Is this too many laptops in your opinion?

[kfzhu1229]

Is this too many laptops for collection? I kept finding either good deals locally or job lots of machines that I end up having this much collection that every single one of them work. I have labelled them for your convenience. As you can see I have a fair share split of ThinkPads and Latitudes, and occasionally I deal with other machines such as Inspirons and Satellites.



Links:
https://i.imgur.com/5b5ivOJh.jpg
https://i.imgur.com/4s9SLTIh.jpg

[axur-delmeria]

1. Please resize the picture, or at least just make it a link. I can only see 1 laptop on this poor X61's XGA screen.

2. Not enough. There's still more space if you ditch the Dells. LOL just kidding.

[atagunov]

Man, that's really impressive. Most of all I'm impressed with how neat and clean it all looks. I wouldn't describe the room I'm using to keep all the stuff that I find dear or necessary in any other way than a cave, a humongous mess.. Yet you manage to keep your collection so clean.. And everything works, that's just amazing. I certainly see how you've come to own such a nice collection. That's love, and probably greater than mine!

Of course I have picked my favourite item in your collection.. That T520, I simply can't regard it as a collector's item. Nope, that's not an item. That the sword for daily fights that I've chosen for myself

[dr_st]

Like the others, I'm impressed both with the collection and the aesthetics. DELL's business laptops are good machines. They are different from Thinkpads, and have a unique design language, but on average I found them on par, at least back around the timeline of your collection, when I was actually keeping track of things.

[kfzhu1229]

Man, that's really impressive. Most of all I'm impressed with how neat and clean it all looks. I wouldn't describe the room I'm using to keep all the stuff that I find dear or necessary in any other way than a cave, a humongous mess.. Yet you manage to keep your collection so clean.. And everything works, that's just amazing. I certainly see how you've come to own such a nice collection. That's love, and probably greater than mine!

Well keeping everything nice and working is just what I do for hobby really. Every time I receive one of these machines they are usually beaten up one way or another and every day I find new ways to tune them up to work as well as possible.
One big problem I had with these Dells are their hinges. Almost every time I receive a Dell Latitude of this age, the hinges have a LOT of wobble on them. This is thanks to Dell using heavier duty hinges used on the likes of T500 that can sustain a lot more load but the glue that assembles the hinge together can come loose (as well as the screws of course).
I stand with my lubricating then dipping Krazy superglue inside method as that solves most of my wobble along with tightening the screws. But the other part is much more brutal and requires you to pry off the hinge cap that screws onto the lid to replace the crumbling glue inside with fresh Krazy superglue. 2 days ago I was doing it to the C840's and well it involves with brutal prying and then hammering because the superglue dries so fast and made like 5-6 cuts on my hands without noticing.
In contrast, the problems I have with ThinkPads are their motherboards. You know, things like faulty GPU or faulty RAM slots, and that their fuses blow so easily.

Of course I have picked my favourite item in your collection.. That T520, I simply can't regard it as a collector's item. Nope, that's not an item. That the sword for daily fights that I've chosen for myself

You are out of luck on that one. That T520 is by far the most utmost repair failure that I have ever had. It's a working laptop that I first damaged the keyboard when wiping it, and then tried buying 3 used keyboards all of them turned out to be broken. Then with one of the keyboard purchased turned out to be a parts T520, I tried to fix that motherboard and broke this working motherboard while probing around with multimeter! These are things that I just want rid of and never see again.

Like the others, I'm impressed both with the collection and the aesthetics. DELL's business laptops are good machines. They are different from Thinkpads, and have a unique design language, but on average I found them on par, at least back around the timeline of your collection, when I was actually keeping track of things.

I started stocking up on Dells simply because AS-IS samples of these are much much easier to find and in many ways easier to repair simply because their motherboards are less likely to fail but sometimes the housing can break.
And yeah I believe the likes of 2000-2002 Latitudes like C600-C640 and C800-C840 stack up quite well against the T20-T23 and A20-A31 respectively. You cannot compare the earlier ones though like CP, CPi, CPx simply because the ThinkPad 600 is just that much more expensive in price and those Latitudes slot right inbetween the 600 and the 385/390 series.
I think for a better comprehension I could write up some comparisons between C610 and T23, C810 and A30/p, and C840 and A31/p, as I have or had all of these machines.

[atagunov]

One big problem I had with these Dells are their hinges ... I stand with my lubricating then dipping Krazy superglue inside method as that solves most of my wobble along with tightening the screws

I am sorry if I asked already but what do you use for lubrication?

I've chosen to stock up on T60 and R60 bodies which mostly have wobbly hinges.. I had resigned to the need to replace them in most cases if I want them to run well..

