|  This is my experience in recycling Toshiba laptops. I own a Toshiba Satellite 1625CDT that I bought in 2000. It was the best compromise between value and state-of-the-art hardware at that time. This laptop comes with an AMD K6-2 475 Mhz chip with 64 Kb + 512 L2 on-die cache. Originally comes with 64 Mb RAM, onboard, plus an empty slot to ad an SODIMM. I've upgraded it with an extra 128 Mb. The screen's 12.1 inches wide, TFT, which is very bright. It's even readable outside in sunshine. Cannot see much if using a dark background and noonday sunshine hits directly the screen, though. An ATI Rage LT Pro (Mach64 chip) VGA controller with 4 Mb VRAM and 2x AGP port deals efficiently with games and video acceleration (in Windoze 98SE). It also supports an external monitor at 1024x768 resolution. I've tried that, even a video projector, and it works awfully well. A Cirrus Logic Crystal SoundFusion CS4281 soundcard provides superb sound playback and recording. This laptop came with a Fujitsu 4 Gb harddisk, 24x CDROM, 3.5" diskette drive. The hard disk broke down a year+ later. I replaced it with an IBM 10 Gb disk that was good enough for another year. Since then, I gave up replacing harddisks and concentrated on using Linux live-CD distros instead. | For connectivity, the laptop comes with serial and parallel (bi-directional, ECP, EPP) ports, and a Conexant PCI modem. No network card. Also, there is an USB port, a PS/2 plug which supports external mice and keyboards just fine, 2 PCMCIA CardBus slots (Texas Instruments), a Kensington lock. Later I bought a Hewlett Packard HP CD-Writer Plus 8200 CD-rewriter. It has USB interface and worked for a while in Winblows and then it wouldn't even read CDs. Since two hard disks broke down on this laptop, maybe because the hard disk is stored below the keyboard beside the motherboard and between the CDROM/floppy disk drives and the battery it just can't cool down and overheating ends up killing them, I decided not to spend more money and try to use it nevertheless. Winblowz only runs from internal hard disks, if it does at all. I had already tried Linux, and liked its speed and stability. |
| Besides, there are plenty of live-CD distros out there that can make use of, otherwise, unusable hardware. I got Ututo (an Argentinian distro) but it didn't work out, although it worked fine with desktop PCs. Later I got Knoppix 3.2 (Spanish and MiB versions). They work very well. All the hardware is detected and works, except the modem that needs a driver only useful if you have a hard disk. I also tried SuSE 8.2 Live-Evaluation CD and also works fine, although it takes longer to get the system running since it mimics a real installation. |
