From: Stanton Young (stantony123_at_hotmail.com)
Date: Fri Dec 06 2002 - 16:26:23 EST
Hi everyone,
I've been reading the archives for a while and decided to write on my
upgrade escapades.
A friend gave me a TP600 233 Pentium with floppy and cd and power supply and
dead battery. HD had 13mb of bad sectors and it took three minutes to boot
with errors, bios battery was dead. Screen was good, no bad pixels! So...
1: Soldered a new li bio battery that costs 2dollars. NO BOOT ERRORS
2: Wiped the HD and installed win98se
3: Bought a used battery for 50 dollars to update to latest bios. (now
stored in in the fridge at 100% charge)
4: Installed all the latest drivers, patches and software from IBM thinkpad
matrix
5: Got a ethernet card for 5 dollars and its on the network or can be
plugged into a DSL modem.
6: Got a PII 300 CPU from a online vendor, and just popped it in and it
worked! (50 bucks) Cost vs
At this point while the case was open, I oiled the fan and blew all the dust
outa this thing.
7: FOUND 128mb ram chips lying around work and they work! RAM at 288 now.
8: Picked up a 12gig Fujitsu HD for 60 dollars.
9: Found a margi card plus dongle for 20 dollars at a computer show
10: Picked up a 2x DVD drive for 35 dollars on ebay. DVD plays great!
11: To insure I would never have to go through software configuration again,
I ghosted the bare system to a CD-Rom and stuck it in my archives.
End result: TP600, PII 300, 288Ram 12gb HD, Ethernet card, DVD capable.
Why all this for 200 plus dollars and 60 hours of spare time spent? It was
fun. NEXT! Installing Win2000 on the 3.2gb HD pull and see how that works
out.
And here is my tip for the TP600 owners. Yes, I found that HD and DVD drive
support DMA. If you open up system monitor and test the ram and cpu usage,
you can see your CPU drop from 100% playing DVD (file transfer) to 55%-75%
Cheers and thanks to all your great posts and tips!
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This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.3 : Thu Jan 23 2003 - 09:59:43 EST