Two Old Laptops

Look out, here comes nearly one HOUR worth of Laptop Related Video Entertainment®. (If you're going to complain about the length of this video, consider that it is essentially two videos for the price of one. And that price is pretty darn cheap.)

I put out the word to a nearby thrift store that I was interested in acquiring any computers they got. They actually kept their word and called me when some showed up! The first is a Dell Inspiron 5100 and the other is a much more interesting Toshiba Satellite 105CS.

Amazingly, the original Dell battery in the Inspiron is still good after all of these years! Neither the battery nor the laptop itself seem to have been used a whole lot. Unfortunately, the Toshiba Satellite is pretty much confined to AC power at this point, and it's got some hinge damage.

I plan to make a video talking about how vintage software recovery media on floppy diskette can be preserved on media more reliable than diskettes.

Yes, I did notice that the Toshiba's panel claims to support some 222,000 colors. That's actually more than the 64,000 or so colors offered by a 16-bit color depth. Even so, it wasn't uncommon for a lot of early color laptops to have a "hard" limit on what video modes and color depths were offered, even if the display panel could show more colors than the video mode limits allowed. (My Compaq Contura 410C from back in the day claimed to support 4,096 colors, but did not allow selection of any greater than a 256 color video mode. If you tried to force it to do so, which wasn't as easy as it might sound, the result was garbled video on the internal panel. As laptop panels have nearly always been addressed digitally, I suspect this was a result of limitations in the digital bus linking the video IC and the panel, or its decoding hardware.)

BBISHOPPCM's video about his Toshiba Satellite 105CS is here:
   • Toshiba Satellite 105CS