I did warranty work on so many of those machines back in the late 90s. Fun fact. The Toshiba laptops from the 90s and 2000s with a 5 at the end of their model number are retail models. Ones that end in 0 were sold through places like CDW or other non-retail partners, often times in bulk orders. The warranty on retail models was less than the non-retail counter parts. The preloaded software differed as well.
@@LGRBlerbs in much of the 2000s I was the service manager at one of the largest (in volume) independent service providers in the US for Toshiba, IBM/Lenovo, Dell, Fujitsu and HP/Compaq laptops.
@@LGRBlerbs Twenty something years old BAT that retain 95% charge!!... Original stikers..... Come on Clint... You borrowed the time machine from @Techmoan... admit it... :-D
This was my first computer, and it was a hand-me-down from my dad. He left the first Civilization on it. I have fond memories of sitting in my room with this thing one afternoon, loading up that game for the first time, then looking out my window to see the sun coming up.
Fun video. People who never used these or won't around then can't fully appreciate the price/performance we get with today's laptops. These 90's models were heavy, weak screens with horrible refresh rate, slow HD's, etc. But all that said, it's still awesome to see one 20 plus years later and show what we had to use back then. Great vid as always.
@Raymond Thimmes Looked up your MacBook Pro and just shake my head that a more powerful 17.4" ASUS ROG Strix laptop that cost less than half as much in brand new retail price comparison... The Apple tax is just bonkers. Edit: Before anyone goes "but the software makes it worth it." Not really, there's stuff for Windows and Linux that's just as good, if not better and there has been for years.
I have the original battery from the Dell Latitude CP M233ST (higher end version of this Toshiba, SVGA TFT display, much thinner body), still works for 45 minutes! But the good thing about these Latitude C series is that you can stick in a monster battery for a C840 and get like 4 hours of battery life on this thing!
I bought an older Compaq Evo laptop with a completely dead battery (only $20!). Using it with the AC adaptor wasn't bad but to my surprise replacement batteries were still made for it. After buying one, the Windows XP experience is now mobile and I love it
I had this exact model. I bought it (refurbished) in 1999 for $999 and was my first personally owned laptop. I used the hell out of it for work which involved me traveling around a lot and evaluating military units. The gray chassis looked vaguely military so it fit right in (after you take off the garish stickers). It was a lot more rugged than it looked. I deployed to Kuwait/Iraq with it in 2002-2003 for that war and it survived just fine in the bottom of my rucksack for 10 months. I used to write e-mails to my wife and send photos from my .33 megapixel camera when I had access to the internet. Still clunky, but better than using the mail system in terms of speed. Technology left it in the dust soon enough, but I kept it around to operate my RX-320 short wave radio since it was the only computer I had that still had a serial port that was required for the radio. Once I had a serial to USB adaptor, it became a paperweight. I finally had to get rid of it before a military move (to save weight) along with a lot of other stuff. Instead of recycling, I took it to the re-use portion of that facility. I hope someone picked it up and gave it to their kid or something. I have a lot of fondness for that computer.
@mike h Dynex DX-WGNBC I think, it had a win9x WiFi connection manager. I recall there was an issue with the brass bumps on end that he had to grind down, but it worked for what he used it for
@@Wolkebuch99 There is a WiFi card from Orinoco that works great in these, and it doesn't need any filing down either. These used a 16 bit PCMCIA slot. Cards like you described were 32 bit, and were designated as Cardbus. Anyway, I was able to make use of that 16 bit Orinoco WiFi card on a Satellite running 98SE Lite (that was 98SE with Internet Explorer completely stripped out), as well as a TI Extensa 486 laptop that was dual boot with both Dos 6.22 / Windows for Workgroups 3.11 and Damn Small Linux. I really need to get the Extensa, Satellite, and the cute little Toshiba Protege restored and fully operational again one of these days.
Holy nostalgia! That was my dad's laptop back then. I remember plugging a phone line into that weird pop out PCMCIA rj-11 jack and dialing into the internet on it. I also would try to play space quest 4 but fail miserably since it had timing issues on it (those sequel police men on Pentiums are brutal!) Seeing it again in all of its chunky goodness is super cool. Love this channel! Also, I think those website files were there so that your internet explorer can have a prebuilt cache of the website and it'll actually load the same day while on a 56k modem xD
My mother still uses one of these for taxes/logging receipts - because the software doesn't exist on modern OSs there is no way to port the info over. This was also my first laptop, we got a dozen of these broken from a school that was throwing them out, managed to get 3 of them to work. I never got internet working though
@@DankRedditMemes They were certainly not! Quite good for laptop speakers actually. Sounds like Clints' have disintegrated over the years. I have a Satellite 320CDT that has the same issue.
@@Artyomthewalrus tell tour mom to back up her data regularly. And not just the data files, she should clone the hard drive and replace it with a new one asap
That Warner Bros. website was painfully 90's. It reminded me of when I used to play flash games on the Cartoon Network website. I remember a Daffy Duck game where it was Duck Dodgers in space and you had to bounce the space ship around off the edges of the screen to collect and destroy things. I remember another Ed Edd n Eddy online multi-player game where it was supposed to be a water balloon or water gun fight. I don't think I ever got in a game with another player though. Good memories. Edit: I found a video of the Duck Dodgers game! m.th-cam.com/video/ogXtDbokPaw/w-d-xo.html
Not painfully 90's, AWESOMLY 90's. I really do miss the way the internet was back then. Even the anticipation you'd get from waiting for a website to load over dial-up.
Man those early 90's sites make me miss when we had web rings and just simple web pages. Now sites are all trying to cram video ads and massive 4k videos in the splash page of their sites and it just annihilates anything thats not a modern pc
Oh shut up lmao and take off your nostalgia glasses. 90s websites were cluttered to the brim with dumb decals and flashy, glittery shit they thought looked cool back then.
I recently had a older Motorola two way radio that needed to be programmed. The radio shop I went to had to dig this same beast out with a 100ft cord reel to program em. It was even running MS-DOS as well.
Ah, this brings back memories... First computer we ever had in the household was a Tecra 750DVD (from my father's workplace) that must've cost a small fortune! I'm always fascinated by how it went on the market with a DVD drive before the format itself was even officially introduced in Europe! As I started collecting old laptops that I had some kind of connection to during my life, I was also able to acquire two of those in pretty nice shape, with maxed out RAM, and even some goodies like the original Toshiba branded laptop bag, documentation, and little tidbits such as replacement domes for the pointing stick! Even better than that, on one of those machines, the original Win95 install was intact and hardly used, a pristine time capsule of a much simpler time as far as child-me was concerned. Pretty fascinated by these machines, even more so when taking into account that they often work perfectly more than 20 years after leaving the factory!
It's always nice to find a bunch of stuff from previous owners in old computers. Especially old saved websites, software and documents. This lets you experience what computers and internet were like over 20 years ago. It's sort of like digging in a pile of old antiques, just virtually. Also, as you found out, some Li-Ion cells can indeed last over 20 years. I remember getting an old laptop pack (from very early 2000s) with 9 Panasonic 18650 in it. 3 of them were still perfectly usable with close to full capacity, despite being almost 20 years old. I also remember servicing a Dell Pentium 3 which still had a working battery in it.
