Toshiba Satellite T2400CS Laptop

It's funny, but the title of this site may not even fit across this laptop's screen.

I sold this laptop in the late winter of 2001 on EBAY to a fellow who lives out west. He wanted it for the same reason I used it. To be a handy machine for running Win95 and Linux on. Thanks, fella, and thanks to this laptop for providing good, daily service for the better part of 6 months.

This is an oldie, but a goody. It's a 486DX/2 50MHz laptop, but even as old as that sounds, it's fairly modern. It has a color, 9.5" DSTN screen, a flashable BIOS chip, on-board Adaptec 6360 SCSI chip and a couple of PCMCIA slots. The slots lay one on each side of the machine, and one's double-height. It came with a port-replicator/docking station thing and a power adaptor as well. I think what I have is a port replicator, as docking stations usually imply either networking ports or add-on drive bays for additional HDD's or CDROMs or whatever. This has none of that.

One of the truly neato things about this laptop is that has all kinds of advanced technology. It has a 50-pin SCSI port on the back of it as well as two PS/2 ports for keyboard and mouse simultaneously. It has the little bud in the middle of the keyboard to control the mouse, and I bought the OEM sound card off EBAY for a paltry $5.00. The laptop came with a 400Mb HDD, but I bought a 3.5Gb drive on EBAY for a good deal. I'm running Windows 95 on the primary 1Gb partition, and Slackware Linux on the rest. It's quite roomy in this configuration, especially since Linux can see the FAT32 partition. That's a nice thing indeed.

It's been really fun playing with this machine. Configuring Linux on a laptop is pretty difficult, but it's not so difficult as to be impossible. I've learned quite a bit about X and it's various parts, and I compiled my first kernel on this machine. It is sobering to see how well Windows 95 works on a machine of this vintage, but not terribly surprising. Windows 95 was the only game in town for the likes of these machines, and I'm just happy as all hell to continue using it to make these old fellas go.

Some folks have seen this page and have asked me where to get information on this machine. Toshiba America has pulled all support for this machine off their site, so getting even a picture of it or an acknowledgement that this machine even exists from Toshiba is rather difficult. I hear your pain, folks because I experienced it. So, in the spirit of giving, here are some files those of you with this laptop may find useful:

Toshiba Europe still (as of 12/02) has the bios update (v5.0) and drivers on its website. It takes a bit of digging, but remember that this laptop is considered "obsolete" or "legacy." If you see a link that looks as if it points to older stuff, take it.

In case you're wondering, I used to have the bios for this machine, but the file got corrupted somehow and won't work with the recommend F12 procedure to flash the bios. Instead of taking a risk with your bios, just get it off of Toshiba Europe's site.

Click here for the technical specs for the Toshiba T2400CS (.txt file, 14kb)

Naturally, you use these files at your own risk. I do not own these files, nor am I including any guarantee, warranty or any other responsibility for these files. I found these on the internet, they worked for me, here they are.

If you want to see the site that helped me the most with this laptop, check out Jay Karolyi's Unofficial Toshiba 486 Laptop Page.