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Toshiba Portégé subnote

Bunsen

Bunsen

Admin-Witchfinder-General
68040
Happy birthday to me!

A friend just handed me a Toshiba Portégé 3110CT subnotebook, bag, external floppy and port replicator. No power supply and no internal optical (there's no room for one).

I'm still searching the specs, but it appears to be a PII Mobile 300MHz with 64 (shipped) to 192 MB of RAM. It's tiny - about the same footprint as a Duo, a little thinner. Very sleek and shiny magnesium and light grey plastic shell. 10.4" 800x600 TFT, USB, Cardbus, modem, and a few doodads and whatsamajiggers I haven't identified yet

The power supply issue looks like a no-brainer - the port is identical to a two-pin motherboard jumper block /*/. And at 15V, I'm going to try and boot it in my car (closer to 14V in reality than the nominal 12V), stick Debian on it and run it as a nav/MP3 device.

Short review

Review

 
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Meh. Sure I can handle it for occasional use, and a USB mouse for the rest of the time. /edit/ It looks as though there's room for a USB trackpad to be grafted into the plastics in front of the keyboard. I might go the whole hog and drop a small Wacom in there.

This thing might go through a bit of Dremel hell before it goes into regular use /cue evil cackling

 
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Nice score B! :p

From that era, old Toshiba notebooks are the only ones still worth using. Other brands from a comparable time are usually poorly designed, hobbled in some way (eg. rubbish onboard graphics), or have failed - or nigh on impossible to take apart!

My girlfriend's father uses a Toshiba Satellite PII-400 and it's built like a tank, great screen and lets him use WinXP, Outlook Express and his iPod nano quite happily (I'd give him a Mac notebook but he will resist).

One of my only PCs is a mint condition Toshiba Libretto 50CT, Pentium 75 @ 133Mhz, 32MB/10GB HD. There was a seller on eBay recently who had a handful of new 16MB sticks which went for up to $60! I waited and waited until the Libretto legion obtained theirs, and picked mine up for about $20. Then I sold the existing 8MB stick I had for $35! :D Also recently picked up a port replicator for $0.99, it's tiny and lets you plug in an external display/mouse/printer without too much fuss.

JB

 
Yes, the port replicator on this thing is nifty as all hell. And suitably tiny - about the size of a king-size Cherry Ripe.

Somewhere around here I've got an earlier P100 to P166 Satellite. CPU speed on that never really encouraged me to do much towards getting it working, but a Mobile P300 is another story :D

Apparently my friend's friend had three being surplused from work (/edit/ an upscale girl's private school with a lifetime IT service contract, so you know it's been well maintained), with only one charger between them - at least that was enough to test them all. So I've been assured that this boots. And she's offered to pony up for a replacement battery if it needs one.

/*/ on closer inspection, the power socket is more like the two-pin connectors used on RC car battery packs. A two pin jumper would fit, but the socket is keyed for polarity. Which provides me an easy and cheap get-out on replacing or re-celling the LiPo pack :D

I'm orf to the markets in search of RAM &c

All around, I say w00t!

 
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Nice score. One of my clients at work has one of those, only it came with a P3/450. Pretty speedy little machine. (relatively speaking)

I've got a ton of old PC notebooks from that era, all Gateways. Most of them are absolute shite (Solo 9100? damn thing is like 15 pounds!) But my favourite is the Solo 5150... great machine, light, and almost indestructible.

 
Just adding some links mostly for my own benefit, on the road to reviving this project.

Bootdisk (archive)

Debian GNU/Linux on a Toshiba Portégé 3110CT

RAM

Portégé CT3110 InfoDump: user/service manuals, config, Debian Linux, Win2k, boot password bypass, specs ...

Hardware
* Intel Mobile Pentium II 300MHz CPU (1.6v)

* 64Mb 60ns SDRAM onboard (expandable to 192Mb using 140*-pin microDIMM)

* 10.4" TFT screen (running at 800x600)

* 2Mb Trident Cyber 9525 64 bit video card

* 6.4Gb 2.5" UDMA3 hard disk

* 2x USB v1.0 ports (one on notebook, one on port replicator)

* 32 bit Cardbus Type I/II PC Card slot

* ESS (SoundBlaster Pro compatible) 16 bit stereo sound card

* Onboard K56flex modem

* 4Mbps/115Kbps IrDA 1.1 port

* 10/100 NIC (on port replicator)

* 66MHz PCI bus v2.1

* Port replicator (10/100 NIC, serial, parallel, video, USB, PS/2, audio, power)

* 30 watt external power brick

* Weight 3.1lbs/1.32kg with battery

* Size 10.1 x 8.6 x 0.8" / 257 x 218 x 20.3mm
Click to expand...
* 144 pin?