Toshiba ftw! I searched YEARS for a Satellite Pro 400cdt, the perfect retro gaming machine. It comes with a 640x480px active matrix display and an original Soundblaster Pro OPL3 chip. So much fun playing adventure classics on this machine.
I have a 420CDT, and have a 430CDT arriving next week... It's hard trying to find matching pairs, but hopefully they'll work for what I have planned for them! The major difference is that the former runs at 100MHz, and the latter 120MHz, although the screen on the latter needs replacing! Both also have 2MB of VRAM rather than 1MB. Additionally, the 400-430CDS/CDT models all share the same form factor with a single speaker, whereas the 440CDS/CDT models onwards have the same dual speaker form factor... At least that's what I saw in the pictures anyway... They naturally have better CPUs and support more RAM too.
@@StormkeeperPU True, but the 640x480px display is very important to me for so that the old games run without upscaling or black borders. I don't mind the mono speaker, it's pretty solid. Had a 430cdt before, it's a great machine as well. And yes, they are the same form factor, you can even switch hardware parts like the keyboard or put a faster CD ROM into the 400cdt.
I remember these cd-rom-internet-things: we had one at the school i worked for so people could learn to use the internet without blocking the phone lines or topping up the bills for using it. It came with a full tutorial and was part of the secretary course. We had a laser disc systems too that was, kind of, interactive: you would get a question and than read a barcode of your answer to which the system would reply. High tech for the time but that was in 1998. I love these blerbs and videos of old stuff! Keep them comming Clint!!
The websites was apart of a CD that was around in late '97/early 98 that I think was called the accelerator pack, or something like that. You could get it from various stores for free to upgrade machines to IE 3 (or later 4) and a lot of the tech mags that also came with CDs bundled it. Other than the IE install it was just cached versions of websites to try out ActiveX in the IE 3 version and Active Channels in the IE 4 version.
"Active" internet is an IE4 technology. Microsoft came up with some new standards so users could have content downloaded from providers automatically. The content would be updated when the user was online. User could then choose "work offline" in IE to go through downloaded content like was a real website. This was useful then because internet meant dialup for most people and dialup meant no reading today's Cathy when mom was on the phone with grandma. IE4 also had Active Desktop that could update the desktop with web content. It was a huge resource hog and not really secure, but you could do it.
I have two 320CDS that I refurbished, they're hardware identical to the 325CDS which was simply sold bundled with more software. I have owned a number of vintage machines over the years and have gradually trimmed down the collection and settled on these as my favorite machines. Why? I believe they're an outstanding "all-round" choice for vintage computing: 1. a nice compact footprint compared to desktops 2. All-In-One design with FDD, HDD, CDR, and all the conventional connection ports including USB, as well as 10/100 Ethernet possible with CardBus PC Card 3. can be run completely silently with an IDE to CompactFlash HDD adapter 4. can run early versions of DOS and Windows, with proper drivers available for Win 3.1, NT, 95, 98, and meets minimum system requirements for XP with 32MB extra RAM installed, can also run versions of OS/2 and Debian 5. real OPL3! 6. Still relatively easy to find and therefore tends to be somewhat cheaper than other vintage options, as well as parts being available After 1998 laptops gradually became larger in size, and the humble 3.5" FDD started to disappear as part of the onboard design, as well as lacking good driver support for older OS. Whilst the models before 1998 tended to lack something, whether USB, floppy, CDR, as well as having slower hardware. Put simply, the 320CDx series covers a lot of ground, straddling the transitional period between early and modern OS, and is great value today compared to other vintage computer options.
Oh man, I had to look up active channels and active desktop because it rang a bell when I saw it. All that DHTML stuff that the big studios were doing was really state of the art at the time. Most websites were pretty static.
OK, you've done it. As a child I had a 486 for my first machine... I assembled it with my father. Time went by, things got bigger and better and that crap faded into the obscurity of my childhood memories, that was until you came along. Now, I'm all into legacy equipment again. Why!? I already manage a repair shop, so I encounter all kinds of crap but thanks to you, now I have a finer appreciation for it again.
Aw man, watching this is nostalgia overload! Had either a very similar Satellite or one of the 500-series Tecras, probably from around 1996. My mom somehow brought it home from her job as a Cobol mainframe programmer, probably around 98/99 -- maybe they thought the hardware was too outdated idk. Was the first personal computer I ever had that wasn't a shared family computer! But the design and layout, the placement of the ports, etc were all very similar.
First time watching a Blerb video and I have to say that it's everything I ever wanted. I love this casual, unedited style, so this channel is a big win in my book.
I had the 325CDT with a dual height 10/100 PCMCIA Ethernet card. It lasted me about 5 years with various upgrades. The sound card was amazing as I could playback one track whilst recording another. Great as a playback/recording device in school music departments. It was, unfortunately stolen in around 2003/4 and the insurance company replaced it with a very poor Acer machine. I didn't realise how good the IR port was until a couple of years in to ownership when it would communicate with the office HP Laserjet over around 30ft. The built-in floppy drive allowed me to transfer MIDI files from the internet to my Yamaha Clavinova. It was upgraded in the end with 256MB of RAM and an 8GB hard drive that Windows XP saw as a single drive. Probably my favourite laptop of all time. Even better than my current DELL i7-7700.
I have a dark confession to make: sometimes I want to seal myself in a concrete bunker with a win 98 machine, some 90's tech and games, and pretend it's 1999 until all this blows by. Short of doing that, these blerbs keep me going.
@@crackwizard666 Every day that goes by i am sure you would miss out on less and less important/interesting/relevant things and spare yourself from loosing more faith in humanity. So its arguable if never getting out again would be such a bad thing.
@@KS-xo3oh yeah there are more moments you get asked to hang out with someone and the first thought is "I'd rather watch paint dry". I would have lost sanity without escapism.
I worked in the configuration department at CDW from early 1997 until 1998 when I moved to tech support. I probably installed extra RAM into hundreds of these and other similar Toshiba laptops. Thanks for the walk down memory lane (pun intended).
Hi LGR I have a 1998 Toshiba Satellite Pro 490XCDT and I love it! Win98 SE and 266MHz Pentium II and the battery is great and it has a Xircom combo 56k 100 lan card and a 13.3 inch TFT screen it is a great machine!!! Part of the palm rest is a bit loose of course. 96MB RAM and a 20 or 40 gig hard drive that is limited to 8GB due to BIOS limitations
Honestly tho I have the Toshiba sattelite from 2008 somehow that thing still works after replacing the fan and power jack runs hotter than hell and has been dropped down the stairs.. it's out lived every laptop I've had
In high school, I was the only kid who brought a laptop to class for note-taking. I had a generic-brand Ultra 486-33 (starting in 1995), and then in 11th grade I upgraded to a Toshiba Satellite 205CDS, which looks like it predated your 325 by a year or so. I turned it on a few months ago, and it still works. I used that laptop through the first part of college. In fact, I don't think I used it in class (still, I was the only one in college using a laptop for notes) until mid 2005.
Got a Toshiba Satellite 320 CDT in amazing shape some months ago, these are great laptops for DOS gaming. Mine's battery also holds a charge, a whopping 2.5 hours, couldn't believe my eyes when I discovered that the battery was still in such good condition.
