Friends,
It’s been real bad news for les ordinateurs anciens around here lately. For one, I purchased a replacement battery pack from a Florida Man and spliced it into the power system of one of the older machines here—a Toshiba T1000 laptop.
Why get this particular machine running again? The concept is brilliant: A PC-compatible laptop that boots almost instantly to MS-DOS 2.11 and runs for nearly six hours on a charge. The keyboard is a delight to type on, the non-backlit LCD screen crisp and reasonably responsive. It’s got a serial port, a parallel port, a 1.44 MB floppy drive and a 2400-baud modem. It’s still a great writing machine and deserves another shot.
After putting the machine back together, I left it on the charger and went to bed.
11:38 PM: “Honey, it smells like plastic burning in the kitchen.”
I shot up out of bed and padded into the kitchen to take in smells like blown 35-year old capacitors. After disconnecting the power adapter, but ever the optimist, I flicked the power switch to see if despite all of the smells, it would still turn on. No lights, no sounds, all the smells. Placing the machine on the granite countertop, I figure that at least I wouldn’t burn down the dining room table if it burst into flames.
1:35PM: Burning smell getting worse. Noticeable from the bedroom.
Laptop is still warm to the touch and rubber feet are stuck to the counter. Move the poor burnt laptop outside into the barbecue. If things go very badly, at least the flames will be contained. She asks me as I walk back in the kitchen, “Hi honey, what are you up to?” “Oh, nothing,” I lied.
I didn’t have time to take the thing apart this morning, so it had to wait until this afternoon. The damage was much worse than I imagined. Bad capacitors weren’t the problem. The real issue was a bad (or incorrectly wired) battery pack. I connected my red wires to the red wires in the battery pack, but the damage sure looks like a dead short that caused a little bit of fire inside the case…
So the motherboard is burnt. The add-on 2400-baud modem is burnt. The battery carrier and harness is burnt.
It’s beginning to look like the machine can’t be fixed!
Aw, c’mon. You know that’s not true.
Your pal,
– bob