I once worked for a medical company that used those exact HP tablet laptop PCs. Back when they came out, there weren't a lot of other options that had a touch pen and swivel screen. They had a high failure rate, and sometime in 2008 it started getting difficult to find parts for them.
I actually worked in a hospital system as a PC tech around 2014 or 2015. One administrator actually still wanted to use his old ball mouse instead of modern optical mouse. I've seen tons of tablet PCs before everything was upgraded. They were using Fujitsu laptops with the stylus. Thankfully the swivel action is built into the laptop but yeah parts were not easy to get, especially since they only got them through their contracts. No picking up discounted parts from eBay or any other provider here. Now were they reliable? It's been far too long since I was employed by the subcontractor and didn't work long enough. I was only contracted for 3 months. I miss those older laptops. They were so easy to service if they needed a new battery or something else.
I am over 60. My father purchased the Super Pong for my brother and I when I was 13, and he was 12. We played this thing until it eventually broke. It was the beginning of my lifelong love of Computer Games. And yes, it was 1976, I remember because it was during our very small cities bicentennial celebration.
13:45 Hi Austin what you said is right. Back in 2012 nothing ran on the Surface RT except for windows apps. But now in 2023 I found out that there is a team who cracked (somehow) windows to load windows 10 on it and with some several tweaks you can install a lot of windows 10 programs.
You could pick up very similar RF switches at Radio Shack back in the day. Probably whoever had owned it just chucked it in the box. Maybe it was included originally but could just be a random one. I drooled over a lot of those early game consoles in the Sears Christmas catalog and studied the images of the games, I very clearly remember that Odyssy ad! The first console we got was Colecovision, which had the BEST baseball game for decades. Better control of all players, pitches, running speed, it was a dream come true, with the Super Action Controllers, and the graphics of games got a lot better, but it took a few generations of consoles to reach the level of control you had over all aspects of the game. (Well that was a tangent!)
As an owner of Windows RT. i loved that little bugger and still have it today. it was way ahead of its time. the app support on it was so bad. it worked for me because it had what i needed at the time but boy was it useless for other things.
For Super Pong, if you wanted to see if it would work, run the cable from the Pong unit directly into the yellow composite input on the TV, rather than through the RF modulator switchbox. Since the speaker is on the actual Super Pong unit, I suspect that the cable off of it only has composite video, and doesn't need to be converted to RF. The graphics would probably would look a bit better, or at least cleaner, if this works.
I might start checking out Goodwill‘s mainly to look around because in my local one in town when I was there for a job interview, I found a really good condition Bradleygames GTA vice city strategy guide and I got it for a buck.
Man I had one of those TC-1100's and I LOVED it. I liked the keyboard and all but honestly using it as a tablet PC was fantastic. I used it during college for note taking and the handwriting recognition was surprisingly good, while my colleagues used laptops there was something much more natural about scribbling on the tablet and this was well before such form factor was commonplace. XP Tablet Edition was *rough* but it worked well enough that overall I had a positive experience. It was very easy for me to upgrade too and the bevy of ports allowed me to make a neat dock for it. There's no reason to use one now given how much more advanced things are these days but I admire that computer so much.
"Who donates this stuff to goodwill" as a former goodwill employee, most of the good stuff is kids cleaning out granparents house and such, and dont want to deal with sales, so they donate anything that looks good just to get rid of everything
That moment when someone is playing a game from your childhood and calls it really old...queue the Simon and Garfunkel - The Sound of Silence...oh wait that makes me old too 🤣
Remember being a kid. Loosing that switch box. And not being able to play those 70s/80s consoles. (I'm an 90s kid.) But loved the classics as a kid and still do.
I like how Austin is always willing to take apart things and take a look inside them. Cool to see the insides of hardware and how dirty a old xbox can get.
I recently repaired an Xbox one because the hard drive had died and the console wouldn't stay on for more than a few seconds. The Xbox was clean on the outside but when I opened it up to check for damage I found that the entire board was covered in dried caked on milk. 4 hours of cleaning just to find a few blown capacitors. After the repair it works fine and when I told my customer about the milk she wasn't even sure she wanted to give it back to her daughter! Some people treat electronics like crap.
I can't remember the name of it but had a knockoff of the RT1 and really liked it - it was slow as it didn't have enough ram and a slower processor but was ahead of it's time for sure 💯
Those old windows xp tablet computers were mostly used in hospitals and ambulances for patients to be able to sign digital versions of forms. I know this because I was on the patient end a lot growing up (and even now) and recognized that second device shown immediately, lmfao. Apparently a perk of being chronically ill was being able to watch tech evolve on a practical standard, and, honestly, part of what got me into tech in the first place (the second part being my love of gaming since the age of 3, lol).
The HP tablet might have originally bought from the Philippines because of the NTC(National Telecommunications Commission) sticker inside it. NTC only put that sticker for devices that are sold in the Philippines.
