I'm waiting on 8-bit guy for his response but then again,he dont respond to all videos but this is a texas instruments and since hes in texas, I think he'll know more about this machine
I worked at Texas Instruments in the early to mid 90's. They made laptop computers in a small town in Central Texas. The TravelMate brand was fully TI designed and built by TI. By 1995 TI decided to bring in some less expensive models built by Taiwanese manufacturers. The Extensa 550CD was one of those systems and it was built by FIC. I was on the team that brought those in. I got to spend a couple of months at the FIC factory outside of Taipei doing what was called "factory authorization inspections" which was quality inspections on the first production run of the Extensa models. TI also had another Extensa model that was produced by Acer. Clint, if you remove the keyboard you will see the the CPU is a desktop Pentium in a socket. We had a couple of issues with the Extensa 550CD. The sled holding the HDD had a little wiggle room and the HDD would disconnect from the connector board. We had to add a spacer to the front of the tray to keep it tight against the connector board. The bigger issue was that the battery would pop out. We had a lawsuit from an incident in an airplane where the laptop owner was putting the laptop into the overhead luggage compartment and the battery dropped out and into a dude's crotch and did some damage. Fun times.
I guess that notebook with that configuration makes for a good DOS machine. Pentium 1, Adlib... if it has a VGA port it would be quite perfect for that.
This blerb and the screen shown here taught me WHY there is an option to make mouse pointer leave trails - before I thought about that option as a random appearance thing.
Screens like this remind me again of how thankful I am that active matrix finally became the norm. You paid a good $400+ premium for them back in the day, but the difference was night and day - almost literally.
$2,799 for this bad boy without the extra RAM, from what I can find. You could also get it with an active matrix display for an additional $800. Unbelievable how expensive laptops used to be if you also consider inflation.
That's the thing that blows my mind. Laptops in the 90's were very expensive machines, I have a thinkpad 760XL, I don't remember it's price when new, but it was way above $2.500. And I recently won a bid for a Thinkpad 770X from a German guy, I'm still waiting for arrive (Coronavirus shipping issues to Colombia, my home country) That beast cost like $4500 in 1998. 14" TFT, Pentium II and DVD drive, it was the top of the class back then.
I have a couple of old Toshiba Satellite laptops. One of them, my parents bought new in 1998. It has a 486 DX4-100 processor. It cost around $1800 new, probably on clearance. I also have the same model with a Pentium 120 MMX and I think that one was just shy of $3k originally.
This is taking me back to high school, my dad had gotten a really, really out of date laptop for 'cheap' (IDK what he paid for it, but he said 'cheap'). How out of date? It ran windows 3.11 and I graduated in 2004. It was a glorified word doc maker. I confused teachers when handing in reports that were printed from our DOT, MATRIX, PRINTER. Some made fun of the PCs in the library for being bad but they were LIGHT YEARS ahead of our family PC. Our PC before that? . . . DOS.
My high school's computer lab had a fleet of IBM PCs. As in 5150s. This was the early 90s. Eventually they were upgraded to 386s and 486s, and we all played Wolfenstein/Doom on those.
Well, if you only needed to type simple documents without much fancy-schmancy stuff, it probably got the job done just fine? Reminds me of that Polish guy running his car repair shop and still using his old Commodore 64, for which he himself had programmed software he needed, like some tire balancing program for instance.
My grandfather has an Extensa 565 that he still uses. Its only job is to automate opening/closing of his curtains. The screen is so faded he has to use an external monitor.
It doesn't seem like anyone else is going to bring this up, so I will. That flash animation was actually done by John K., of Ren a Stimpy fame. He made a lot of Flash back in the day.
IIRC he contributed quite a bit of work to Sugarqube, which was an early to mid-2000s e-card website. Wayback Machine says they went dark in late 2007 and apparently were absorbed by American Greetings - assumedly without John K.
