A poor old 380ED was sitting near a dead Toshiba laptop around other computer junk. I powered it up with my X32 power supply, removed the dead CR1220 battery to go past BIOS errors, found 32MB and a running Windows Me, installed automatically a 3c589d ethernet adapter without asking for any driver disk, but the battery must be really dead because it cannot be charged at all (the switching regulator makes a painful slow sweeping frequency noise). Here are my questions:
How much to pay for a new battery and memory upgrade ?
Is is difficult to open and replace the hard disk ? I can use it because it does not sound worn out (no bearing noise of death), but I would like to put a CF card with a 2.5" IDE to CF adapter - will the BIOS accept such a 'disk' ?

The hard drive is in the back upper right corner as you are sitting looking at the screen. You have to open up the case by removing screws from the bottom and then the whole top cover with keyboard separates away to show the inside. Sounds harder than it is. I am not sure about the CF solution with an adapter. It likely shipped with a 2.1 gig 12 mm IBM Travelstar and it will run up to a 32 gig drive.

It's a two part answer:

First, if you wish to boot to the adapter-mounted CF card, the ability of the BIOS to recognize such an arrangement will depend on the construction of the adapter. If the latter looks exactly like a PATA drive to the BIOS, i.e., if it handshakes like a PATA drive, it will work.

Second, if you wish to use the CF card only for added storage, you can buy a PCMCIA/CF adapter card very inexpensively (eBay) that will handle that task for you straightaway. If the PCMCIA card you find turns out to be Cardbus (32 bit), you will also have to purchase a port replicator for your laptop to provide the needed Cardbus slot. The two existing PCMCIA slots built into your laptop are 16 bit only.

You might benefit from reading my thread nearby which describes how to obtain USB 2.0 on a 380D. The 380D and the 380ED are quite similar.

Update after RAM and new battery upgrades: now want to try bsd or linux operating systems, but the cd drive does not see my cd-rw's (Verbatim 1x-4x 700MB). Is there another compatible brand of cd-rw ? Or will I need to burn cd-r's / boot from floppy and install from network ?

Given the age of the 380ED, the optical drive may have trouble reading a CD-RW. It might also not like a CD-R, but there's a better chance that type of disk will work than the RW. The TWBOOK for the 380ED also states that the optical drive is not bootable and that a "Recovery CD-ROM with boot diskette" was provided with the system.

ref: http://www.lenovo.com/psref/pdf/twbook.pdf

Should you get a port replicator, you will then gain a USB port, in which you can plug an external USB CD/DVD drive.
Check that the drive is USB1.1 downwards compatible.

For linux, or any other bootable CD, get Smart Boot Manager (SBM), install that to a floppy.
Boot from said floppy, you should see an option to now boot from the CD-ROM.

Will most probably need CD-R burnt at like 4 to 8x the cheapo "see thru" ones seem to give the most hassle on older drives for me

Get smb.img (floppy image) from: http://linux.simple.be/tools/sbm
to write the image to a floppy in windows, try: http://tux.nchc.org.tw/trac/tux2live/ex ... wrtwin.zip
(Under 95, this program requires diskio.dll in the programs folder: http://mirror.leaseweb.com/debian-archi ... diskio.zip)