Thanks for the assessment. Bummer, but not too surprising. Shame the manufacturers don't standardize on power plugs, with each voltage a different size, to protect equipment from dumb screwups like me. :-( But on the positive side of the aisle, now I may have a nice functional LCD for that T20 with ...

I cringe as I type this, because it's the sort of head-smackingly stupid thing I'm always warning other people about. But all it takes is a little distraction and carelessness (and a massive dose of idiocy) to plug the wrong power adapter into your computer. Which is what I did. Blasted my poor T23 ...

I'll give that a try. Thanks.

One of our T22s (we now have two) seems to think it's always connected to the power adapter. It's running non-factory Windows 2000 Pro. The machine came to me with a wiped disc and I installed a full purchased OS version. I didn't try to use the restore CDs, so the setup isn't 100% standard IBM. (I ...

Hi folks. I have a 600E that I'm using for various 24/7 background tasks, including a printing server. It's tucked away under my desk and has been running calmly and quietly for months. I use Win98SE and the OS stays up for astonishingly long periods with no trouble. My problem is that with the mach...

Progress! It seems that something also twisted the bits of the original HD with XP on it : it behaved exactly the same way when stuffed back into the main disk bay of the T43, and wouldn't get past the XP splash screen. So I restored the original as-received image to the original drive (Toshiba, not...

Old thread, I know, but certainly well relevant for folks who live with (as one person here called 'em) these moody T43s. I have now a used T43 and a (separately purchased) used Hitachi Travelstar 7k100 HTS721080G9AT00 drive, manufactured in 2005, with firmware revision MC40A51A. Instructions for fo...

This gets even more interesting. It appears that in the last attempt to boot XP from the ultrabay, something trashed the partitions and format on my main drive. (I did NOT allow XP to "check for consistency" as it asked to do.) See above for the former partitions. Gparted now evaluates the main HD a...

I may have found a clue. When I tried lifrancis's suggestion XP complained that one of my drives needed to be "checked for consistency." That drive, it said, was C: XP said it was a FAT32 drive. Interesting. The drive I'm trying to boot from has an NTFS file system. It's the drive in the main HD bay...

Thanks for the suggestion. Alas, that didn't help. XP gets to the two-tone blue splash screen with the Windows XP logo just to the right of center, then all progress stops. Now and again the disk activity icon flashes briefly, but that's about all. I recall reading in the IBM literature somewhere th...

My new-to-me used T43 arrived with a more or less functional but far from optimized installation of Windows XP. It has a COA, but no recovery partition or CDs. The video driver is wrong for my Intel video chipset, so my guess is that the vendor just dumped an image onto it without really checking. I...

I'm not familar with that model and don't know how old it is, but you may be up against the bios rather than a filesystem issue. Some older machines have various bios limitations that choke on disks over some size, which can vary from (IIRC) 504mb to 8.4gb. Usually a bios upgrade takes care of this,...

Never heard of such a thing. Are you sure the T30 doesn't have a factory 802.11b card tucked into its underbelly?

Kind of a shot in the dark here, as I'm hardly an expert, but in your place I might try setting the router or AP to a different frequency, and letting the Dell rediscover it.

Slight change of plans. After I'd already gotten a T43 and Margaret finally tried out my SXGA T22, she decided she didn't like the fine print on the 1400 x 1050 screen either. So, in the end, I picked up a cheap and rough T22 with a good XGA 1024 x 786 screen on fleabay, and transplanted the T20's d...

I use an Adaptec AUA-1420A for my T22. Works fine for me ...

Nerdo, if you're still around, I hope you won't mind my resurrecting this thread to ask -- did YOU manage to successfully patch the Toshiba MK8032GAX drive firmware, and send the 2010 error and its beeps straight to ... ? Has anyone? Lenovo lists the "MKxx32GAX" as one of the drives suitable for the...

> This is not IBM quality. Maybe not, but compared to more recent machines, it's robust. Notebook prices today are literally a fraction of what they were then -- 10-20% in some cases -- but they're essentially disposable machines. The "netbook" range takes this a step further. Look at how long the o...

Folks, I can't thank you enough for all this solid info. With these tips in mind, I'm currently considering a type 1872 in fairly clean condition. Based on the drives thread (I read all 18 pages, whew) I guess if I transplant my Samsung MP0402H drive into the T43 I can expect to deal with noise and ...

Yikes, I had it backward and sideways both at the same time! Under, thanks for setting me straight on this one. I don't treat my hardware roughly, but when one buys used it's hard to tell what kind of treatment the machine has had previously. Besides, I'm no gamer; no way do I need the oomph of a fa...

Hi, I'm considering an upgrade from my T22. I've gotten the impression from a cursory reading here that the T43p doesn't suffer from the same frequency of graphics chip failure as the T43. Is that a correct impression? Next question -- used T43s go for around $250-350 depending on condition, speed, ...

My T20's backlight has become a BLACKlight. It never flickered, never showed any reddish or other off-color, no other warning symptoms. One day, it just didn't light up. I can see the images on the screen when I shine a flashlight on it obliquely, and it also works fine when the video output is rout...

Derek, I suggest you go for a new drive. They're not that expensive. Can I name a company here? I guess the mod will clip it if no. This is NOT a recommendation, just a company I've traded with and happened to have bookmarked. No idea whether they trade in the UK. It's Directron. A quick check for n...

"I would downgrade to Win98 but I need to connect to my wireless network with WPA protection which isn't supported under the older OS." I don't understand what you mean by this. Maybe WPA isn't native in the OS. I wouldn't know; I've never tried to use Win98's wifi support. All my wifi cards have co...

I finally carried out a fresh installation of Windows 98SE on my well-used 600E. It has a 6gb disk, which I think is the original, and ... uh ... it's kinda slow. The disk, I mean. Mea culpa. I was in a hurry and didn't read the instructions for the w98sfdit.exe package. It looked as if they were ma...

Thanks for the response. I cheated and loaded a copy of Win2K. Works fine now. Not really a solution, but a usable workaround.

Bugs me, though. The same wifi cards were perfectly happy with Win98SE on the 760EL. Why not on the T20? It's a puzzle.

Hi, I hope someone has seen this before. I'm stumped. Trying to get my T20 back on the road, as a gift for a friend (mostly for lightweight web browsing, email, and the like). I'm using bits from my surplus drawer. The machine originally came with Win98SE and that's what I'm using, since it has a li...

I'm tentatively waving the victory flag here. For a while I thought the old girl was ready for the hospice. I did a full discharge (uh, that's a battery discharge) Saturday night, by running the bios diagnostics until the machine shut down. It didn't take long - just a few minutes. Then I plugged in...

Sorry! I posted a question too hastily, before realizing that quite a few T2x threads were in other neighborhoods. I found the answer to the multiple IDE controllers in device mangler, uh, manager, in one of them. It's a (somewhat counterintuitive ;-) matter of applying the apm2apm.reg patch. You'd ...

If you cycle it, make sure to turn off the timers, so that it completely resets itself. (Scratches head) I guess I don't know what you mean by "turn off the timers." Sorry. Could you explain in one-syllable words for an ignoramus (me)? Sounds like it could be a problem with the motherboard ... Do I...

I just stumbled on this thread; I hope it's not too late. I've used Wingroove (do a search) to replace the beep-boop FM synthesis on a 760EL. It gives acceptable results, under both Win95 and Win98SE. One warning, though - if you don't register it, the nagging will make you crazy.