Worked at the Support for Toshiba Nordics from 1995 to 2003, one of the best supports at the time, our commitment was to help the customers either to get software and hardware working or to help them restore machine in working order... supported all the models from Libretto to the flag ship Tecra, quite impressive when you get to work with a Tecra 9000 with fully packed Deskstation, SCSI and external disks, good speakers even in that and it mostly just worked , I still have a tablet model somewhere amongst my heap of machines. stirdy swivel hinge on that one, and it should still run :) You might just have inspired me to grab it and see if it works still :)
That would have confused SOOO many people. "Margret, that compooter looky-box only got 4 of the giga memory ram bits and such. This'un over here has 'dem over 4 billion!".
I had the same laptop around 2007. It was still running 95 though. It finally crapped out on me in 09. I ewasted it now I wish I had kept it with this video.
Gooooood lord that ghosting. I had an HP for my first laptop, one of the first to offer DVD-ROM, solely to watch movies on car trips and play GTA. Thing ran hotter than a two dollar pistol and I remember needing some crazy inverter because of the amp draw, watching quick camera cut movies made me nauseous. I loved every minute of it.
I loved the 320CDS my sister's boyfriend left in the house. I used it in college (2007) for programming PICs via the parallel port, it clearly stole all the looks. I remember connecting it to a router via USB and getting to the internet that way. It played Quake1, snes9x, Doom and some other games pretty much ok. Some awful day they broke up and she took it from me. Years later I asked her if she still had it. She stored it in an attic, getting dust and humidity. The display got burnt and the charger got lost. Some people just don't appreciate old hardware
My father had the Satellite 225CDS. I had the 115 - no sound card or CD Rom. My brother had one of these in high school and used to play Carmageddon on it. These were good machines. I have fond memories of playing Xwing vs Tie Fighter on my dad's computer...
lol, tell me about it. Kinda wish Clint had tried to run Vipersoft, since I noticed there was a shortcut on the desktop for that. Funny to think that Henry Schein used to sell their own imaging software as well as PM..
That’s almost identical to the one my grandpa used in the field as an electrician for about 15 years before he upgraded. That’s a neat machine and one heck of a workhorse for the time!
I definitely remember finding all those MIDIs from my dad's PC in the '90s but I never saw the accompanying websites. Amazing to see their intended context.
This model came out shortly after I got promoted to the tech shop at CompUSA. I upgraded and repaired SO many of these things. These were, for a "budget-conscious" retail consumer, probably the most durable laptops of the day. Only Apple and IBM made bigger tanks for retail consumers. Though it's interesting how over the years and changes in design processes, materials, and philosophies, things have gotten more or less reliable. Screen hinges, for instance, were terrible back then, and would break all the time. Not so much now. But the wire harness from the screen to the motherboard seemed to be a lot stronger back then, and keyboards were both better feeling and easier to replace back then. I do NOT miss those eraser-style trackpoints.
I agree modern screen hinges don't seem to be an issue with modern laptops. Instead the screw mounts just tear out of the chassis. Same with keyboards, it's just stupid when they're integrated with the top shell, which also happens to be the entire chassis on these thin systems. Lastly, I love using a good TrackPoint. I also hate using a bad one and unfortunately there are too many of those.
@@eDoc2020 My last laptop was permanently retired because of a keyboard issue. Couldn't find a seller that would sell the "entire part", they actually ripped the keyboard off of the upper chassis assembly with no way for replacement to actually happen. It's the dumbest thing on the planet. And of course, this was after the manufacturer (Dell) had stopped support so I couldn't just buy an OEM part.
My father gave me his old Toshiba Satellite when I was probably twelve after he had upgraded a couple times. It was a lot of fun to mess around with. I wish I still had it around.
Always a pleasure to see your videos... My dad used to have one of these Toshiba Satellite laptops, almost identical to yours. I don’t miss being the free tech support, but better troubleshooting that than windows 10! 🤨
These were the standard computers we had in high school for our laptop program! I remember that giant gray brick of a computer. I hated that screen so much. As soon as I got home I plugged it into an old cheap monitor we had. So many memories of passing floppy discs back and forth on the bus with NES roms on it. Then our school got a T1 line for us and life was never the same again. I don’t think I’d be working in I.T. today if it wasn’t for having to constantly trouble shoot that thing and learning how to upgrade the hard drive and ram.
I have a similar model Toshiba and the original battery still works. No bulging or leaking (thankfully). I was floored when I discovered the battery to be in working condition.
This Active Channels archive is fantastic. Even if the laptop itself is subpar (dual-scan is brutal, my 2505CDS sits unused primarily because of that).
That screen refresh rate! This is a pretty lovely laptop but I'm glad I have a roughly similarly spec'd Gateway for my retro computer needs of the era.
I worked for Computer City (RIP) back when these were sold, in the Corporate Sales Department. I sold so many of these to companies here in the Dallas / Ft Worth area. Man that brought back memories.
I have a slightly older Compaq Armada 1560D, the battery holds a charge and keeps the computer on for at least two hours. I was blown away, usually after a few years any laptop battery holds a tiny charge at best. Here i can play games for an hour unplugged. Awesome thing with this compaq is the adapter is integrated in the case, it only needs a clover style wire.
My laptop I've had barely a year the battery can't hold its darned charge, and yet somehow this beast from 22 flipping years ago manages to cling in there- really brings a whole new meaning to "they don't make them like they used to" (I know, it's a totally different battery type, but still) EDIT: HOLY CRAP THE FLASHBACKS FROM THAT INTERNET ON DISK, I remember, as a kid, finding very similar offline webpages on my computer, and somehow thinking I was on the internet even though my computer wasn't even connected to the modem. You could do a whole video on that wakcy oddity
Nope, this is a Li-ion battery, the same basic type as modern laptops. Other laptops of the time has Ni-MH batteries which are indeed totally different.
that's some pretty impressive CSS/HTML work for the late 90s there edit: and I'm sure there's a bit of flash mixed in there as well, surely. Those midi files are tight also o_0
3:45 - That's what you take off to flip the keyboard over to add a stick of ram to the one expansion slot. Yeah, one. And it's a bit of a pain to get it back to how it was before you took it out. lol I just got a 325CDS on the 23rd from ShopGoodwill, particularly a Goodwill from the Phoenix area all for $50 (including shipping)! Apart from some marks and stains that easily came out with a magic eraser, the machine looked hardly used! I've added a 64MB stick of ram to give me 96MB and an IDE-to-CF adapter for a HDD replacement (Mine had the HDD removed). All I have left to do is replace the passive-matrix display with an active one and luckily I've got such a donor unit coming in the mail. Surprisingly, the battery still holds a charge, though I haven't tested how long it lasts. Along with the laptop itself, I got a Toshiba-branded AC adapter, a lovely leather carrying bag, a silver/gray PS/2 mouse, the 320 series user manual, a spring 1998 Toshiba accessories catalog, PCMCIA ethernet and 56k modem cards with their appropriate dongles, and even a full specification printout from the previous owner dated from 2000. Sadly, my unit doesn't have those OEM stickers nor the Energy Star logo. My unit aside, that IE CD-ROM gave me a damn nostaligasm.
I just bought a Toshiba Satellite 4025cdt, with a 300mhz Pentium 2, for myself for my 40th birthday. With the Yamaha OPL3 audio chip, DOS audio will be great! Going to set myself up the best DOS gaming laptop! Also, the listing for mine says it has an XGA Active Matrix, so the screen should look good!
