Old Laptop- want something cool

Xc3ll3rator · Post by **Xc3ll3rator** » Wed Dec 31, 2008 8:59 am

I have a 1994 Toshiba T1910CS...yeah its that old. It only has a floppy drive and of course a printer port and a VGA output. What can I do to make it better. I want to put linux on it or make it a DVD player... I just want something cool you know. Please help me!

Post by **bicostp** » Wed Dec 31, 2008 10:12 am

Make a digital picture frame! It's probably more than enough to spit JPEGs onto the screen, especially if you resize them to the screen's native resolution.

What model is it? What's the CPU? How much RAM does it have?

nitro2k01 · Post by **nitro2k01** » Wed Dec 31, 2008 12:19 pm

Check if it has a headphone out put. If it does, i may have an OPL chip in it. If it has an OPL chip, I (and other people) are interested in buying it. The OPL chip is the chip that made those cheesy MIDI sounds that were so common back then.

Xc3ll3rator · Post by **Xc3ll3rator** » Thu Jan 01, 2009 10:45 am

It is a 1994 Toshiba T1910CS ,Intel Inside(all I know) with probably 256-512 MB RAM.

Xc3ll3rator · Post by **Xc3ll3rator** » Thu Jan 01, 2009 10:48 am

There is no output, which sucks, but it does make MIDI sounds.

Post by **bicostp** » Thu Jan 01, 2009 11:12 am

Yeah, I just looked its specs up. You have a 33 mhz 486SX (not even a Pentium), and (probably) either 32 or 64 MB of RAM maximum. This is definitely not something you want to run Linux (or even Windows 98) on.

However, you can make a digital picture frame out of it really easily. I highly recommend this because it's too slow and old to do much of anything else, and you'll get a larger picture than most real digital frames.

Get a CompactFlash to IDE adapter and replace the hard drive with it, that way you can take the CF card out and plug it into your desktop PC to add or remove pictures. (You can get 1 and 2 gig cards dirt cheap nowadays, and that will be more than enough for 640x480 JPEGs. Don't go any larger than 2 gigs, since that's the largest partition you can make with FAT 16 and the computer might have trouble with anything larger.) Even if you have an old 128 MB card that came with a camera, you can use that. (DOS and the slideshow utility will take up less than 1 MB.)

Then install DOS 6.22 and the utility LxPic. (Make a DOS boot floppy, boot the laptop off it with the CF hard drive in place, and type "format C: /q /s" and it will install a minimal DOS system.)

Now all you have to do is resize the pictures you want to display (it's easiest to use an image editor that can do batch processing), throw them on the card, put the card back in the laptop, and you're good to go!

Links:
LxPic homepage
DOS boot disks
2 gig CF card
Someone else who did something similar (But they didn't have a color screen)
CF to laptop IDE adapter

Xc3ll3rator · Post by **Xc3ll3rator** » Fri Jan 02, 2009 7:01 pm

Thanks for the links. But I do have another question, is there a way I can swap the processor for one from a Old World Mac tower or get another motherboard from a newer laptop for storage purposes?

XCVG · Post by **XCVG** » Fri Jan 02, 2009 7:04 pm

Xc3ll3rator wrote:Thanks for the links. But I do have another question, is there a way I can swap the processor for one from a Old World Mac tower or get another motherboard from a newer laptop for storage purposes?

1. No way. I seriously doubt that kind of processor swap would work. I'm the guy who tried to jam a Cyrix CPU into a mobo that was I think P2. Well, not really, but it sounds interesting.

2. Putting in another mobo would be one (Ben)heck of a hacking project. It would be cool though.

Post by **bicostp** » Fri Jan 02, 2009 7:38 pm

No. Old-world macs use Motorola (now Freescale Semiconductor) 680x0 processors and IBM PowerPC processors. They're completely different. The only thing you might be able to find is a newer 486 or a Pentium Overdrive, but they're hard to find and a lot of Jurassic laptops have the CPU soldered to the motherboard anyway.

No, don't track down a newer motherboard. 99% chance the screen won't work with it.

Don't bother trying to make this a useful computer; it's just too old. Make a digital frame, that's all it's good for.

Xc3ll3rator · Post by **Xc3ll3rator** » Fri Jan 02, 2009 8:42 pm

Thanks, sounds like a plan.

Xc3ll3rator · Post by **Xc3ll3rator** » Mon Jan 05, 2009 4:48 pm

I actually began to make the picture frame, but it doesn't look that great and the software I was planning to use to view pictures didn't work. I need to find a app that will actually work and fits on a floppy disk.

Kurt_ · Post by **Kurt_** » Mon Jan 05, 2009 8:49 pm

Doesn't it have an ethernet port or something? Phone jack?

I have a pentium 1 laptop with an ethernet port. Hook it up to your lan, and who cares if it can fit on a floppy.

Another solution: Use winrar to break up a file into several floppy-sized files.

Xc3ll3rator · Post by **Xc3ll3rator** » Wed Jan 07, 2009 9:20 pm

Sounds good and all, but I went to add some more software to the new-born digital picture frame and found that my ribbon cable is ripped! What can I do to connect the ribbon from the floppy to the motherboard to work again? I don't know how to do it without messing up the cable- HELP ME PLEASE!

Aguiluz · Post by **Aguiluz** » Wed Jan 07, 2009 9:27 pm

Xc3ll3rator wrote:Sounds good and all, but I went to add some more software to the new-born digital picture frame and found that my ribbon cable is ripped! What can I do to connect the ribbon from the floppy to the motherboard to work again? I don't know how to do it without messing up the cable- HELP ME PLEASE!

Pictures?