New Lappy = New Questions!

Post by **bicostp** » Wed May 07, 2008 8:32 pm

I recently came into possession of a Toshiba Portege 7200CT, ca 2000. (Company throwaways FTW.) It's mostly my answer to an Eee 900, because I can't justify its $550 price tag. This was free.

When it starts up, it gets about halfway through the boot process at the Windows logo screen, then the scroll bar freezes and it just sits there for about 30 seconds. It's a clean install, it's defragged, and the drive is error-free, so what's going on?

Obviously replacing the hard drive will give it more storage space, but could it help performance? The old IBM drive in it is only 4200 RPM, and it seems a bit sluggish, even for such an old laptop.

That's all I have for questions; on to specs and rebuild progress!

Will do:
- New HD (pref. 5400 RPM for better seek times. Regardless, 10 gigs is pretty small. I only have XP, basic maintenance tools, Firefox, some of Office 2003, and Opera on there and it's more than half full.)
- CompactFlash card in a PC Card adapter for additional storage. (More than likely it will server as a swap drive and it will hold the browsers. This should, in theory, allow the hard drive to spin down more often, saving battery power.)
- Patch up the spot on the hand rest where the paint came off.

May do:
- LED mod the screen, but for now the CCFL is just fine except for a wrinkle in the diffuser sheet in the lower right corner by the clock.

Done:
- Thorough cleaning (It was chock full of dust when I got it. I'm surprised it didn't spew forth a cloud of dust when I powered it on.)
- Max out the RAM (320 MB)
- Reinstall XP, do all the updates, install software, blah blah blah
- Install the Vista Transformation pack just to confuse the hell out of people

Specs:
13.3" 1024x768 screen
600 mhz Coppermine P3
100 mhz FSB
10 gig IBM TravelStar 4200 RPM HD
1x USB 1.1 port, external floppy port, 2x PC Card Slot, speaker, volume knob, VGA port
Port Replicator (Serial, Parallel, PS/2)
TrackPoint (they rule)
Dock (which adds TV-out, 6x DVD-ROM, Floppy, and the standard assortment of ports)
Battery that actually works! (It can get about 2 hours out of a charge under a normal system load. Hey that's pretty good for an 8 year old laptop.)
Width: 29.7 cm
Depth: 24.1 cm
Height: 2.5 cm (a little more than half a centimeter thicker than the MacBook Air)

It can cut its clock and FSB speed in half through a BIOS setting, increasing battery life. Even then it's plenty enough for browsing, videos, Youtube, and other desktop stuff.

Dr. KillGood · Post by **Dr. KillGood** » Wed May 07, 2008 9:30 pm

Why didn't you get me one?

Raithah · Post by **Raithah** » Wed May 07, 2008 9:51 pm

I'm really, really sorry if I missed something vitally important but why not try something a little easier on the 'ol machine ? Like ... Damn Small Linux, or Xubuntu. Linux distros are getting more popular every day, hell you even gave an example in the EEE PC. Plus, it seems like all you're going to be using it for is basic surfing/word processing, so why not take the plunge ?

vskid · Post by **vskid** » Wed May 07, 2008 10:22 pm

Nice find, I spent a total of about $225 for my Lifebook B2630 (a bit smaller than yours but a bit thicker), it has a faster cpu though (900MHz mobile P3).

So is it booting at all, or is it just taking forever to boot?

I'll have to find a CF to pc card adapter so I can throw my 4GB CF card in my laptop. Would the card be ok with the swap file on it though?

My Lifebook will get about 1.5 hours with the backlight on full and a WiFi card if you stop all the warnings/auto shutdowns. I can squeeze out up to about 2-2.5 hours with the screen at half brightness (any less and its hard to see in a lit room) with wifi, probably 3 with backlight on low. I figured that if I rebuilt the battery with six 3.7v 5Ah cells ($20 each, $120 total, from battery space) I could get 8-10 hours of runtime. Would cover most of the bottom with 1cm of battery, but still not bad for about what a rebuilt pack would cost from most sites (good thing 2 hours is enough for me, I don't have $120 to cover the bottom of my laptop with).
There is a cool program called BattStat that monitors a lot of system stuff, including battery discharge rate. Really useful and it barely takes up any ram.

Post by **bicostp** » Thu May 08, 2008 10:12 am

Dr. Killgood wrote:Why didn't you get me one?

You didn't ask.

If you want one, there's bound to be some on eBay.

Raithah wrote:I'm really, really sorry if I missed something vitally important but why not try something a little easier on the 'ol machine ? Like ... Damn Small Linux, or Xubuntu. Linux distros are getting more popular every day, hell you even gave an example in the EEE PC. Plus, it seems like all you're going to be using it for is basic surfing/word processing, so why not take the plunge ?