Proud owner of a Satellite 4090CDS (Celeron, Win98SE) here, everything still works. The passive display sucks, you can see shapes burned in :D. And the best is, the battery actually can keep up for whopping 20 minutes :D. Its a great machine to play C&C, AoE and such on it.
Recently i got similar model: Toshiba 2530CDS. 64 MB of RAM and a Pentium MMX 233 MHz. One more for my personal laptop collection. Greetings from Mexico!
My first windows 98 pc is a 4005cds for $7 at a local recycling center about as new as this one, it's been a great start into the retro computer hobby!
I love it. This laptop is almost identical to the first computer that arrived at my home which was a Toshiba Satellite 200CDS. Unfortunately for the economics here in Colombia at that time (2001) it was already a ~6 years old laptop, still useful but anyway, I was able to connect it to my LP stereo in order to amplify the audio output and then reproduce MP3s using Winamp. That was fun.
Whenever an old PC (or camera, or random memory card) lands on my desk, I run data recovery software on it just for the heck of it. Sometimes, later, I wish I hadn't.
I had a Toshiba 200CDS for several years when I was younger. Bought it from my dad, and it served me well as my first laptop. Pentium 100 with the 40MB RAM upgrade! Loaded Win98SE (bumping colour from 16 to 65k) and installed a Ethernet PC Card. Even tried Windows 2000 at one stage, but that didn’t go so well!
I also have one of these (320CDS) and yes, the battery indeed still can hold a charge. These late 90's Toshiba laptops are almost indestructible and can do a lot of late 90's stuff. The Soundblaster Pro is a super lovable card, especially for playing old DOS games like Doom, Wolfenstein 3D or Tyrian 2000 (my personal favourite one) and has that sweet twangy FM synth sound every retro gamer loves. I also use it for MS Office 97, since it's a nice piece of old hardware even for work. The downside is the terrible DSTN screen, but it's possible to live with it, if you get used to it. Otherwise these things were built like a tanks and you definitely can't go wrong with them.
I had one of these 20 years ago, loved it. Was a perfect little old work/ very light gaming laptop (for the games I played at the time, had a massive Transport Tycoon Deluxe addiction back in the day.)
I have a Tosh laptop of a similar vintage that holds a charge for about 20 minutes. Nice old laptop, fun to see all the store display stickers still on it all these years later. 😄
During my first internship we had to image those type of things as they were the loan and back-up units my company worked with. Handled a lot of them; trustworthy machines.
I still have my old PCMCIA Soundblaster Audigy card that I used back in college at the library when studying while headphoning. Definitely pushed some quality sound through
I watched this video 2 years ago and here I am today coming back because I coincidentally coming across this same model for free. Mine too still somehow holds a charge but the screen is in rough shape! I'll end up refurbishing it and adding it to my collection.
My 2000 Tecra T8200 that I recently acquired still holds some charge, at least 30mins amazing really, the IBM A21m from the same era that I have only lasts a couple of minutes. I will say both are in pretty much mint condition which is amazing (no noticeable scratching, all labels intact, screens both still fine with no dead pixels), yet some similar machines were advertised with "damage appropriate for the age of the machines" which went for much more money.
More than likely it was always plugged in. The battery lasts longer if it's not allowed to discharge plus his a Lithium-ion which doesn't have the memory problems.
Simple technology lasts longer. One of the major reasons behind the slow uptake in tech in space. The only stuff that's "new" and goes up there is either 100% requirement, no other way around, or for personal use (cameras, laptops).
I'm not surprised at all that the battery still works. Those batteries were extremely reliable and not just that, but also toshiba used the same battery type for many of its laptops from around that time to like, 2001 or so? So you could swap batteries (the actual battery itself which could be easily and harmlessly pried off from whatever plastic thingy they were inserted into (aka the grey plastic on yours). Same pinout, same form factor. Also I have the same exact lappy somewhere in my place
With the color and aesthetic appeal of a 90s airport lounge chair ;) My parents had a similar looking Compaq Presario at the time. I was 17 at the time. I managed to play Doom on it via serial cable with a body of mine
I did warranty work on so many of those machines back in the late 90s. Fun fact. The Toshiba laptops from the 90s and 2000s with a 5 at the end of their model number are retail models. Ones that end in 0 were sold through places like CDW or other non-retail partners, often times in bulk orders. The warranty on retail models was less than the non-retail counter parts. The preloaded software differed as well.
Ooh, that's good to know!
@@LGRBlerbs in much of the 2000s I was the service manager at one of the largest (in volume) independent service providers in the US for Toshiba, IBM/Lenovo, Dell, Fujitsu and HP/Compaq laptops.
@@Choralone422 You must be very proud of yourself. I know you're a better gentleman than this sir.
@@LGRBlerbs Twenty something years old BAT that retain 95% charge!!... Original stikers..... Come on Clint... You borrowed the time machine from @Techmoan... admit it... :-D
I have a Toshiba Satellite 330CDS laptop with windows 98 it has 4.0 on the bottom what does it mean?
This was my first computer, and it was a hand-me-down from my dad. He left the first Civilization on it. I have fond memories of sitting in my room with this thing one afternoon, loading up that game for the first time, then looking out my window to see the sun coming up.
@@stonecodfish2365 haha, sounds like you've never played "one more turn" through an entire night
Fun video. People who never used these or won't around then can't fully appreciate the price/performance we get with today's laptops. These 90's models were heavy, weak screens with horrible refresh rate, slow HD's, etc. But all that said, it's still awesome to see one 20 plus years later and show what we had to use back then. Great vid as always.
Big D! I’m outta here..
so what was the civil war like?
@Raymond Thimmes Looked up your MacBook Pro and just shake my head that a more powerful 17.4" ASUS ROG Strix laptop that cost less than half as much in brand new retail price comparison... The Apple tax is just bonkers.
Edit: Before anyone goes "but the software makes it worth it." Not really, there's stuff for Windows and Linux that's just as good, if not better and there has been for years.
I’m 20 years old and I have nerver used these kinds of laptops, and I still love this.
Just the reliability. When I was on 98 using a lower specced machine I got bsod on the regular, it was part of life.
Maybe the battery has been replaced at some point - some of those batteries can surprisingly be found unused out in the wild. Very cool!
Possibly rebuilt
I have an original battery for a similar model - unbelievably, still gives a couple hour's charge.
I have the original battery from the Dell Latitude CP M233ST (higher end version of this Toshiba, SVGA TFT display, much thinner body), still works for 45 minutes! But the good thing about these Latitude C series is that you can stick in a monster battery for a C840 and get like 4 hours of battery life on this thing!
I bought an older Compaq Evo laptop with a completely dead battery (only $20!). Using it with the AC adaptor wasn't bad but to my surprise replacement batteries were still made for it. After buying one, the Windows XP experience is now mobile and I love it
I have similar Toshiba but older, and it's battery has enough charge for ilke 2 hours which is extremely impressive after all those years.