I'm obviously (from my signature) running T520 and X220.. So if there is any maintenance you could suggest for those hinges as a precautionary measure I'd be grateful too (those hinges are ok, but seem a bit stiff).

[kfzhu1229]

I am sorry if I asked already but what do you use for lubrication?

I've chosen to stock up on T60 and R60 bodies which mostly have wobbly hinges.. I had resigned to the need to replace them in most cases if I want them to run well..

If you are talking about the 4:3 versions I believe those also only have loose screws as a point of failure for wobbly hinges.
If you are talking about the 16:10 versions, then I believe the hinges on yours would look something similar to these:
https://1drv.ms/u/s!At7-rt1KJ7WviPtgsBD ... Q?e=uv5sTu
Then you might need lubricating and then tightening with superglue. Drip oil inside the opening marked in blue below. Lubricating I still first use WD-40 to immediately free up the hinges if they are really jammed, and then follow it with a few drops of olive oil because I have a 1L bottle worth of expired ones. I believe something like Synthetic ATF that cadillacmike68 mentioned should work for hinges too.
Then from my experience with these Dell hinges, there are 2 points that can potentially give you the wobbly hinge:
1. The steel casing around the inner workings of the hinges have expanded that now (marked blue on the pic below)
2. The part marked in red (that I have pulled apart on the image below) supposed to have adhesives that have degraded enough to allow wobble.

Solving 1 is not too bad. First lubricate the hinges, wait 3 days, and then fill it with quality superglue like Krazy superglue, leave the lid tilted at an angle for half an hour for it to dry, and presto!
Solving 2 is very tedious. That involves with pulling the hinge apart like that image, which is much easier said than done, as sometimes making a gap for a flat head screwdriver to go in is extremely difficult. Then you replace that portion with also quality superglue, and some Q-bond powder if you have some. You need to assemble the part very quickly after applying superglue, that's why it's advisable for this one you remove the hinge completely from the lid and have a hammer ready in case it doesn't go all the way in (please be mindful of the surface that you are doing this in as I am clearly doing this on concrete so the floor doesn't get damaged!).

In my experience, this trick should work for something like 12 months in very regular usage. My Precision M4300 that I have done both to is a tiny bit more loose than it was in day 1 after 2 months, but nowhere near as bad as when I first received it.

I'm obviously (from my signature) running T520 and X220.. So if there is any maintenance you could suggest for those hinges as a precautionary measure I'd be grateful too (those hinges are ok, but seem a bit stiff).

Those are not affected by wobbly hinges unless the screws go loose which is an easy enough fix. Even my very badly beaten T520 with bullet holes through the chassis has flawless hinges.

[kfzhu1229]

Oh and here are some even older machines not pictured (the 2 left machines):

https://i.imgur.com/TthIruI.jpg
The leftmost one is a Latitude XPi P75D, I found it locally, out of all places, at some of the poorest communities in the entirety of Toronto (Jane & Finch).
Specs of that machine (if you are not familiar with the naming scheme) is:
Pentium 75Mhz (non-MMX)
8MB soldered RAM. Can't find the right RAM sticks for these machines for the open RAM slots.
540MB 2.5" standard IDE Seagate HDD. It's twice the thickness as your standard T4x IDE hard drives and have different mounting holes than those too, but such a HDD will work here too as I have used a 10GB IBM Travelstar that came from a T2x instead of this. This old old IDE drive still works perfectly fine though but that Travelstar has hydraulic bearings and at the same time not too much larger than the 8196MB BIOS limit.
An old school 10.4" VGA 640x480 DSTN passive matrix display, but has 16bit (65536 colour) colour support and refreshes surprisingly fast enough the mouse cursor doesn't go missing.
An optical trackball is your pointing device. I don't know how many ThinkPad users have any positive experience with those trackballs though.

Getting this thing to work was quite a task for me. While the machine does sort of work when I received it (boots to DOS perfectly fine on the HDD), well I am getting stuck keys (annoyingly it's the right arrow key so every time I press the fn key the contrast goes down on the STN all the way to pitch black), nonworking floppy drive, and dead main + backup batteries so CMOS settings can't be saved.
For the hardware side of things, the floppy drive was a routine fix. Just a cotton swab with alcohol did the job once I disassemble the machine and the floppy drive. The stuck key on the keyboard got fixed after I soaked enough contact cleaner on the keyboard connectors. The dead backup battery was a bit of a problem. I ended up ordering the cheapest Varta 7V backup battery replacement I can find (which is for a Latitude D600) and cut both wires and swap the connectors. It now keeps time for 1-2 months, but doesn't have enough power to keep the machine on while at sleep.
Installing Windows 95 was more painful than I expected. After multiple failed attempts I realised that as soon as I plug this hard drive onto my Windows 10 laptop to copy Windows 95 files, the computer will no longer boot from the hard drive unless I reformat and reinstall MSDOS on that computer on that hard drive. Don't know why this is the case because the same content still boots perfectly fine on the 2 years newer Latitude CP pictured there! I ended up using that CP to do the copying from my burnt Win95 CD, run setup until it restarts the computer and then swap the hard drive back in, and only then Windows 95 is finally installed!
Unfortunately it does not have a sound card, only a PC beeper, so there is kinda limited number of things you can do on such a machine...