"I don't know what this little water faucet icon is that showed up right there..." Texas Instrument's short lived attempt at merging laptops with tamagotchi. (not really)
I've a feeling that the backup battery is leaking, hence the corrosion in the PC Card slots, so I recommend you try to get it apart and remove it! Hopefully it can run without that backup battery. (Edit: I think there may be leaking capacitors that are causing the audio output to be quiet) 5:45 Power management mode! Compaq used the same icon back then.
A leaky CMOS/BIOS battery is what killed the GPU on the one I picked up (Had the Toshiba branded varient, can't remember the video-chip, but it were BGA and failing due to battery leakage) Yep, I tried replacing the VRAM and trace testing, defo the GPU.
@@alhuno1 that's why I love my G3 15. Yeah it's a lower end system build wise, but she games with the best of them and stays cool because the internals were designed properly.
I had this exact model laptop when I was in high school (my mother worked for Texas Instruments and purchased the laptop at cost), it was an absolute tank. An excellent DOS machine but very mundane and slow as a windows pc. I played Doom and Doom II on it constantly, and yeah, that screen was absolutely horrible. Thanks for the nostalgia trip back to the 90s. I'd love to see you upgrade it to the max, if I remember correctly the cpu is socketed and can be replaced with a desktop pentium 133Mhz.
When Windows 95 first came out there were sometimes issues where the setup wallpaper would get "stuck" during setup and be carried over to the install once it was completed.
Man...I remember these. When my department, back in '98, was depreciating old equipment to give away to employees, one of these was turned in by the hardware engineering dept. so they could upgrade to a shiny new Compaq. Anyway, I'd made everything else ready for the giveaway, and this was one of the few stragglers. I could NOT get the Ti video or sound drivers to work. They'd install and let me put the display at 8 or 16 bit color (it's been a while, don't recall) and play audio but as soon as I rebooted the laptop, it would default back to the previous settings, and from there on it wouldn't acknowledge the changes. Ended up going to the recycle bin.
That's a laptop you can take into the wilderness, beat a bear to death with it and then work on your business presentation afterwards without any issues.
Man, that Valentines Dance exe makes me miss the early Internet. We used to send those things around all the time at school, heh. The IT guy wrote a script to get rid of sheep.exe which he called mintsauce. xD
that valentine's day animation brings back memories.. as SOON as I saw the "Enter name" screen I knew what it was... trust me Clint, get it going on the woodgrain and witness it in all it's glory, it's awful.
With the right adapters and some soldering, you could fit a Raspberry Pi in there and do just that. I've seen a few examples of older Thinkpads that were pulled from tech recycling places and rebuilt that way.
I'd think some of the challenge would be getting a modern screen of the right size. The refresh rate on whatever it has as stock is somewhat horrid. Would be fun if done well and kept to the form factor.
10:00 OOH LOL haha didn't expect to see this thing in the laptop hahaha!! Greeting cards was popular back in the 90s/2000's when I was a kid I saw my mom watching that when she put her name on the guy's a$ (yet didn't seen that on video because its way too laggy, 75Mhz xD) Sadly the website is closed since the 2000 times, but I still have those files and they can still be retrieved on web.archive.org xD
I just picked up a mint Toshiba 430cdt P120 machine. Has a fresh restore from 2004 with only one user created document. Screen is really nice on it too. Battery even still holds a charge. I like that the PSU is internal.
This is the laptop I had in highschool and college. I loved it so much, and I miss the heck out of it. if any manufacturer can make something like this again, I would buy it immediately.
That fan is dry for sure & making some noise, cleaning it out with some degreaser & sewing machine oil afterwards. That oil is a bit on the thicker side but should have it work nicely my r9 280's fans have been working great daily for 1.5 years now since i added some sewing machine oil into them after they started making similar grindy bad noises.
5:44 The water faucet has to with the power management settings... The more drips appear the more power/battery power the laptop is using. That indicator was pretty common on lower end laptops of the day..
Would be interesting to see it running on an external monitor, keyboard, mouse, and especially speakers :) It was always cool to see how close some of these could perform desktop replacement duties.
