Have picked up the 600E from
ninjackn and have begun thorough diagnostics on this old system (2645-8AU S/N 78-YFNnn 05/99). After cleaning the screen, the top lid and the keyboard, I'd say that has pushed it up to a physical 8 out of 10. The lid has some heavy wear in the paint along the edges but otherwise appears in good condition. The hinges are tight and the latches are intact. It's missing the docking port and serial/parallel port covers but still has the PCMCIA "dummy" cards! It's missing all of the bottom screw covers and several screws (one in the Ultrabay, one in the HD bay and a bottom keyboard screw) so it may have been taken apart before.
Electrically, is another story... Arrived with 96MB (32MB on the motherboard and two 42H2819 32MB modules). Booting the system yields the date/time error as was mentioned previously - the CMOS battery reads 0.56V. It has a Fujitsu MHM2060AT (6GB) hard drive which whines like a DC-3
. An "operating system not found" error shows up which goes along with the explanation I was given that there might be some bad blocks on the disk. Also, the Sanyo 24X CD drive pops open if you push on the left side of the front bezel (nowhere near the blue eject button). The fan is spinning (quietly), the LCD is bright, does not have any scratches or marks, does not have any pink tint to it, nor can I see any dead pixels yet (memtest86+ screen is almost all blue). The keyboard does not show much use; there's just a little bit of shine to them. However, there are a couple of keys on the left side which don't feel right (Caps Lock, A, Tab and Q). There may be something underneath them that's obstructing movement.
The system has just completed 6 passes through memory tests (two hours) so that's working fine. I'll start with the built-in diags in BIOS and then see what a DFT run on the drive says.
edit: Had a few minutes between job responsibilities to take a look at the keyboard problem... As it turns out the system was disassembled (or had been attempted) before. The screw that goes into the bottom below those strange-feeling keys was too long (!). There are three different length screws in the bottom of the 600 series. The screw holes have symbols next to them which indicate the relative length of screw that is supposed to be installed there:
-> for the very short screw (4.8mm)
--> for the medium-length screw (16mm)
----> for the long screw (19.5mm)
There was a 19.5mm screw in the 16mm screw hole. That caused those keys to be pushed up. Unknown whether there is any permanent damage to those keys or the keyboard in general. I'll have to see if I can load up PC Doctor and run the keyboard diag.
edit: Ah.. a closer inspection of the lid reveals a hairline crack in the "front" edge, just above the middle of the Ultrabay opening. This is causing the lid to tilt slightly upward on the right side latch and makes closing the lid difficult sometimes. That drops the physical rating down to 6.5 out of 10
.
edit: I finally got around to running the keyboard diagnostic from a 600X PC Doctor diskette and those four keys are still functional after re-arranging the screws into their proper positions. However, the Fn key is not working. Don't know if this is due to the screw "run-up" or some other problem.