The $40 Notebook, sort of...

I do like my toys, Back at the beginning of the year my roommate Lorne was complaining that his notebook would not boot reliably and was crashing. I has a look at it and determined that the hard disk has failed. I told him I would be happy to help him repair it. Well some weeks back I asked him if he ever got his notebook fixed; and it turns out rather than repair the notebook, he had bought a new one.

I immediately asked him if he would be interested in selling it, he was, and I did.
I bought his notebook carcass for $40. I bought a hot little Toshiba replacement hard disk for it and a wireless network card; In the end I got a slick little notebook for about 170$

Again, specs. For those that care:

Toshiba Satellite 1800

Celeron III-1100 MHz
512 Mb RAM
16 Mb Video
- new - 60GB 16Mb 5400RPM HDD
14in LCD
integrated sound, lan, DVD/CD-rom etc.





** update on the lappy **

Apparently Toshiba is the worst company is existence...
They built the satellite notebooks as budget models, how did they make them cheaper?
well they used desktop processors. Sounds okay, right? Not really. The heat production in a desktop processor is about 50% more than that of a "mobile" processor.

How did Toshiba decide to fix it? Well they wrote a BIOS patch to throttle the CPU, to an acceptable level of heat production. (this version of the BIOS had already been installed by the time of my purchase, oh and they deleted all the old BIOS version from the web site)

Anyway, so I do have a pretty nice lappy, except that my 1100mhz Celeron runs at 734mhz. Not quite fast enough to decode a DVD :(

There is currently a class-action suit against Toshiba for this misleading advertising of system performance.