Should've tried Quake. I had a P-60 in the days, actually had graphics card that ran it as fast as a typical P-90. 320x240, lowest fps was 10, high about 40s. It almost never "Did the Turtle". (Those who played the game in the day would know what that means.)
This machine seems very unhappy to have been brought back from the dead. It only desires to continue its eternal slumber. It's not screaming "kill me", but it is quietly groaning "no... must.. sleep... "
oh man, please tell me you saved that flash animation lmfao I kinda miss those things, they were a neat goofy late-90s-early-00s thing I never really got to experience, they weren't much of a thing by the time I actually got online in late 2003.
Cool, I have a slightly newer 650CD that I bought for 30 bucks in pristine condition, desktop pentium 133, with both the swappable cd and floppy drives. Wouldn't boot at all with the dead cmos battery but fired right up once replaced. Had the original install apparently, with surprisingly few files and programs installed... The original receipt was there, really seems like the guy bought that $4400 machine on 6.6.97 and barely used it ever. The screen is a passive matrix as well, but not as bad as yours it seems. I threw 2x64MB RAM sticks in addition to the built in 16MB and a CF. I tried installing W98 but for the life of me can't get the PCMCIA slots to work with it, so 95 it is so I can at least throw a network card and card reader at it.
I used this exact model to take notes in college starting in 2003. Better laptops were available, but this one was free. The hinge was falling apart, the battery didn't work, and it was super slow. I ran DOS 6.22 on it and a simple text editor since all I needed to do was type notes. I kinda wish I still had it so I could follow along at home.
I have a Fujitsu Lifebook 435dx with a similar screen. The laptop can run Doom, but the screen can NOT... Still, with an external monitor, it's a nice 133 Pentium computer.
I restored a COMPAQ presario, got an old FX5600 Nvidia Card that still works, Pegatron and Maxtor video cards, a ZIP100, among other things, they all work, even a brick of Hard Disk of 4GB.
This reminds me heavily of my Toshiba Satellite T2130CS. No sound of course, and a 486DX4-75, but it has the same DSTN screen, 24MB of RAM and 500MB hard drive -- I upgraded the hard drive in mine to a 2GB SD adapter.
Wow, I sure hate passive-matrix LCDs. I had something like this system but a Pentium 120 circa 2000, probably built around 1995. It was a Toshiba, had a green 'nub' like the red ThinkPad ones instead of a touchpad. Two gigantic curved buttons where a touchpad would go, one for left click and a smaller one for right-click below it. Made for an OK typewriter but attempting to do anything with motion just turned it into a smear. You were also CONSTANTLY adjusting the contrast slider to make stuff legible.
I have a Maxdata Artist "Oxford C" Pentium 120 laptop that looks *suspiciously* similar, except for the little indicator display and the dock connector - certainly from the same OEM manufacturer. There is a NON-rechargeable lithium battery soldered in for the BIOS settings, that apparently lasted about 15-20 years. When it failed, the display defaulted to 0% brightness and 0% contrast and I thought the whole machine was broken. But the battery can be replaced (after a full disassembly) for a couple bucks, and now it's fully working again, except the main NiMH battery pack of course, which was already worn out when I bought it used around 2005. The plastic has become very brittle by now though, and it wasn't a particularly pretty machine to start with.
This laptop is VERY similar to my NEC Versa 2400 from 1996. Same ports on the back, same water faucet indicator, came crappy display, same bios. it even has the same power supply, which split apart just like yours, so I had to tape it back together. It does have a slightly different design though.
