1112-1111111 etc. Lol
I love it when older batteries work
MS Works was the bane of my existence back in the day. I was in charge of a small school computer lab and back in the early 2000's, most kids had home computers that came preloaded with Works while the school of course used Word. Can't tell you how many times I'd have to try to convert a Works file to Word for a kid so they could work on it at school. I eventually just had them save everything as an RTF file which would work no matter where they went.
Works Suite came with Word back in 2000.
I have an IBM thinkpad R51 that has that same video chip. I reflowed the board in august of 2013. That board has not failed yet. The battery also holds a charge for about an hour.
Dang, this reminds me of my early years. My first computer was a Inspiron 5150, similar to that 5100. Those were the days man. Rocking my p4.
That means my latitude c600 (13yrs) is actually vintage! I never thought of that
I recycled took one a part to recycle it. I was amazed to find the Toshiba has a gold plated heat sink and the CPU is mounted on some kind of mylar. If you remove the heatsink you can see all the gold wire is going to the chip. It was the coolest thing I've ever seen. I still have the motherboard because I can't bring myself to destroy it.
Very nice to see the old laptop once again. I want to see some working black and white screen laptop. Can you please share with us if you have one?
Those plastic cracks are very likely the result of shrunken plastics due to age. They've got several failure points, and the hinges are one of them, unfortunately. I've seen a few that have been ruined by this because they eventually break apart.
Amazingly I have owned three Toshiba laptops in that grey case, all of which used in an environment using fluorescent lights exclusively, and not one of them had hinge cracks. I did have a 440CDX at one point that had cracks on the bottom and the sides all over, but the hinges were still fine.
I always found these older Toshiba BIOSes to be difficult to work on, since they don't tell you much of anything about the installed peripherals. I also found that the scaler option acted strange on a few of these machines. The two Toshiba Tecras I have stretch out the text as well as the spacing with that option enabled, while my 420CDT only seems to stretch the spaces between the text. Maybe it has something to do with different scaling technologies, a newer BIOS, or display size, I don't know.
If you ever have to change the hard drive for any reason, watch out for the blue crud (!!!) around the screw terminals of the hard drive, as it can make a mess out of everything if you aren't careful. I don't know what it is, but it looks like some kind of glue or rubber or something like that.
When I worked at a computer shop last summer, we had both of these, I took apart the Dell on the bottom.
old laptops are really interesting to me, glad I have a few.
The "best" one I own is an IBM 380XD from 1997. Or at least the best one that's completely working.
I have some which are either not working, or have passive matrix displays, only a floppy drive, etc.
I have the 5150 (similar to the 5100) Check on the panel for the ram and make sure one if the tabs is snapped off. From what I understand, the placement if the tab can break the solder joints of an IC and cause booting issues.
I still use my Thinkpad 770z from 1999 almost every day! It still keeps up just fine with my work.
Ya know, all things considered, for a Dell laptop from 2004 this thing was probably a more expensive unit when it was new. You bought it essentially for $5 but in 2004 it was probably an $800+ laptop, easily. Its amazing when you think about that. I have my old IPod in a drawer and I haven't used it in years (it cost me a decent amount of money back then) but now its just obsolete. I remember seeing the first generation of IPod and at the time I thought it was amazing. Now my phone plays music, games, surfs the web, has widgets/apps, and even serves as a flash light too. I wont lie though, I like Windows 7 but I still miss Windows XP a lot. I wonder what kinda tech we'll be looking at in 20 years....
Wow! lucky! those are some nice machines! Wish my 2001 Toshiba laptop would hold a charge as well as your Dell does.
I have a working Dell Inspiron 1150 that's in great shape that I got new back in 2004
the first laptop i owned was a toshiba satellite that looked like that. it had a 50mhz slc processor and 8mb ram. it never had an issue and i wish i had never got rid of it. these are museum pieces
I have a laptop that's basically that, but it's grey, and has a Celeron instead of a P4. The power jack has broken off of the motherboard pcb
EDIT: This laptop is actually the inspiron 1150 mentioned at 6:00, works perfectly fine (except for the DC jack and the battery obviously) and it still turns on if i pend the connector a certain way. So there's at least one (mostly) working 1501.
It has the same port layout other than the new dell plug and the removal of the FireWire port.
I plan on getting it working, and you bet I'm gonna use one of those laptop cooling pads on it because i like my house. taking the battery out too.
Odd that this laptop is the one that was known for fires, yet it's not a P4, it's a Celeron, must be a P4 antecedent
My laptop does have the wireless option
I actually had a Dell Inspiron laptop. We threw it away back before 2009 (I believe) because the charging port kept on jiggling around and it would never sustain a perfect charging connection. So the charging indicator would turn on and off every time you would move the laptop or the charging port or cable.
You're lucky. Here in Britain a lot of thrift stores don't sell anything electrical. Those that are willing don't sell anything electrical very often. This is because in Britain it is illegal for any shop to sell used electrical items unless it has been electrically tested by a qualified electrician or by a person qualified to use a PAT test machine. Which of course, costs money.
The only computer I have managed to pick up from a local thrift store was an old Apple imac. I still have, collecting dust in my closet and it still works.
I think the volume controls are on the "Page Up", "Page Dn", and "End" keys (via function key) that's how they are on my dell which has an identical keyboard.
I recently got ahold of an old Inspiron 1150 which I think is nearly identical to this machine, I think the difference between the 1100/1150 and the 5100/5150 is that the 5100 series came with dedicated video and the 1100 series used Intel extreme graphics, and with my machine I was also surprised when I plugged it and the battery started taking a charge and holds a good charge still. The 5100 would probably bee good for playing games from the early 2000s on eBay you can get The FX5200 Go or Radeon 9000 GPU modules to upgrade the GPU for $8-15.
I really enjoyed this video it was fun I had a toshiba thinkpad and I think it is still in storage I really like how you go through everything and are so animated as you explain things
Thank you for posting this video :) I really enjoyed the trip down old hardware memory lane.. :)
You should have checked out the screen savers on the Toshiba! It could have had that awesome Shooter screen saver that they made :P (You know with the flying laptops and balloons to shoot ;D )
Additionally, on the subject of old laptops: My first laptop was a laptop made by Ultra! The only trace of the model number I can find is on the bottom which reads "6020", and it doesn't display a serial number. When I search Google for the make and model, I get nothing of interest. Another interesting feature is on the battery - there is a button which, when pressed, tells you how much charge is left in the battery. The button unfortunately no longer functions (probably because there's actually no charge left in the battery lol).
When you mentioned the built-in PSU thing on Toshibas and Compaqs, I just looked around to my Armada 1530, which also has a built-in PSU :) The BIOS entry method on the other hand is better than on my Armada, where one who wants to access the BIOS has to have a boot diskette with the setup utility. Fortunately the hardware changes (like the HDD replacement) is recognized by the BIOS automatically, so it's not really a necessity to have that diskette around at every hardware change.
I remember having a laptop with decent specs but guess what slowed it down ... Windows vista
It was a garage sale find for $20. It has a 1.5 Ghz Intel Pentium M and a 40 GB hard drive. It also has 256 MB of RAM.