[fatkatsupra1]

Great collection! I had a few Dell's from the early 2000's but many suffered from brittle plastic. Yours look fantastic!

[stphnclrk1181]

darn, I wonder if those would cost a fortune one day. I used to collect cellphones from the 90s but I stopped when I got married. Hopefully, I can start collecting old techs again soon.

[stphnclrk1181]

You're laptop collection's not too much, by the way.

[kfzhu1229]

You're laptop collection's not too much, by the way.

Well if you think that's not too much, I have a lot of 6 incoming. Unfortunately they don't have ThinkPads or even Latitudes in them - only Inspirons and Precisions. All of them were beastly stuff that one can dream of back then and now I am getting it in a lot. There are desktop replacements like Inspiron 9100, Precision M65 (17") and M4300, that are practically well out of your reach back then, though there are also a lower end desktop replacements included, the Inspiron 5150 and 8600.

[RealBlackStuff]

At the height of my 'hoarding' I had 42 Thinkpads.
Today I have only 6 left (1 each T23, X1, X240, X240s, X250, T440p), the rest has all been sold.

[TRS-80]

Today I have only 6 left (1 each T23, X1, X240, X240s, X250, T440p), the rest has all been sold.

Are those your favourites? Or just happenstance?

With all the FlexViews and Frankies that must have passed through your hands, I am surprised not to see any in your collection!

[RealBlackStuff]

The T23 is used occasionally to remove SVP and CT, it has the 1.2 CPU, 1GB RAM, wifi and a de-rubberised lid.
The X1 was used by my daughter to hook up to TV, because it was one of the first Thinkpads with a proper HDMI port. To be sold next.
The X240 is a Lenovo prototype without docking slot, used by my wife as her daily driver.
The X240s is a Lenovo prototype with MTM 123-4567 and i7-4500u, used for playing with Linux.
The X250 has FHD touch, and is currently collecting dust.
The T440p is my own souped-up daily driver.
And I still have my home-built, ~20 years old desktop for when I get sentimental.

In general, I'm not in favour of big machines such as 15" Frankies.

[dr_st]

The T23 is used occasionally to remove SVP and CT, it has the 1.2 CPU, 1GB RAM, wifi and a de-rubberised lid.

That derubberised lid looks awesome. I just can't get enough of it.

[kfzhu1229]

That derubberised lid looks awesome. I just can't get enough of it.

My ThinkPad 600 also has a derubberised lid, though that one is painted over with black spray paint with sadden finish so it looks like the rubberised coating. It also has a new battery that I have scored from local computer shop as scrap.
I am considering to do that to the palmrest too.

In general, I'm not in favour of big machines such as 15" Frankies.

Huh that's not exactly what I expected.
But well I find older large size machines much harder to "tame" though. I have a dead 770ED, A30 really prone to graphics failure, A31p prone to that and RAM slot failure, and the C810/C840 Dells I have also age worse than their 14.1" C6xx counterparts with stiff and wobbly hinges that I broke my hand trying to repair, cracked bottom covers near the PCMCIA slot, and RAM slots that while not defective, loves to get oxidised and then causes bluescreens from time to time unless I spray contact cleaners and reseat the RAM.

[Tasurinchi]

The T23 is used occasionally to remove SVP and CT, it has the 1.2 CPU, 1GB RAM, wifi and a de-rubberised lid.

Interesting... I also have a 2nd hand T23 but the lid looks still like new. Everything in this T23 shines, I'll keep that link handy in case my lid degrades in the future...

[kfzhu1229]

So do I have a T23 whose lid is just fine, and also I used another lid on T22 that literally sat with its LCD and inverter in the drawer for 10 years!
Well none of those have antenna built into the lid so for wifi I ended up stripping one antenna off a T4x lid and then route it to the PCMCIA cage.
Note then you cannot use ThinkPad cards anymore because the IBM FRU cards while they look like other cards, will NOT work with just one antenna!

[josh5k]

It's never too many laptops when they are organized and identified and enjoyed

Esp if they are Thinkpads and such classics.