Despite the problems I had with a later version of this laptop, the 575CD, I had some fun times on it back in the day. Ran Windows 95, Dos 6.22 with Windows 3.1, an old Slackware Linux version, OS/2 Warp 3 Red Spine, and Minix. When I was on AOL, I ended up having some serious fun with an idiot that was trying to get peoples user names and passwords and later credit card info. The idiot had made an AOL look alike website and had it hosted on geocities. I saw the discrepancy in the url bar and immediately called up the html source code. They were having the info entered into the site forms emailed to a juno email account. After the idiot got mad at me for discovering his email address, I decided to use his site to blow up his email inbox with useless crap a couple of different times. After the second time of me doing that, the idiot took his site down.😁
I used to work in a PC Superstore that sold these. Not a proper TI machine - those were the Travelmate range - Acer had bought the brand recently and this was an OEM rebadge of some sort.. The internal drive bay would take either the 3.5" drive or an included CD-ROM drive. The funky connector on the back that you suggested was for a dock would plug into an external caddy that you could slot the 3.5" drive in if you needed to use both. CD-ROM didn't work externally. So yeah, the CD-ROM and the floppy caddy appear to be missing.
That's quite generic old laptop. I got myself Toshiba Satellite 470 CDT with 192megs of ram. It's imo the best/ideal retro laptop. It's super easy to use as hdd is accessible from the side and change cf cards to transfer data. Pentium, good amount of ram, svga active matrix, excellent sound blaster compatibility and one USB port to easily use modern mouse. Not going to sell that machine never :)
eeek! don't play that game on this machine!!! It hurts my eyes!!! I hate these old LCDs. lol I remember when I got my first laptop in 2000, I was scrutinizing every detail on every laptop screen. I quickly determined that TFT was the best. I knew there were 2 or 3 others and I ranked them all. I actually gave up 3d acceleration just to have TFT since price was capped at $1000.
Many moons ago used a Clevo-rebadged laptop of possibly a couple years later (it had one USB port). Also had an ESS audio chip. Odd thing is it had wavetable on port 330 as well. Not documented anywhere. But even the win95 install it came with was set to use the FM synth by default. Only found by accident. If esscfg and essvol are on the HDD somewhere, one configures the ESS chip for pure DOS use, the other allows setting the volume. Became less and less reliable before randomly shutting down, and then the hinges crumbled, and that was that.
On many 90's era laptops, "CD" and "CS" in the model tended to mean that the laptop had a color passive matrix (DSTN) display. At least a few manufacturer's, like Apple and Toshiba, followed this, but there was certainly no standard and just like cars the "trim lines" are pretty much made up.
Do you ever feel like these videos make you not want to do the real ones on LGR because already posted these? I'd love to see a lot of the things you do on here over on LGR with a bit more depth. Either this channel is for blerbs or you just want another subscriber base with separate income and less work because of the rough format.
I had a Fujitsu lifebook with a similar lcd display but it had cdrom drive and floppy drive allso a Intel Pentium MMX i can't remember the speed 166mhz to 233mhz range, try som spekers on the pc maby that will tell if somthing is bad inside the pc :/
I have a laptop that looks identical, except for the color. I believe it also mentions FCI somewhere, but its name in big letters is Trogon. It originally was with Windows 95, but at some point I upgraded to Windows 98. In my collection of computers, it is the only one that still plays an old CD that contains bird songs, apparently recorded in either 12- or16-bit format. All my newer computers reject that format.
I know you said there isn't anything notable about this laptop, so heres a neat idea for the hell of it... How much can you upgrade this machine? You could do an SD card reader for the hard drive, and I wonder what else? Could you upgrade the screen for it? Try to find something on ebay, fit it in, and do whatever soldering you may have to do. I know it would be totally pointless, but I'd love to see you challenge yourself with a small budget. Oh, may hydro dip it with some cheesy 90s pattern?