I had this exact model. I bought it (refurbished) in 1999 for $999 and was my first personally owned laptop. I used the hell out of it for work which involved me traveling around a lot and evaluating military units. The gray chassis looked vaguely military so it fit right in (after you take off the garish stickers). It was a lot more rugged than it looked. I deployed to Kuwait/Iraq with it in 2002-2003 for that war and it survived just fine in the bottom of my rucksack for 10 months. I used to write e-mails to my wife and send photos from my .33 megapixel camera when I had access to the internet. Still clunky, but better than using the mail system in terms of speed. Technology left it in the dust soon enough, but I kept it around to operate my RX-320 short wave radio since it was the only computer I had that still had a serial port that was required for the radio. Once I had a serial to USB adaptor, it became a paperweight. I finally had to get rid of it before a military move (to save weight) along with a lot of other stuff. Instead of recycling, I took it to the re-use portion of that facility. I hope someone picked it up and gave it to their kid or something. I have a lot of fondness for that computer.
This was my dad's last computer, he worked in sewage and used it for field work up until 2014... brings back alot of memories
@mike h TBF, all he used it for was excel and a few DOS/Console based logging applications from the State's EPA. He did have a WiFi card for it though
@mike h Dynex DX-WGNBC I think, it had a win9x WiFi connection manager. I recall there was an issue with the brass bumps on end that he had to grind down, but it worked for what he used it for
@@Wolkebuch99 There is a WiFi card from Orinoco that works great in these, and it doesn't need any filing down either. These used a 16 bit PCMCIA slot. Cards like you described were 32 bit, and were designated as Cardbus.
Anyway, I was able to make use of that 16 bit Orinoco WiFi card on a Satellite running 98SE Lite (that was 98SE with Internet Explorer completely stripped out), as well as a TI Extensa 486 laptop that was dual boot with both Dos 6.22 / Windows for Workgroups 3.11 and Damn Small Linux. I really need to get the Extensa, Satellite, and the cute little Toshiba Protege restored and fully operational again one of these days.
LGR is one of my top youtube channels, imo. The amount of time spent on each video is commendable, even BLERBS!
especially his comedic videos such as that recent Photoshop video.
Holy nostalgia! That was my dad's laptop back then. I remember plugging a phone line into that weird pop out PCMCIA rj-11 jack and dialing into the internet on it. I also would try to play space quest 4 but fail miserably since it had timing issues on it (those sequel police men on Pentiums are brutal!)
Seeing it again in all of its chunky goodness is super cool. Love this channel!
Also, I think those website files were there so that your internet explorer can have a prebuilt cache of the website and it'll actually load the same day while on a 56k modem xD
My mother still uses one of these for taxes/logging receipts - because the software doesn't exist on modern OSs there is no way to port the info over. This was also my first laptop, we got a dozen of these broken from a school that was throwing them out, managed to get 3 of them to work. I never got internet working though
But were the speakers really that crappy?
@@DankRedditMemes They were certainly not! Quite good for laptop speakers actually. Sounds like Clints' have disintegrated over the years. I have a Satellite 320CDT that has the same issue.
@@Artyomthewalrus tell tour mom to back up her data regularly. And not just the data files, she should clone the hard drive and replace it with a new one asap
@@Artyomthewalrus could your mum not clone the drive and get an IDE to SD adapter? Would make doing things much more useable
The world: Radeon RX6000 series
LGR: Here's a Toshiba Satellite from 1998
wouldnt have it any other way
In the next 20 years LGR will make a video about the RX6000 series. LOL!
Oh right that's today isn't it...
@@JohnSmith-xq1pz Looks promising!
@@CattoRayTube indeed. Literally just cought up on the news... wow
That Warner Bros. website was painfully 90's. It reminded me of when I used to play flash games on the Cartoon Network website. I remember a Daffy Duck game where it was Duck Dodgers in space and you had to bounce the space ship around off the edges of the screen to collect and destroy things. I remember another Ed Edd n Eddy online multi-player game where it was supposed to be a water balloon or water gun fight. I don't think I ever got in a game with another player though. Good memories.
Edit: I found a video of the Duck Dodgers game! m.th-cam.com/video/ogXtDbokPaw/w-d-xo.html
Speaking of Warner Brothers, they never took down the original Space Jam website. (www.spacejam.com) It's still there in all its awful late-90s glory.
..back when geeks were in charge of online marketing and graphic design! It was so much better honestly.
Not painfully 90's, AWESOMLY 90's. I really do miss the way the internet was back then. Even the anticipation you'd get from waiting for a website to load over dial-up.
There was a courage the cowardly dog one too where you used a flashlight to go room to room looking for ghosts etc. Haven't thought of that in years!
You can actually still play those flash games using BlueMaxima's Flashpoint. very simple and convenient.
Man those early 90's sites make me miss when we had web rings and just simple web pages. Now sites are all trying to cram video ads and massive 4k videos in the splash page of their sites and it just annihilates anything thats not a modern pc
I agree about the video ads and such, but I don't miss the general aesthetics of '90s computer software.
"Just because you can do something doesn't mean you should" - that ideal in web design is long gone.
Oh shut up lmao and take off your nostalgia glasses. 90s websites were cluttered to the brim with dumb decals and flashy, glittery shit they thought looked cool back then.
Someone clearly wasn't around in the age where printing out websites to read them was the ideal method of browsing the internet.
I recently had a older Motorola two way radio that needed to be programmed. The radio shop I went to had to dig this same beast out with a 100ft cord reel to program em.
It was even running MS-DOS as well.
Ah, this brings back memories... First computer we ever had in the household was a Tecra 750DVD (from my father's workplace) that must've cost a small fortune! I'm always fascinated by how it went on the market with a DVD drive before the format itself was even officially introduced in Europe! As I started collecting old laptops that I had some kind of connection to during my life, I was also able to acquire two of those in pretty nice shape, with maxed out RAM, and even some goodies like the original Toshiba branded laptop bag, documentation, and little tidbits such as replacement domes for the pointing stick! Even better than that, on one of those machines, the original Win95 install was intact and hardly used, a pristine time capsule of a much simpler time as far as child-me was concerned. Pretty fascinated by these machines, even more so when taking into account that they often work perfectly more than 20 years after leaving the factory!
It's always nice to find a bunch of stuff from previous owners in old computers. Especially old saved websites, software and documents. This lets you experience what computers and internet were like over 20 years ago. It's sort of like digging in a pile of old antiques, just virtually.
Also, as you found out, some Li-Ion cells can indeed last over 20 years.
I remember getting an old laptop pack (from very early 2000s) with 9 Panasonic 18650 in it. 3 of them were still perfectly usable with close to full capacity, despite being almost 20 years old.
I also remember servicing a Dell Pentium 3 which still had a working battery in it.
Toshiba ftw! I searched YEARS for a Satellite Pro 400cdt, the perfect retro gaming machine. It comes with a 640x480px active matrix display and an original Soundblaster Pro OPL3 chip. So much fun playing adventure classics on this machine.
I have a 420CDT, and have a 430CDT arriving next week... It's hard trying to find matching pairs, but hopefully they'll work for what I have planned for them! The major difference is that the former runs at 100MHz, and the latter 120MHz, although the screen on the latter needs replacing! Both also have 2MB of VRAM rather than 1MB. Additionally, the 400-430CDS/CDT models all share the same form factor with a single speaker, whereas the 440CDS/CDT models onwards have the same dual speaker form factor... At least that's what I saw in the pictures anyway... They naturally have better CPUs and support more RAM too.
@@StormkeeperPU True, but the 640x480px display is very important to me for so that the old games run without upscaling or black borders. I don't mind the mono speaker, it's pretty solid. Had a 430cdt before, it's a great machine as well. And yes, they are the same form factor, you can even switch hardware parts like the keyboard or put a faster CD ROM into the 400cdt.
