Toshiba laptop aggravation

Hoping it works like on my laptops: Go into the Control Panel -> Mouse

-> Hardware -> Tapping -> uncheck the box "Enable Tapping". That's it.

While at it you might as well turn off other over-sophistications such as "click lock". That's what I do the instant I get a new laptop, even before installing any apps.

--
Regards, Joerg

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I just bought four used Win98 laptops. They have real parallel ports and floppies, and '98 programs can do direct port i/o, so they are handy for lots of things. I use them to run uP background debugger pods. And I use them as "print servers" with my Epson wide-carriage fanfold printers (copy file from XP onto a floppy, carry over to laptop, print.) The Epson Windows USB drivers always install in Polish or some strange language that I can't understand, and don't seem to want to print in fast mode now matter how you play with them. From the laptop parallel port, they print full blast with no drivers at all.

I use them with real PS/2 mice. Those mousepads are awful.

It's weird to buy a computer for less than a scope probe.

John

[win98 laptops]

Most mousepads are sited in the wrong place. But, then again, with a laptop you haven't much choice...

We discard laptops with anything less than a Piii.

Right. Big companies unload, sometimes, thousands of working laptops. Brokers buy them by the pallet, refurb, and resell them with a warranty. They can be handy to have around sometimes. It doesn't take a Core Duo to wiggle bits on a parallel port.

You can get a clean working '98 laptop on ebay for around $50. A refurb IBM from a broker, with 6 month warranty and a good battery, goes for about $250.

John

It's much simpler here. I use a Barricade firewall-router and it has a built in parallel port so the old HP-Laser mutated into another network printer.

Some had those rubber sticks, I think IBM did that. I always liked the trackball in my old Compaq but one more hard landing finally brought it to its knees, big crack around the enclosure, HD loosened and battery fell out :-(

Watch the old batteries. At that age some start leaking and must be disposed of at the transfer station.

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Regards, Joerg

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[snip] [snip]

I used to do that, then I got an hp P2015dn (double-sided printing) which came with a network port. ...Jim Thompson

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| 1962 | The only thing bipartisan in this country is hypocrisy

The heavy duty printing is done by a Brother MFC which has a LAN port. It has an impressive throughput. But the HP warms up faster and most of all has no fan because its low throughput doesn't cause it to get hot. The Brother's fan keeps running at least 5mins and the things sits right next to me.

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You can still buy PCs with ISA slots. And you will be able to for a loooong time. ISA is here to stay because of many industrial uses.

In a desktop the controller can do it, at least in my Dell here (Foxconn mobo). But the BIOS does not support 5-1/4" :-(

[...]

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I had a decent older laptop with *built-in* AC power supply (eliminates the problem of having to buy replacement batteries for something that is rarely used :< ). But, I opted to discard it in one of my periodic "purges".

I've held onto a Compaq "Portable 386" (lunchbox, not the luggable). Big, yes. And had to hack the BIOS to get support for even a 300 *MB* disk. But, keeps two ISA slots available for me (something I don't have in any of the other machines, here).

Unfortunately, I don't have another machine with a 5" floppy so I can't create the "SETUP floppy" to reinitialize the CMOS now that the battery died. ( I was smart enough to save images of all the floppies -- but forgot to save a drive that could write them... other than the one in the Compaq!)

I am hoping, someday, to have time to see if I can hack a USB 3" floppy drive to accept a 5" drive, instead (no idea how closely the controllers in those floppies are wed to the actual 3" drive! I don't expect much joy...)

Got any links? We've had a hard time getting mobos with ISA slots, as spares for older systems. We just refurbed a 10-year-old magnetic field mapper system and had a hard time getting parts. Our customer was breathing down our neck, as the mapper is in the critical path of a billion-dollar annual revenue stream.

John

Yes. The advantage of the Portable is that it is much smaller than a "regular" PC -- including the keyboard and plasma display -- portable and still has the old serial and parallel ports (even an *EGA* video out :> )

Yeah, so doesn't buy you much. :< I am hoping that the controller in the 3.5 usb floppies is smart enough to see the difference in a 5" -- much like you can repurpose an external USB CD-R/W to be an external (hard) disk.

I suspect the 5" went disappeared too soon for the makers of these controllers to support it. :-/

Can you use good used motherboards? 386, 486, Early pentium?

--
Lead free solder is Belgium's version of 'Hold my beer and watch this!'

They were 5.25" Do you need 360 KB or 1.2 MB

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Wow. That goes back a long way. I used to have one of those it was like carrying a car battery around with you. Powerful in its day.

You might be able to trick it into booting despite the CMOS being empty by powering it up leaving for a few minutes and then switch off and restart. With any luck enough power to put the CMOS into a default safe state will stay around just long enough on capacitors. Try a few variants of power on, reset reboot. You only have to get lucky once!

If it will boot once then use RS232 or parallel port networking to move the files across.

Regards, Martin Brown

There were no default setting for those computers. You had to run the CMOS setup program, or scrap the computer. I may still have a copy that is readable, in my collection of about 5,000 floppies.

If he had another 286 or newer computer with an ISA slot he could move the controller board and drive to another computer if he only wanted some files.

--
Lead free solder is Belgium's version of 'Hold my beer and watch this!'

The first few search links:

I found a European source for someone a while ago where they offered new ISA-motherboards with rather extreme numbers of ISA slots, similar to this one:

The good thing is that most of the "ready-to-go" ISA computers come as a heavy duty industrial version, with some serious fans and all that.

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Yup. :> The plasma screen brings back warm and fuzzy memories of playing Empire on Plato (though obviously the Compaq's display is much smaller!). It's nice in that I can disassemble it

*repeatedly* for upgrades, repairs, etc. Try that with a laptop and you quickly end up with a bunch of broken plastic parts that you have to *tape* together. :<

I've replaced the battery. Problem is it sees the CMOS as "corrupt". So, the hard drive is unrecognizable (since the "type" information is no longer valid in the CMOS!).

That means booting off the 5" floppy. :> If I had a bootable floppy, chances are it would have been the SETUP floppy! :-/

If I can get it to boot, I have a parallel port NIC that gives me about 70KB/s -- which is what I use normally (since sneakernet is not an option when you have no other

5" drives!).

Problem is just getting the SETUP image onto 5" media.

I recently rescued a Portable 3 (286 but w/ same 5" floppy). I will try to get *it* to write an image for me which I can then carry over to the '386.

And, then remember to keep bootable copies of this media available (instead of just "blanks"!) :-(

What are your images on? Just files on your hard drive? Why not just email them to a machine that has a 5-1/4, or am I missing something here?

I converted all the 5" I wanted to keep to 3", and now to CD. I actually had one 8" floppy (remember those?) I wanted to keep - an old 8048 Avocet cross-compiler.

Now I'm wondering if I shouldn't take those files and convert them yet again - to SD Memory Cards! Ha!!!

As time marches on, the list of stuff I want to keep (in general, not just specific to computers!) drops significantly!!

-mpm

Better yet - swap out the CMOS backup battery first. Probably either a coin cell, or more likley (depending on age), either one of those plug-in power paks, or a few cell stacked in series and soldered to the board. If the latter, just clip and connect new.