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Just last week I had to lubricate the fans on one of my units as well. Started making this horrible noise... and while now it's not really like new, it definitely is quieter and, this will sound silly, sounds much cooler when it kicks in. Feels like you're using a supercomputer! Right in your lap!

Hmmmm, that's odd that it works fine on the second you bought. Perhaps its thermal paste has dried up and the fan must run for longer periods to cool the system? How long does it have to be powered on for it to spin up? Also - critical for the laptop to remove the green CMOS battery! They puke...

Even if I do find a replacement board, it'll have the same battery, and as such the same amount of damage done to it, if not worse. I'll fix the DC-DC board and use the machine as-is until it finally dies. Or maybe I'll go the SBC route, keeping the whole case, keyboard (should be PS/2 or AT...

Today I opened up my Nan Tan FMA3300A to attempt to fix the damage from my attempted recapping of the DC-DC board (ripped pads, capacitor put in backwards, dumb mistakes overall) from ~6 months ago. I've learned a lot since and can actually solder decently now :-) (still doesn't start, TI TL494...

Dropping my .02 cents here about these: I can concur they're quite good laptops, so good that I've bought a 2nd one in January of this year. However, they do have a few downsides/oddities: the hinges will get loose over time, like flippity-floppity loose. They still hold the display upright but...

I agree about the ewaste flood: so many Core 2 CPUs can be found for less than 10$ on AliExpress, and motherboards go for right about that price as well on local used market sites. For me, it's only a matter of time until I pick up a cheap PGA478 motherboard from the flea market.

I guess you're right. If P4 is separate, so should be PII and III. I guess the P4 is a lot more modern only in my mind. There's still lots of machines from that generation floating around over here, some still being used with Windows 7, but PIII and earlier ones can be quite the chore to find -...

I think P4 is a bit too new to be categorized in the PII/III sections, and the P4 content would very easily get buried by these older generations. On the other hand, if it did have its section, it would easily be the most empty of all and would stay that way for a long time. In the end I do...

Lots of people believe Pentium 4s and the AMD equivalents to be vintage, and if vintage is to be defined as functionally obsolete for modern tasks, then yes they are. But then how do we define modern tasks? If it's by the Windows version that a system can run reasonably well (so, no Windows 10...

I was just about to suggest another archive, hobbes.nmsu.edu , when I found out it's been shut down exactly a week ago :-( https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/01/after-32-years-one-of-the-nets-oldest-software-archives-is-shutting-down/ However, it was all announced months in advance, and the...

I've tried to install Gentoo on a PBG4 12", and the Nvidia drivers just plain don't work, like, at all. The machine shits itself the moment it loads the modesetting driver, screen flickering, colours flying everywhere like it's the 70s. Crazy, considering how an x86 machine from that time period...

They're both rock solid, that's what matters to me the most. I don't play a lot of games, and when I do, well, they're DOS based and run just fine on OS/2. I like to use all machines I have for actually productive stuff, no matter how strange it seems to quite literally everyone around me. We're...

Hey now, if I find nothing for OS/2 I may just be tempted to learn some C, finally...

I found it, the mystic FAN.EXE. On VOGONS of all places :-) https://www.vogons.org/viewtopic.php?t=49365 I tested it from a DOS boot floppy and it works as I described it, even on a Pentium III-based machine, so I figure it'll work on yours as well. Syntax: fan.exe [on] [off] (what features!)...

Toshibas are like that. They power the fan on only for a brief amount of time when the temperature gets way too hot. Perhaps there's a thermistor on board? I have a SP4270 and some other cheap crappy Satellite I can't bother remembering the model number of, and using them on a lap... well you...

Funnily enough, I've never even noticed that button right until you pointed it out.

Talking about UNIX, Slackware is probably the most UNIX-like Linux distro we're ever going to see. It's a full system worth of 15+ GB of software (of which one would use probably 3-4 realistically) and fits on a single DVD-R. There are projects such slackpkg and sbopkg which make installing and...

And now here's some of the display. Sanyo LCM-5483-24NTK. Also included is a better angle at the broken metal hinge support. It's a very small part, and tomorrow I'll attempt to redesign it. (one shortcoming with the forum software is that images can't be reorganized, by the way).

Also, removing the IDE and floppy ribbons was extremely easy: just use force and pull them out. The ribbons themselves, not the plastic part, which is the connector.

If someone here wants to redistribute the BIOS and optionally these images, feel free to do so. (just make sure Award doesn't find out about the BIOS, hehe ;-)).