The TI Extensa had some design flaws. The most serious of them was the lack of any kind of a decent cooling system. The cooling was nothing more than some vents on the bottom and back of the laptop and a very small fan imbedded in a cpu heat sink. The heat sink fan was glued to the processor so if it went out, there was no way to replace it. The heat sink fan wasn't anything you could find in stores any way. The processor is located right under the keyboard. It basically just blows the heat coming off of the processor into the air inside the laptop. There was no way for the fan to vent the heat out of the laptop at all. The result was that the case would get very hot. I recommend using this laptop on one of those cooling pads to provide some better cooling to this laptop. Also using it in a room that doesn't get warmer than 68 degrees F might be a good idea as well. Otherwise the case will eventually disintergrate from the heat. The batteries were NiMH cells. The temperature that these laptops got up to tended to kill the battery prematurely. The cd-rom module came as one of two brands. One was better than the other one. The not so good cd-rom had a tendency to wear out in a short time. There were some dos drivers for the cd-roms. So it was possible to use the cd-rom in dos mode if you had the dos drivers. The ram for this laptop comes with 8 MB soldered to the mother board. You could get two 16 MB ram sticks to max the ram out to 40 MB. Because of the modular design for the floppy, cd-rom, extra battery bay, you couldn't use the floppy drive and the cd-rom drive at the same time. I used a cd-rom emulator program to get around that problem and kept iso images around to allow me to use certain software that required the cd be in the cd-rom drive while running while using the floppy drive.
Yeah, that was an awful display. Maybe you could swap the panel for a better one, but I dunno if it's worth it. It seems like a rather average, old, not-very-good machine. But it works. Could empty the battery pack to reduce the weight.
The water faucet shows how fast it is currently draining the battery (or overall power consumption) - the same system was used on Panasonic Toughbook CF-62.
Holy shit this was the first laptop I bought at a flea market in ~2005. Was coffee damaged! Held onto it for years but never tried to boot it from a 100 percent match power supply. Never thought i'd be watching a video on the same one haha
OK, never understood mouse trails, but never had such a bad monitor either, even on passive matrix laptops. I guess what I used was more recent, bundled with Win2K IIRC.
Oh. That's what the mouse trails are for.. I always thought they were a fun gimmick. Well, the last time i even thought about them was when i was a kid, so, idunno. I'm just about old enough to maybe have seen those screens when they were used, but my family was poorish so we didn't have computers until a bit later. And the school had a relativelyheywait that's only flat screen thing isn't it? All the screens i used when kid were crt.
Looks like the inverter for the CCFL backlight (or the backlight itself) might be on its last legs, with how the brightness keeps fluctuating. It might even get brighter with a new part! Not sure where you might even begin to find one, unless it's an outsourced part that other manufacturers also used.
I had this exact notebook but not TI Extensa, it had another brand. I can tell a few thing about it. The HDD bay is not locked you can pull it out. If you remove the FDD you can open that little thing right from the floppy drive and put in a CD drive or a second battery.
You can get new panels for these things which are A LOT better - and it's actually not a bad little machine for playing old games on... if you can manage to fix the battery (Put in new cells cause there is no way to fix them other than refubing them :-D)
I know the later models with the MMX cpu is the same as the compaq laptops of the day and both were acer models (I had one of those and slapped a K6/2 in it and let it ride on the 66mhz fsb so it was a 500mhz running at like 466)
I used to do technology displays for the Royal National Institute for the Blind and we would demonstrate screen magnification and large print software. Sometimes I'd have a van full of kit and we'd have to unload the laptops first and leave them near a heater before setting them up otherwise the screen contrast was zero. Even the early TFT screens weren't much better if they'd been left overnight in a cold van.
Weird, the shell and flaps seem almost identical to my NEC Versa 4000 laptop. EDIT: Oh man, it even has the water faucet LCD icon to show it's charging -- I have a feeling the exact same factory made this laptop and the NEC Versa 4000 series. They are uncannily similar.
Bought an Extensa E610CDT (says Acer on the sticker)/Extensa-Scholar ESS3 on eBay and being fed up with FedEx delaying my package... AGAIN! Also, the water faucet is basically like the turbo. When you press Fn-FX (1-12) that has the water faucet icon on the F1-F12 key, it deturbos the laptop and lowers the screen brightness (power management, according to another comment I saw), making it run as a 486 variant or something thereof. My Toshiba Satellite Pro 410CDT has that and the PC LED turns amber.
