The coolest thing I've bought at a flea market.

[The Apprentice]

I just bought an old IBM Thinkpad from te flea market for $30.00. It has a 1.0G harddrive and 32M of ram, and uses a Pentium 1 processor! I managed to get my old wireless G card working on it, so I'm typing this post on it. I love it! It's like a tank, it's like 3 and a half inches thick. It uses its original battery, which still holds its charge.

Anyone here use an ancient laptop? This one was made in 1997.

[racketboy]

I'm a huge Thinkpad fan. What model is it?
It's probably a bit older than the one I stopped using last year.
Since my laptops are my secondary machine, I'm always using older ones to save money.

[The Apprentice]

It's a 380, and looks like this:

I used to have an old 360CSE from 1994. I never could get it to work.

[Hatta]

Very nice score, should make a nice little terminal for use on the couch, maybe even emulate some NES on the road. What are you running on it?

[megadethdrumfire]

I got a sega game gear new for 20 bucks.. it is the blue one that comes with world series baseball, huge travel case and an AC adaptor..

[racketboy]

My very first Thinkpad was very similar to that -- I think it was in the same family.
Should run Windows 98 quite well.

And yes, those were absolute tanks.
My 600X that I still have put replaced it an excellent upgrade from that.
It has a 500Mhz PII and is still quite sturdy while loosing some weight and has possibly the very best laptop keyboard ever.

[bobbynewmarkiii]

I have a Toshiba 3110CT that looks like this (...er, can't get the image posting to work)

anyway, it's quite small and totally not a tank, i've already replaced the LCD screen once, but I use it for MIDI music applications (Band in a Box and Sibelius). It's 300 mhz, 128mb ram 6 Gig HDD (OH YEAH!), and used to run system shock perfectly until i upgraded to windows 98, now it still runs sshock, but not full screen.

I've been a bit concerned about connecting it to the world wide web for security reasons, but it has a PCMCIA and ethernet connection. Are you guys using windows 98 to surf the web? if so what's it like? any problems? and what (if any?!) antivirus are you using that still works on 98?

Cheers

[The Apprentice]

Well, I just embarrassed myself! I had this computer for less than half an hour before I totally destroyed my registry files! I'm using Windows 98, and I'm so used to using Windows XP on my desktop that I installed my wireless card drivers incorrectly. I had to reinstall windows and start all over, but this time I did it right, now it gets on the internet, recognizes all the other computers in the network, and can print to the living room printer wirelessly.

To answer some of the questions on Windows 98: It is exactly like using XP except everything takes longer to do. Win98- Run CD, Install, Restart computer, Insert hardware, Install, run internet. WinXP- Insert hardware, Run CD, Install, run internet. It's a little tedious, but it runs very solid and is easy to use once you sort out your hardware.

[Zer]

Yep, those things are tanks. The only sturdier laptop that comes to mind is a brand called Toughbook or something like that, if I remember correctly it's not uncommon for police departments to put those in patrol cars since they can take a beating (all aluminum casing I think). I've had a few of those and it'd be hard to physically damage them accidently, I dropped mine a lot and it never cracked. Not many consumer laptops even come close to the durability of most IBM laptops...

[racketboy]

Windows 98 is a great little OS as long as you're not planning on keeping it running 24/7
They are also more challenging to maintain.
A few years ago I worked briefly as a designer and IT type person for a REMAX office where almost all of their machines were still running 98. Up until then I forgot how often it needed to be rebooted