I remember these cd-rom-internet-things: we had one at the school i worked for so people could learn to use the internet without blocking the phone lines or topping up the bills for using it. It came with a full tutorial and was part of the secretary course. We had a laser disc systems too that was, kind of, interactive: you would get a question and than read a barcode of your answer to which the system would reply. High tech for the time but that was in 1998. I love these blerbs and videos of old stuff! Keep them comming Clint!!
The ghosting on that screen is eye-bleeding.
I love it
Makes my Amoled screen seem not so bad.
It's easy to take for granted modern technology, but we often forget just how far it's really come!
Not even a haunted house has this much ghosting
It certainly puts a lot of those $300 laptops into perspective
The websites was apart of a CD that was around in late '97/early 98 that I think was called the accelerator pack, or something like that. You could get it from various stores for free to upgrade machines to IE 3 (or later 4) and a lot of the tech mags that also came with CDs bundled it. Other than the IE install it was just cached versions of websites to try out ActiveX in the IE 3 version and Active Channels in the IE 4 version.
"Active" internet is an IE4 technology. Microsoft came up with some new standards so users could have content downloaded from providers automatically. The content would be updated when the user was online. User could then choose "work offline" in IE to go through downloaded content like was a real website. This was useful then because internet meant dialup for most people and dialup meant no reading today's Cathy when mom was on the phone with grandma. IE4 also had Active Desktop that could update the desktop with web content. It was a huge resource hog and not really secure, but you could do it.
I thought the Hip Clip link would be related to those horrid music players Tech Moan has been showing.
I was thinking the same thing.
Oh god hit clips oddware
ditto!
I can be your hero, baby.
I haven't heard that Warner Brother's song in years. Decades even.
I have two 320CDS that I refurbished, they're hardware identical to the 325CDS which was simply sold bundled with more software. I have owned a number of vintage machines over the years and have gradually trimmed down the collection and settled on these as my favorite machines. Why?
I believe they're an outstanding "all-round" choice for vintage computing:
1. a nice compact footprint compared to desktops
2. All-In-One design with FDD, HDD, CDR, and all the conventional connection ports including USB, as well as 10/100 Ethernet possible with CardBus PC Card
3. can be run completely silently with an IDE to CompactFlash HDD adapter
4. can run early versions of DOS and Windows, with proper drivers available for Win 3.1, NT, 95, 98, and meets minimum system requirements for XP with 32MB extra RAM installed, can also run versions of OS/2 and Debian
5. real OPL3!
6. Still relatively easy to find and therefore tends to be somewhat cheaper than other vintage options, as well as parts being available
After 1998 laptops gradually became larger in size, and the humble 3.5" FDD started to disappear as part of the onboard design, as well as lacking good driver support for older OS. Whilst the models before 1998 tended to lack something, whether USB, floppy, CDR, as well as having slower hardware. Put simply, the 320CDx series covers a lot of ground, straddling the transitional period between early and modern OS, and is great value today compared to other vintage computer options.
13:16
🎵 We're Animani-
Totally insane-y...
Game Reviews Lazy! 🎵
“Let’s see if Warner Brothers website opens”
Do I hear boss music?
We had a cart full of these exact laptops when I was in middle school
lol
Uwu windows 95\98 gang
In your dental courses.
I still have 3 Toshiba Tecras of this vintage - still damned fine machines all these years later.
Oh man, I had to look up active channels and active desktop because it rang a bell when I saw it. All that DHTML stuff that the big studios were doing was really state of the art at the time. Most websites were pretty static.
Those old laptop screens used to give me such a headache when I had to use them for work. So bad.
Those dental programs must have lots of bites...
9:50 That fall_01 is a BANGER.
i was vibing tbh
Yeah
OK, you've done it. As a child I had a 486 for my first machine... I assembled it with my father. Time went by, things got bigger and better and that crap faded into the obscurity of my childhood memories, that was until you came along. Now, I'm all into legacy equipment again. Why!? I already manage a repair shop, so I encounter all kinds of crap but thanks to you, now I have a finer appreciation for it again.
My dad had one of those for work. He still put Doom on it so I could use it on long trips.
Your Dad is a legend!
Aw man, watching this is nostalgia overload! Had either a very similar Satellite or one of the 500-series Tecras, probably from around 1996. My mom somehow brought it home from her job as a Cobol mainframe programmer, probably around 98/99 -- maybe they thought the hardware was too outdated idk. Was the first personal computer I ever had that wasn't a shared family computer! But the design and layout, the placement of the ports, etc were all very similar.
First time watching a Blerb video and I have to say that it's everything I ever wanted. I love this casual, unedited style, so this channel is a big win in my book.
I had the 325CDT with a dual height 10/100 PCMCIA Ethernet card. It lasted me about 5 years with various upgrades. The sound card was amazing as I could playback one track whilst recording another. Great as a playback/recording device in school music departments. It was, unfortunately stolen in around 2003/4 and the insurance company replaced it with a very poor Acer machine. I didn't realise how good the IR port was until a couple of years in to ownership when it would communicate with the office HP Laserjet over around 30ft. The built-in floppy drive allowed me to transfer MIDI files from the internet to my Yamaha Clavinova.
It was upgraded in the end with 256MB of RAM and an 8GB hard drive that Windows XP saw as a single drive.
Probably my favourite laptop of all time. Even better than my current DELL i7-7700.
I have a dark confession to make: sometimes I want to seal myself in a concrete bunker with a win 98 machine, some 90's tech and games, and pretend it's 1999 until all this blows by.
Short of doing that, these blerbs keep me going.
It'd be like a time machine, but you can never go outside. NEVER.
@@crackwizard666 Every day that goes by i am sure you would miss out on less and less important/interesting/relevant things and spare yourself from loosing more faith in humanity. So its arguable if never getting out again would be such a bad thing.
@@KS-xo3oh yeah there are more moments you get asked to hang out with someone and the first thought is "I'd rather watch paint dry". I would have lost sanity without escapism.
Interestingly, the Animaniacs are coming back. Circle of Life, man.
I worked in the configuration department at CDW from early 1997 until 1998 when I moved to tech support. I probably installed extra RAM into hundreds of these and other similar Toshiba laptops. Thanks for the walk down memory lane (pun intended).
Hi LGR I have a 1998 Toshiba Satellite Pro 490XCDT and I love it! Win98 SE and 266MHz Pentium II and the battery is great and it has a Xircom combo 56k 100 lan card and a 13.3 inch TFT screen it is a great machine!!! Part of the palm rest is a bit loose of course. 96MB RAM and a 20 or 40 gig hard drive that is limited to 8GB due to BIOS limitations
It's amazing that the sticks are still on there.
I’d love to have those midis! I still love listening to them lol
This was cutting edge technology when I was a highschool freshman. God, I feel old.
Ah yes the Nokia phone of laptops
like if you dropped it on the floor it would go through to the basement
These old Toshibas were very well built. After 2000/2002, Toshiba's build quality started to go bananas.
