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Request: your opinion on a semi-vintage IBM ThinkPad's price

Just a wild guess but, could the "unknown adapter" (29H9467) be for a PCMCIA SCSI card<- ->drive, (neither of which is present)?

--T

I did a consultation with Saint Google, and it turns out it is a MIDI/Joystick adapter for the Thinkpad:

http://www.ultratecdirect.com/stocklists/searchresults.jsp?textSearch=29H9467
http://www.ibmupgrades.com/29h9467.html
http://www.memory4less.net/29h9467.html
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/5950-IBM-29H9467-Game-Port-Cable-Thinkpad-NEW-/310316717284

If I were to believe those online dialers (which I don't), that MIDI/Joystick adapter would be about as expensive as the laptop itself...
 
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Very nice, especially with all the extras! Those accessories combined would certainly run ya more than the system :)
 
OK, I've installed Windows 95 (B edition) on the IBM ThinkPad 755CE, and I am posting this from it using Netscape Navigator from the Nestcape Communicator 4.76 suite, and a 16 bit PCMCIA ethernet card (NE2000 compatible). Had to disable javascript support in Netscape to stop it from crashing when accessing the forums.

With 40 MB RAM, this machine does very little swapping and therefore feels quite spiffy under Windows 95.

It's a pitty that despite having 1MB in the video card, the TFT screen is just 640x480 pixels... I guess with the VGA-out connector I may be able to get 1024x768 with 256 colors, haven't tried that yet.

I'm going to try a screenshot now... :D

---
Edit: the screenshot:
screenshot755ce.png
 
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I think you can also try an older version of Opera that I think is a lot lighter than netscape-and maybe with better javascript support
 
I think you can also try an older version of Opera that I think is a lot lighter than netscape-and maybe with better javascript support

Netscape 4.76 is quite light in resources consumption on a 486DX4@100MHz, also it uses only around 10 MB of RAM. The problem, as you note, is that it does not support CSS nor most of the javascript found in today's web pages, so it crashes often unless you disable its javascript support, and if you do then the formating of most web pages looks totally out of wack.

I'll try Opera. Also, the last release of the the Seamonkey project which supported Windows 95 was version 1.1.19, from March 2010, which probably brings to Windows 95 a somewhat current Gecko HTML rendering engine and javascript engine... I'll try that too.
 
Alright, this post is sent from Seamonkey 1.1.19, which has the HTML rendering engine Gecko/20100228 rv:1.8.1.24, so it is a quite up to date browser.

The question is, I do get now a perfectly rendered layout when browsing the forums, everything looks neat and tidy. But... there is always a but: this browser does not have a built-in tunable to disable javascript, and therfore it is executing it all, and it so happens the javascript in this forum is just too much for a 486DX4@100MHz, it pegs the CPU at 100% and stays there. So the layout is perfect now but the usability is worst than with Netscape 4.76 (which did allow for disabling javascript in the browser) because it behaves very slow and jerky.

I may have to find a NoScript extension for Seamonkey and try then...

---
Edit: here are the screenshots:

seamonkey3.png



The CPU at 100% because of the javascript of the web design trends of today... :(
seamonkey2.png



The forums layout with Seamonkey is seen OK:
seamonkey1.png
 
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Well, I've been having such a blast lately with this little big machine!

So I've been testing how far can I take it, and in that process I had almost filled its hard disk of about 500 MB. I had less than 17MB of free space left!

38843584.png



When I first disassembled the laptop about a month ago, the hard disk looked like a proprietary black box, but then I didn't think twice about it as I had many more immediate things to try in the machine. However, now that I was so tight in free space, I had no choice but to revisit the hard disk issue.

IMG_3065.JPG



And then I remembered I had somewhere an old IDE 2.5" disk, from an old Pentium-II laptop whose original hard disk I upgraded a long time ago (I think that was around the year 2001, pheww!). So I looked for it, and I found it - that new found disk happens to be a very nice IBM-branded "Travelstar" 4.8GB laptop hard disk (quite fitting for a ThinkPad, me thinks) with the "astonishing" speed of 4200 rpm:

50123504.jpg



So I reach for my handy dandy retrocomputing tool case (bought for 6 euros at some German Lidl store in Madrid), and proceed to crack open the original hard disk enclosure.

03byo.jpg



That's how it looked like and what was inside of it:

41572942.jpg


66573831.jpg


A heavy IBM-branded made-in-the-UK 2.5" IDE hard disk, with a "strange" geometry: 1047 cylinders, 16 heads, and 63 sectors per track. So, if that disk works in this laptop being 1047 cylinders (and not 1024 which is usually the maximum number of supported cylinders in 486-era BIOSes), then the laptop's BIOS must support "Large Addressing" of hard disks up to 8GB, right? Looks promising...


So I remove the old hard disk, install the "new" one in the black enclosure, and connect the enclosure to the Thinkpad 755CE, which I eagerly proceed to power on... only to be welcomed with this sad, sad, sad screen:

70396137.jpg


And then, for good measure, with this other:

11672262.jpg



Oh, DAMN! Quite frustrating, if I may say so. :eh:

At this point comes the usual rigmarole every tinkerer loves to hate: check and double check the conections and cables, try and double try the process of assembly, explore the BIOS options like a mad man with eyes wide open, the whole this-is-not-working-but-damn-if-I-give-up experience we all quite know...

But nothing, error 174 it is, and it doesn't want to go away. :(


Fine, so I decide to go to have something for dinner, just to let the problem cook itself a little... When I come back, I hit Google real hard. And there it is, the elusive answer, buried in a mailing list post dated 1999, waiting to be read by the afflicted Thinkpad owner. :D

>BUT
>2. the drive select was changed from the time of your original HDD.. reversed, in fact..
>3. depending on the HDD shell you're using, it is most likely telling the machine that the drive is a
>slave, thus the machine does not see the drive and you get the 174 error..

So, it seems that in the interim between 1995, when this Thinkpad was made, and 1999, when that was posted on a mailing list about the same problem I now have, the "industry standard" for setting the master/slave configuration in laptops' hard disks had changed. According to that post, my "new" hard disk is getting configured as "slave" by the Thinkpad's hard disk caddy assembly, and therefore the BIOS does not see it, or sees it as wrongly connected, therefore: ERROR 174.

As the caddy hard disk assembly attaches tightly to the hard disk's IDE conector, there is no room to set a jumper to change that suspected behaviour. So, determined as I was to scape the infamous ERROR 174, I however reluctantly proceeded to bend the pin which helps sense the master/slave configuration, thusly:

87980241.jpg


And then I attach the connector assembly, with the bent pin sticking out:

21122267.jpg



Alas, it worked! No more errors, straight boot with a floppy, FDISK, FORMAT, Ghost back the C: partition, and I'm in business again, with plenty of room to try even more retro software and more retro games. :cool:

75449179.png



PS: Yeah, it's a minuscule hack, I know, but a great victory for me all the same! Yeay!
 
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