Toshiba Tecra 510CDT

My new laptop. It's about time. I guess I spent a year with the old one. Having an old laptop is fine, but if you want to do cool things like wireless LAN, use USB and have an on-board CDROM drive, you start to yearn for something just a little bit faster.

Something a little bit faster is exactly what I got. The old laptop was a 486/100. This one's a Pentium 133. It has twice the RAM and can have much more than the 64Mb it presently has, but one has to find the elusive 128Mb stick. They're out there, but they're usually in the hands of someone who wants $250.00 or something for it. Not me, mano.

This laptop has an internal CDROM drive, IR ports on front and back, a sound card, and an active matrix display. All these things are things the old one didn't have. You can probably see why this feels like an update. It's even slightly lighter. On the downside, it's a bit larger than the old one and I wanted an on-board USB port. I'll just have to go buy a card. Speaking of cards, this one has cardbus slots so I can run new PCMCIA cards. Wireless LAN, here I come.

So now I get to hit Ebay to get a battery, the elusive RAM chip and perhaps the nifty neato boffo docking station. There's just one more thing I need. The darn thing didn't come with a floppy disk. Odd. Gotta get one of those, too.

1/31/02

I've found out quite a few things about this laptop. First, the 128Mb RAM chip that boosts this thing to its 140Mb max is probably not going to happen. In my studies, I've found that this laptop has an older chipset that only has TAGRAM that will accommodate 64Mb of RAM. Anything more than this and the processor has to maintain the array for the rest of the RAM to be accessible. Since this laptop is a little light on the processor power side, I'll be staying with 64Mb. Yes, I just implied that more RAM is bad. On older, Pentium Classic and MMX powered systems, as a cost-saving measure, the motherboard manufacturers would only put a TAGRAM chip--a chip that tells the processor where the memory is--that only could map 64Mb of ram. If you open your computer up and on one of the flat, square, flush-mounted chips there's written 430FX, 430TX, or 430VX, you too have one of these boards. The only exception to this rule is if your motherboard has a 430HX chipset. This is only and exception if there are TAGRAM chips on the motherboard that will support more than 64Mb. If it's an HX chipset that only has TAGRAM to support 64Mb of RAM, you're still stuck. The HX chipset, the top of the line chipset for servers and such, will support a max of 256Mb of RAM. Much better than 64Mb. This, by the way is only for the Intel 430 series chipsets. VIA, SIS, and others produced chipsets that were also limited to 64Mb, but also produced ones that aren't. Do your homework.

Anyway, after ordering the wrong external floppy, I received the correct one. I'll have to auction off the incorrect one. Do not assume an external floppy drive that fits newer Toshiba laptops will fit this one. Internally they're the same, but the plug at the end of the cord is more narrow on the new ones. It won't work. It won't even fit into the SelectBay at the front of the laptop. Nuts.

I also ordered a battery, but I'm still waiting on that.

With the floppy I was able to flash the BIOS to the latest version and, as stated before, reinstall the OS. Yes, I could have booted to dos and reinstalled the drivers for the CDROM from there, and yes, I could have put the whole CD on the hard drive and installed it off there as well. I didn't want to do it that way. So I didn't.

3/22/02

My Tecra and I are very happy. I put in wireless ethernet and now I'm sitting on the couch updating my site with no cords hanging out of my laptop. Fun. I've also swapped the original 2.0Gb HDD for an almost 6Gb HDD. I had to order a new carrier for the new drive. When I got the thing, I noticed that the HDD new screw locations and the carrier had old ones. I had to drill a couple of new holes in the carrier to get the screws to clear plastic parts in the HDD bay, but the operation was ultimately a success. The BIOS sees the whole drive and that's a big ol' plus.

I had a hell of a time getting the battery I ordered off of EBAY. I waited a month for it. The guy finally mea culpa'ed his goofup and sent me out a new battery. In the meantime, I'd already won a second one for about half the price. Go figure. I then found the second battery adapter for the Select Bay on Ebay and now I have a laptop with a pair of new batteries in it. No, I can't use the CD-ROM when I have the second battery plugged in, but if I don't have it with, I can just share another machine's CDROM. Anyway, this thing isn't exactly easy on batteries. I get about 3 hours total off both batteries, but that's usually going to get me through any wireless session.

I had thought about getting a USB PCMCIA card, but the only thing I was going to use it for was synching my Visor. I have a serial cradle laying around, but I didn't really want to drag it around all the time. With USB I could use a cable. Since both devices have IR ports on them, I decided to take a stab at getting them to synch via the IR port. I had success on the very first try after acquiring the right software. How slick is that. Now I don't have to buy the USB card, nor do I have to lug another cable around. Score.

3/24/03

All good things must end. The Tecra has been put out to pasture by the Toshiba Portege 7140CT. I bought that one off eBay as well. I'm going to be putting up this old one for sale on eBay sometime this week. It put in good service. I lugged it back and forth to work for a year and precisely nothing happened to it. That's good.