UHHHHHH awwwwwww
@@mima85 I have a toshiba satellite from 2014 and the hinge snapped off lol
Honestly tho I have the Toshiba sattelite from 2008 somehow that thing still works after replacing the fan and power jack runs hotter than hell and has been dropped down the stairs.. it's out lived every laptop I've had
In high school, I was the only kid who brought a laptop to class for note-taking. I had a generic-brand Ultra 486-33 (starting in 1995), and then in 11th grade I upgraded to a Toshiba Satellite 205CDS, which looks like it predated your 325 by a year or so. I turned it on a few months ago, and it still works. I used that laptop through the first part of college. In fact, I don't think I used it in class (still, I was the only one in college using a laptop for notes) until mid 2005.
Got a Toshiba Satellite 320 CDT in amazing shape some months ago, these are great laptops for DOS gaming. Mine's battery also holds a charge, a whopping 2.5 hours, couldn't believe my eyes when I discovered that the battery was still in such good condition.
Worked at the Support for Toshiba Nordics from 1995 to 2003, one of the best supports at the time, our commitment was to help the customers either to get software and hardware working or to help them restore machine in working order... supported all the models from Libretto to the flag ship Tecra, quite impressive when you get to work with a Tecra 9000 with fully packed Deskstation, SCSI and external disks, good speakers even in that and it mostly just worked , I still have a tablet model somewhere amongst my heap of machines. stirdy swivel hinge on that one, and it should still run :) You might just have inspired me to grab it and see if it works still :)
This is the first time I've ever seen storage space measured in billions of bytes. I guess they were trying to make a 4Gb hard drive sound impressive.
Watching videos on older laptops makes me realise that people had it rough back in the day, makes my slow windows 10 craptop seem good
"Enormous 4.1 billion bytes!"
Lol. Couldn't just say 4.1 gigs, huh?
That would have confused SOOO many people.
"Margret, that compooter looky-box only got 4 of the giga memory ram bits and such. This'un over here has 'dem over 4 billion!".
Or 32 billion bits
That wouldn´t be "enormous" enough as 4.1 billion bytes sounds fancier than 4.1gb
Imagine if TH-cam worked on it, what a wonderful experience that would be with those great speakers and that fantastic screen!
I had the same laptop around 2007. It was still running 95 though. It finally crapped out on me in 09. I ewasted it now I wish I had kept it with this video.
If you wind up replacing the display with TFT i would love to see that since I have a similar predicament with these older screens as well lol
I used to have this laptop and used it for 3 years during high school (online/distance learning). Thanks for the trip down memory lane!
Gooooood lord that ghosting. I had an HP for my first laptop, one of the first to offer DVD-ROM, solely to watch movies on car trips and play GTA. Thing ran hotter than a two dollar pistol and I remember needing some crazy inverter because of the amp draw, watching quick camera cut movies made me nauseous. I loved every minute of it.
I loved the 320CDS my sister's boyfriend left in the house. I used it in college (2007) for programming PICs via the parallel port, it clearly stole all the looks. I remember connecting it to a router via USB and getting to the internet that way. It played Quake1, snes9x, Doom and some other games pretty much ok. Some awful day they broke up and she took it from me. Years later I asked her if she still had it. She stored it in an attic, getting dust and humidity. The display got burnt and the charger got lost. Some people just don't appreciate old hardware
Holy shit that last Warner Bros MIDI is amazing. I downloaded the Active Channels archive just for that.
My father had the Satellite 225CDS. I had the 115 - no sound card or CD Rom. My brother had one of these in high school and used to play Carmageddon on it. These were good machines. I have fond memories of playing Xwing vs Tie Fighter on my dad's computer...
Softdent is still a thing. Dentists take forever to update their computers lol.
lol, tell me about it. Kinda wish Clint had tried to run Vipersoft, since I noticed there was a shortcut on the desktop for that. Funny to think that Henry Schein used to sell their own imaging software as well as PM..
my dentist still uses windows 3.1 programs running on windows xp
That’s almost identical to the one my grandpa used in the field as an electrician for about 15 years before he upgraded. That’s a neat machine and one heck of a workhorse for the time!
It's hard to believe that 1998 is 22 years behind us. So long ago that even WB didn't had the eye of Horus for a logo.
I definitely remember finding all those MIDIs from my dad's PC in the '90s but I never saw the accompanying websites. Amazing to see their intended context.
This model came out shortly after I got promoted to the tech shop at CompUSA. I upgraded and repaired SO many of these things. These were, for a "budget-conscious" retail consumer, probably the most durable laptops of the day. Only Apple and IBM made bigger tanks for retail consumers. Though it's interesting how over the years and changes in design processes, materials, and philosophies, things have gotten more or less reliable. Screen hinges, for instance, were terrible back then, and would break all the time. Not so much now. But the wire harness from the screen to the motherboard seemed to be a lot stronger back then, and keyboards were both better feeling and easier to replace back then. I do NOT miss those eraser-style trackpoints.
I agree modern screen hinges don't seem to be an issue with modern laptops. Instead the screw mounts just tear out of the chassis.
Same with keyboards, it's just stupid when they're integrated with the top shell, which also happens to be the entire chassis on these thin systems.
Lastly, I love using a good TrackPoint. I also hate using a bad one and unfortunately there are too many of those.
@@eDoc2020 My last laptop was permanently retired because of a keyboard issue. Couldn't find a seller that would sell the "entire part", they actually ripped the keyboard off of the upper chassis assembly with no way for replacement to actually happen. It's the dumbest thing on the planet. And of course, this was after the manufacturer (Dell) had stopped support so I couldn't just buy an OEM part.
2:00 Quake 2 for linux official big box! Kept there for a future review/project I hope?
Good eye! It. Would be cool to see a video on that.
Love the Blerbs, new video always bring smile on my face. Thanks for great work!
My father gave me his old Toshiba Satellite when I was probably twelve after he had upgraded a couple times. It was a lot of fun to mess around with. I wish I still had it around.
There's a 445CDT I have upstairs that looks just like that. Still works, too. Love the sculpted keys.
"Explorer caused an illegal operation." Ah yes, I remember that error well.
Always a pleasure to see your videos... My dad used to have one of these Toshiba Satellite laptops, almost identical to yours. I don’t miss being the free tech support, but better troubleshooting that than windows 10! 🤨
These were the standard computers we had in high school for our laptop program! I remember that giant gray brick of a computer. I hated that screen so much. As soon as I got home I plugged it into an old cheap monitor we had.
So many memories of passing floppy discs back and forth on the bus with NES roms on it. Then our school got a T1 line for us and life was never the same again.
I don’t think I’d be working in I.T. today if it wasn’t for having to constantly trouble shoot that thing and learning how to upgrade the hard drive and ram.
I have a similar model Toshiba and the original battery still works. No bulging or leaking (thankfully). I was floored when I discovered the battery to be in working condition.
This Active Channels archive is fantastic. Even if the laptop itself is subpar (dual-scan is brutal, my 2505CDS sits unused primarily because of that).
Not gonna lie, I've been enjoying Blerbs lately more than the main channel.
That screen refresh rate! This is a pretty lovely laptop but I'm glad I have a roughly similarly spec'd Gateway for my retro computer needs of the era.
I worked for Computer City (RIP) back when these were sold, in the Corporate Sales Department. I sold so many of these to companies here in the Dallas / Ft Worth area. Man that brought back memories.
I grew up with a P90, 16MB of ram satellite. That thing was a beast.
