IBM Lenovo X61s Faulty Laptop From eBay

I picked this little beauty up on eBay the other week and I think I was the only bidder as not only does it need a jolly good clean, but it was also listed as faulty.

In this short video I will see exactly how 'faulty' it is and if there is anything I can do about fixing it...

£3 Dell Latitude D620 Laptop Testing

I picked this up a while ago but only just gotten around to test it to see if it has any signs of life.

It's a bit grubby but what do you expect for £3?  Initially the seller wanted £5 for the laptop but after I pointed out the 2 missing keys I got a couple of quid knocked off.

Now lets see if it has a Hard Disk Drive and some RAM...

As luck would have it, there's a 60GB SATA Hard Disk Drive in the laptop but no RAM, at least no RAM installed in the socket on the bottom of the laptop/motherboard but there should also be a slot for a SO-DIMM under the keyboard so hopefully there is some RAM installed there else when I try and power her up it wont work!

Before I try and power her up, I've just noticed that the bezel that covers the hinges and top of the keyboard is not seated correctly, so I wonder if someone has tried to fix the keyboard or something and not put it back on properly?

On removing the bezel, all seemed fine but I did notice that there is a connector not connected to anything!  As you can see from the photo on the right there is a space for something for the connector to connect to but there is nothing there - if you know what it's for then please let me know in the comments below.

Now to connect up my universal power adapter and see if she turns on...

We have life!

A free Disc!!

Okay, so it doesn't have the original Operating System on it (Windows XP Professional) but it does has Linux on it showing that it does indeed work.

All I need to do now is see if I have a spare keyboard in my laptop keyboards box and get Windows XP installed on it...

New Home - New Grotto! (Coming Soon)...

It's been a bit of a weird year the last 12 months with the Covid19 Coronavirus causing many of us to go in to periodic isolation.  Despite these shenanigans I have managed to do one thing - I've moved house!

I now have a dedicated room that has now become the new Retro Computing Grotto.  I've barely moved boxes in (let alone unbox and sort things out) so the short YouTube video below shows you the Grottos current state and is a sign of things to come...

Symantec Norton Ghost Boot Disk Blank DOS Box Screen Ghost Wont Run

Having problems getting Symantec/Norton Ghost?  If all you are getting is a command prompt within Windows PE (as shown below) then check the amount of RAM you have!  In the example below the laptop only has 256MB of RAM by upgrading to 512MB (or more) Ghost then loaded OK.

HP/Compaq Laptops - Spares and Repairs

Earlier on today I took a quick look through all the 'Car Boot Sale' laptops that I've got and I've found another 7 nx9000 series HP/Compaq laptops so I now have 9 in total that I need to fix/repair/refurbish!

First things first, I need to see what Spares and Repairs I might have as a few of these laptops have missing HDD Caddys and covers for the RAM etc so time to rummage through my Spares and Repairs box for HP/Compaq laptops...

Way before the Covid19 Pandemic came to light I picked up a job-lot of laptops from a car boot sale and I'm slowly starting to refurbish them!

In this YouTube video I will show you how I use my 8 Steps To Refurbishment to get the laptop back up and running!