CT3110.jpg.baccf4415af8d75ade1f3960feaa4b11.jpg


 
From that era, old Toshiba notebooks are the only ones still worth using. Other brands from a comparable time are usually poorly designed, hobbled in some way (eg. rubbish onboard graphics), or have failed - or nigh on impossible to take apart!
Click to expand...
Personally, I'd say that a comparable era ThinkPad (600?) is still a decent system. I used to have a 600E that ran Xubuntu nicely until I loaned it to the neighbor. What is the comparable era Mac? An early Wallstreet?

I disagree, though, on the easiness to take apart. Try finding disassembly instructions for any Toshiba. I think the only company worse is Acer.

John

 
you can find acer service manuals all over the net, and acer also made the TI and Compaqs from the Pentium mmx era to the amd k6/2 end of line (for that model)

when I had my TI I had a entire chip listing, system flow chart and schematics + detailed description of how everything in that notebook worked on a maybe 10 second google search

 
I gave away a similar machine, a Portege 320CT, a few years ago. That model had a 266Mhz Pentium MMX CPU, 96MB of RAM and the oldest WSVGA (1024x600) LCD I've ever seen. It was quite tiny, close to a modern Netbook in overall dimensions but about a pound heavier.

Pros: I'm one of those weirdos that actually like the pointer stick.

Cons: Even a few years ago it was getting pretty borderline trying to fit "modern" software onto a machine that small. You're lucky you have twice as much RAM, but the 800x600 screen is likely to get on your nerves. (I'm sort of curious why they discontinued the widescreen on the later PII models.) If you go with Linux try XFCE... GNOME or KDE is sheer suicide. I personally also thought the build quality was pretty ***p. I'll admit the unit I had had been "ridden hard and put away wet" by the exec that used it before it ended up in my paws, so your mileage may vary. Among other things it had a "squeeze right here or wiggle the hinge if the screen starts spazzing out" problem, and overall I just thought it felt a little... plastic-y and tacky. (Like every other Toshiba of that vintage. I don't really get it, actually... the machines were heavy and seemed to have reasonably solid chassis, but the outer shells were just "bleah". And what the heck was with that weird pinky-blue-beige-??? color they used?) In my opinion you could have easily wielded a Thinkpad 600 as a hammer and used it to completely demolish the Portege without damaging the Thinkpad in the slightest. :^b

I guess the person I gave it to liked it. It stands out in my memory as the very last machine I ever ran Slackware on.

 
I am intrigued by the form factor and the vintage to the point where I am considering picking one up. Unfortunately, for the price of getting a system, a battery, and an AC adapter (all separate) I could probably get a Pismo.

 
DOS and Fusion is the current plan - retro hackint0sh
Click to expand...
Personally I'd do minimal Linux+BasiliskII if that's your plan. Fusion is inferior to BasiliskII by any measure I can possibly think of. (Unless "runs on DOS" is your criteria. But if you want DOS install dosemu. It'll run positively great on that hardware.)

Heck, even Sheepshaver might almost be "usable". If your standards are really low. (Extrapolating from my 2 Ghz Core Duo, which Speedometer 4 thinks is 10 times as fast as a PowerMac 6100, well... if a Core Duo is 10 times as fast as a 300Mhz PII it might be close to a tie.)

 
Personally I'd do minimal Linux+BasiliskII if that's your plan. Fusion is inferior to BasiliskII by any measure I can possibly think of.
Click to expand...
Or split the difference and go Win9x+BasiliskII. That's actually my personal favorite if only because I can get networking working. (OTOH, I can't seem to find a version of the SheepNet driver that builds with recent Linux kernels.)

John

 
I've had no problem at all with networking Sheepshaver *or* BasiliskII on recent linux-i... but I 've always used either the slirp or tun drivers, not sheepnet. I guess the sheepnet driver is the "easy" way to get straight Appletalk working but the only file servers I've ever connected to supported Appletalk-over-IP (IE, NetaTalk), which any driver works fine with.

 
'Gratz on a killer sub-notebook.

I've wanted a Protege for years. What I would use it for doesn't really matter, I just want one.

 
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