I have a slightly older Compaq Armada 1560D, the battery holds a charge and keeps the computer on for at least two hours. I was blown away, usually after a few years any laptop battery holds a tiny charge at best. Here i can play games for an hour unplugged. Awesome thing with this compaq is the adapter is integrated in the case, it only needs a clover style wire.
My laptop I've had barely a year the battery can't hold its darned charge, and yet somehow this beast from 22 flipping years ago manages to cling in there- really brings a whole new meaning to "they don't make them like they used to" (I know, it's a totally different battery type, but still)
EDIT: HOLY CRAP THE FLASHBACKS FROM THAT INTERNET ON DISK, I remember, as a kid, finding very similar offline webpages on my computer, and somehow thinking I was on the internet even though my computer wasn't even connected to the modem. You could do a whole video on that wakcy oddity
Nope, this is a Li-ion battery, the same basic type as modern laptops. Other laptops of the time has Ni-MH batteries which are indeed totally different.
that's some pretty impressive CSS/HTML work for the late 90s there
edit: and I'm sure there's a bit of flash mixed in there as well, surely.
Those midi files are tight also o_0
3:45 - That's what you take off to flip the keyboard over to add a stick of ram to the one expansion slot. Yeah, one. And it's a bit of a pain to get it back to how it was before you took it out. lol
I just got a 325CDS on the 23rd from ShopGoodwill, particularly a Goodwill from the Phoenix area all for $50 (including shipping)! Apart from some marks and stains that easily came out with a magic eraser, the machine looked hardly used! I've added a 64MB stick of ram to give me 96MB and an IDE-to-CF adapter for a HDD replacement (Mine had the HDD removed). All I have left to do is replace the passive-matrix display with an active one and luckily I've got such a donor unit coming in the mail. Surprisingly, the battery still holds a charge, though I haven't tested how long it lasts.
Along with the laptop itself, I got a Toshiba-branded AC adapter, a lovely leather carrying bag, a silver/gray PS/2 mouse, the 320 series user manual, a spring 1998 Toshiba accessories catalog, PCMCIA ethernet and 56k modem cards with their appropriate dongles, and even a full specification printout from the previous owner dated from 2000. Sadly, my unit doesn't have those OEM stickers nor the Energy Star logo.
My unit aside, that IE CD-ROM gave me a damn nostaligasm.
I just bought a Toshiba Satellite 4025cdt, with a 300mhz Pentium 2, for myself for my 40th birthday.
With the Yamaha OPL3 audio chip, DOS audio will be great! Going to set myself up the best DOS gaming laptop!
Also, the listing for mine says it has an XGA Active Matrix, so the screen should look good!
Proud owner of a Satellite 4090CDS (Celeron, Win98SE) here, everything still works. The passive display sucks, you can see shapes burned in :D. And the best is, the battery actually can keep up for whopping 20 minutes :D. Its a great machine to play C&C, AoE and such on it.
Recently i got similar model: Toshiba 2530CDS. 64 MB of RAM and a Pentium MMX 233 MHz. One more for my personal laptop collection. Greetings from Mexico!
My first windows 98 pc is a 4005cds for $7 at a local recycling center about as new as this one, it's been a great start into the retro computer hobby!
I love it. This laptop is almost identical to the first computer that arrived at my home which was a Toshiba Satellite 200CDS. Unfortunately for the economics here in Colombia at that time (2001) it was already a ~6 years old laptop, still useful but anyway, I was able to connect it to my LP stereo in order to amplify the audio output and then reproduce MP3s using Winamp. That was fun.
Thanks for sharing! I really enjoyed seeing that old WB channel promo site or whatever.
Whenever an old PC (or camera, or random memory card) lands on my desk, I run data recovery software on it just for the heck of it. Sometimes, later, I wish I hadn't.
I had a Toshiba 200CDS for several years when I was younger. Bought it from my dad, and it served me well as my first laptop. Pentium 100 with the 40MB RAM upgrade! Loaded Win98SE (bumping colour from 16 to 65k) and installed a Ethernet PC Card. Even tried Windows 2000 at one stage, but that didn’t go so well!
Animaniacs advert from that time ❤️ So much memories! Also, I'm glad that we also have a continuation of it now.
I also have one of these (320CDS) and yes, the battery indeed still can hold a charge. These late 90's Toshiba laptops are almost indestructible and can do a lot of late 90's stuff. The Soundblaster Pro is a super lovable card, especially for playing old DOS games like Doom, Wolfenstein 3D or Tyrian 2000 (my personal favourite one) and has that sweet twangy FM synth sound every retro gamer loves. I also use it for MS Office 97, since it's a nice piece of old hardware even for work. The downside is the terrible DSTN screen, but it's possible to live with it, if you get used to it. Otherwise these things were built like a tanks and you definitely can't go wrong with them.
I had one of these 20 years ago, loved it. Was a perfect little old work/ very light gaming laptop (for the games I played at the time, had a massive Transport Tycoon Deluxe addiction back in the day.)
I have a Tosh laptop of a similar vintage that holds a charge for about 20 minutes. Nice old laptop, fun to see all the store display stickers still on it all these years later. 😄
Oh wow, I actually had one of these! I don't remember if the specs were the same, but man that is my old computer. So nostalgic seeing this. :-)
Those websites, nostalgic AF. Takes me back to one of the best times of my life.
My favorite laptop from before 2000. Love your review.next favorite was a nec a few years later
During my first internship we had to image those type of things as they were the loan and back-up units my company worked with. Handled a lot of them; trustworthy machines.
I still have my old PCMCIA Soundblaster Audigy card that I used back in college at the library when studying while headphoning. Definitely pushed some quality sound through
I watched this video 2 years ago and here I am today coming back because I coincidentally coming across this same model for free.
Mine too still somehow holds a charge but the screen is in rough shape! I'll end up refurbishing it and adding it to my collection.
The battery holds a charge? wow that is impressive.
My 2000 Tecra T8200 that I recently acquired still holds some charge, at least 30mins amazing really, the IBM A21m from the same era that I have only lasts a couple of minutes. I will say both are in pretty much mint condition which is amazing (no noticeable scratching, all labels intact, screens both still fine with no dead pixels), yet some similar machines were advertised with "damage appropriate for the age of the machines" which went for much more money.
I wonder if the previous owner put new cells in it.
More than likely it was always plugged in. The battery lasts longer if it's not allowed to discharge plus his a Lithium-ion which doesn't have the memory problems.
Simple technology lasts longer. One of the major reasons behind the slow uptake in tech in space. The only stuff that's "new" and goes up there is either 100% requirement, no other way around, or for personal use (cameras, laptops).
You'd be surprised at just how many of these old laptops still have semi-functional batteries.
I'm not surprised at all that the battery still works. Those batteries were extremely reliable and not just that, but also toshiba used the same battery type for many of its laptops from around that time to like, 2001 or so? So you could swap batteries (the actual battery itself which could be easily and harmlessly pried off from whatever plastic thingy they were inserted into (aka the grey plastic on yours). Same pinout, same form factor.
Also I have the same exact lappy somewhere in my place
With the color and aesthetic appeal of a 90s airport lounge chair ;)
My parents had a similar looking Compaq Presario at the time. I was 17 at the time. I managed to play Doom on it via serial cable with a body of mine
before we got a dial up connection, i would spend so much time going through those active channel samples.