I work for a goodwill sorting through donated technology. We get multiple Surface RTs every month. I wish there was more we could do with them than recycle
I bought the original Surface RT tablet. It was a great piece of kit back then. I mostly used it as a laptop for school, and it did do everything I asked it to. Also it was the only tablet capable of running Office. Back then I also had a windows 8 computer and a Windows phone and all 3 of them used to work perfectly in sync of each other. App support wasn't great, but apps weren't really that big yet. Over the years the battery died and there is no way to replace it. Therefore I now only use it as a glorified digital picture frame running a loop of pictures in my gallery.
You should do a video where you buy stuff from a real goodwill. Sometimes you go there and find an iPod dock typewriter combo and sometimes you go there and find a nuclear weapon.
The Surface 2 is still usable in 2023, it just doesn't work well for most things. I converted mine a couple years ago to be a portable media center; it has all the main streaming apps installed and I purchased a mini-hdmi to hdmi cord so it can be plugged directly into a TV rather than trying to cast it. I also added a 512gb microSD so I can load up personal media for when we go on trips where there won't be wifi. The only problem with it is that the keyboard just stopped functioning so now it is just relegated to being a dust cover; I'm not sure if this issue is with the connection port or the keyboard itself.
Wife and I live in Iowa theres goodwills everywhere! I find some of the best tech, collectibles, videogames, dvds, vhs, blu ray all super cheap in great condition! More than half the time the employees have NOO idea what they're sitting on and I buy it up fo next to nothing:) I got a 200$ grogu for 5 bucks, The whole collection of Star Trek collecible plates easily worth over 1k for 10 bucks!
I hate that goodwill does this now. Years ago, I worked less than a block from goodwill. I went multiple times a day. In a span of a year, I had a massive retro video game collection. Consoles, games, you name it. I even had an extremely rare japanese black dreamcast. I had probably 200 dollars in a collection worth thousands. Thats how its supposed to be at a thrift store.
Lol Verizon gave all the market Managers those surface laptops back when they came out. All I really remember was how shitty and slow they were just working with Excel not to mention how much worse it was using iur internal systems
You should update that HP tablet, put a 4GB stick in, a IDE to Sata adapter for a SSD. Also you might be able to upgrade the CPU, Centreno was used for a line of cpu's from PM up to Core2 Duos.... Centrino was more less codename for intel cpu with a intel wifi nic combo. Also you could try win10 or use Andriod OS for X86 or just put ubuntu with Gnome 3 which is tablet friendly. Also the surface you could install andriod on that as well.
I got a ps4 pro for $20, less with the monthly coupon, at my local Goodwill. Thats a pretty solid deal! Works great, quiet, and is overall a solid system!
C'mon Austin, upgrade that little HP !! You can swap in an "ide to SD",or "ide to sata" adapter,and boost it's memory to the max. Also,i would try to do something with it's wireless adapter.
Ngl, back in 2014 when XBOX ONE and the PS4 came out, and you had the new menus... they actually felt so refreshing. PS3 had its XMB (I was an PS3 guy), which is had since it started, and the XBOX360 changing its interface every year or so... what they both had was so refreshing and interesting. Nostalgia, while now they are all too busy and too much. :D Moved to PC in 2012 myself tho.
The Super Pong console knob controllers may be a little rusty, which could explain why the move jittery on-screen. Open up the console, and squirt a little WD-40 into the potentiometers of the knobs.
I would love to see a revisit to this. Goodwill finds is horrid now. First thing on the site is a Wii console with a single useless game(untested). 3200$ discounted in clearance. 3800$ base
As someone who worked for Surface support and had to support the RT I can tell you for a fact that thing is not a piece of history, it's a POS. Those things were awful, they supported basically no apps, if the app store for it went down it was a paperweight. At customer support we couldn't even remote in to help people cause there were no apps for it! Screw that thing!
So... the first computer that Microsoft Sold to consumers was the Surface... nothing attached, but now referred to as the Surface Table. (Or Pixelsense apparently) You personally could have seen one at Disneyland, inside of Innoventions, it was a literal table, with a large 52 point multi touch display, designed for several people to work on at once, and ran at the low price of about $10,000 per unit. And yes, they did in fact actually sell them. edit* to add date... announced in 2007 and actually shipped in May of 2008, and sold through 2013.
That's not a surface rt, it's a surface 2, which also had the arm processor and thus the rt version of windows 8.1. You can tell because it's the wrong color. I know because I bought a non functional one for the power supply and keyboard, which also work with the surface pro and pro 2 as well as the actual surface rt, that came with it. It was only $40 including shipping on ebay.
I was looking for this exact comment. I used to use the original RT for school work and YT and that was black, unlike the grey of the surface 2 RT. I still use it every now and then for the nostalgia.
Just a heads up the surface you unboxed was a surface 2 not the original Microsoft surface RT. Original surface RT came in black only. Surface 2 released a year later came out in silver
I have four surface rt's in the cupboard. All installed with a cut down version of windows 10!! here in the uk i paid £15 each including keyboards. they are pretty useless nowadays but at the ridiculous low price i bought them to fiddle around with 😀
If you want to get something close but similar in design to the surface rt, get a surface pro. I own and use a surface pro 5 as my main laptop, it works great and the form factor is perfect 👍