Because I hate Linux as a desktop operating system, that's why.

I'd sooner install Windows 2000 or NT 4.0 on it. It would also be nice for the 802.11 card I have (Cisco Aironet 350) to work properly, preferably with its own kickass monitoring software.

Besides, it's only a year older than XP, and when the hard drive gets replaced, it will be reinstalled with a specially made nLite disc rather than a generic install of XP Pro version 2002. (Yes, my install disc doesn't have any service packs slipstreamed into it.

)

vskid wrote:So is it booting at all, or is it just taking forever to boot?

It boots just fine, but it comes to a grinding halt for between 30 seconds and a minute in the middle of the boot process. The only time I've seen that before was with another similar laptop with the same hard drive.

Have you thought about using a portable DVD player battery with your Lifebook? It may be a little heavier than a bunch of lithium cells but you could keep it in a bag or something.

I just picked up a 2 gig, 133x PNY CF card from BJ's for $16. Hopefully it will help a little. (Yes, SD acrds are pretty cheap, but I don't have an adapter for them.) Once it's finally free from its acre of plastic packaging, I'll give it a try.

vskid · Post by **vskid** » Thu May 08, 2008 7:02 pm

bicostp wrote:Have you thought about using a portable DVD player battery with your Lifebook? It may be a little heavier than a bunch of lithium cells but you could keep it in a bag or something.

I just picked up a 2 gig, 133x PNY CF card from BJ's for $16. Hopefully it will help a little. (Yes, SD acrds are pretty cheap, but I don't have an adapter for them.) Once it's finally free from its acre of plastic packaging, I'll give it a try.

I think that if I ever needed a cheap power source for it, I'd just get a couple SLA batteries off ebay and use those.

Have you trying using the CF card for the swap yet? I tried to use my 160MB PCMCIA hard drive for swap, but it wouldn't work. So before I buy a CF>PC card adapter, I want to know if you can get it to work.

Post by **bicostp** » Thu May 08, 2008 7:47 pm

It let me set up a page file, but I'm going to put it in a card reader and use the HP formatting utility to format it as an NTFS volume before committing to it.

It's mostly going to be for the browser and swap for the nearly instantaneous seek times. (And as a data lifeboat for the HD replacement.)

vskid · Post by **vskid** » Thu May 08, 2008 7:59 pm

bicostp wrote:It let me set up a page file, but I'm going to put it in a card reader and use the HP formatting utility to format it as an NTFS volume before committing to it.

It let me set my pc card hd as the place for the swap and I told it not to have a swap file on C:. When I restarted as it told me to, the settings were still as I had them (150MB swap on the card and none on C:), but the card was still empty. I believe the card is set up correctly to have the swap (it shows up under hard drives, not removable devices), but it just won't use it. I would guess that the 150MB isn't enough swap with only 256MB of ram, but if that were the problem I'd expect some kind of error.

Post by **bicostp** » Fri May 09, 2008 9:09 am

I got Opera running completely off the CF drive (edit the settings .ini file to put the cache there and disable multiple profiles), and it seems a bit faster. (Firefox is a resource glutton. That doesn't matter too much on a desktop, but on a slower machine, every bit counts.)

However, the battery just did something screwy. It booted and ran for an hour without incident, then suddenly the machine starts beeping and goes into standby mode.

Here's a screenshot of BattStat showing the sudden drop (Great utility, by the way.):

That's just the Vista Transformation Pack. Wheee!

Either the battery needs to be reconditioned or its monitoring board needs to be recalibrated. What do you guys think?

We have another battery for this model that's completely dead; I suppose I should see about rebuilding that one.

timmeh87 · Post by **timmeh87** » Fri May 09, 2008 11:57 am

Eh. It seems to happen if you have left a battery sitting on the shelf for a few months.

It happened the first time I ran my used thinkpad too, jumped from 30% to 0% on the first discharge cycle. Im assuming it just dosent account for self-discharge and therefore became wildly inaccurate.

So yeah just charge it up again, you should be fine. Then re-cell it. And remember too hook up the new cells BEFORE you remove the old ones, as disconnecting a cell can permanently trip the protection circuit in some batteries.

vskid · Post by **vskid** » Fri May 09, 2008 5:37 pm

My battery actually does kind of the opposite. Without the warning stuff enabled, it will run at 0% for about half an hour.
Looks like kind of a power hog compared to mine. Mine averages about 10-12W with the backlight on full, spikes to 14W when the hard drive is taking a beating. Uses 8W when the backlight is turned off, so a LED mod would probably lower the power usage by about a watt. Wouldn't be too big of a time increase with the battery as it is, but that would add about 30 minutes to a rebuilt pack.

I really hope the CF card can work as the swap, my hard drive almost never gets to turn off unless I kill all the open programs, including ones sitting in the system tray.