Does anyone have, for free or very cheap, a 486 laptop computer with at least
8MB RAM and a working internal keyboard and monitor (no color needed), for
a younger grexer who is running linux on one we gave him with a broken
keyboard.  He says he is not concerned about the floppy drive, but it is sort
of a nuisance to carry around a keyboard.  He does not want to do X.

29 responses total.

internal keyboard?  Is he looking for a laptop?

Yes, a 486 laptop in which the keyboard still works, also the monitor, but
the floppy drive can be dead since we made him a serial transfer cable.
See the item heading 'Working 486 laptop'.

ah.  i just read the text, which makes no mention of laptopness.

You can make a serial transfer cable from the tails of two serial mice, but
for a nullmodem cable you need more wires connected than are found in a mouse
(which I think is only 4).  He eventually got a parport zip drive working for
file transfer, which is faster.  A laptop computer is handy for transferring
larger files than 1.44MB between distant locations (farther apart than two
mice tails).  

I find a USB keychain drive to be both faster and more compact than
using an old laptop to transfer files.  (Probably not cheaper, though.)

re #5
Do they make devices to do quick copies from one cruzermini to another? 
That's my only problem is that they're easy to lose yet most folks rarely back
them up due to the inconvenience.

What is a cruzermini?
A USB keychain drive requires that you also have a USB port.  The parport zip
drive does not, and it was $10.  The serial transfer cable does not need a
USB port either and it was free.

Apparently nobody has an unwanted 486 laptop with or without working floppy
drive.  He will manage with the one we gave him for a while longer.

Re resp:6: Not that I know of.  I back them up to my hard disk.

re #7
CruzerMini is the original USB keychain drive made by SanDisk.

Does it have to have a floppy?  I have some kind of pentium laptop that
I was just going to toss, but it has only a CD.

re #10
What kind of laptop? I might have a floppy for it.

It specificially does NOT need to have a floppy drive, please pass it along.
You can do file transfers via serial or parallel cable.  No floppy drive is
a big improvement over dead internal keyboard.  We have had laptop computers
before that were designed not to have a floppy drive at all (286) and one with
a plug-in external floppy drive, and one where you have a choice of floppy
drive or CD-ROM drive, and with the right connectors also external floppy
drive.  

I'm afraid on re-examination that the hinges on the display are broken
so that the display flops down with no support at all.  I'm not sure
when that happened, but it would be almost impossible to use this way. 
Still you are welcome to it for parts or whatever.  If you would like to
have it, where should I bring it?

I bet Jim can fix the hinges - he is good at mechanical fixes.  Are you in
Ann Arbor?  Can you leave it at 512 Felch St. (just off Spring which is off
Miller) on the unlocked front porch?  I presume this computer has a hard drive
or at least the caddy for it, unlike the last one given to us (to recycle).
Thanks!  Can we fix anything else for you when you stop by?

I started it up to make sure its mostly ok.

Pentium 133
16 MB RAM
CD-ROM
Touchpad
The battery is not functional.
Power cord.

It pauses for a while at startup, but it does boot RedHat Linux 7.0.  I
cleared the root password so you'll want to set one as soon as you get
it (if you don't reload the system).

I can bring it by.  Is it possible to get there by car during Art Fair?

Art Fair parking extends to my street, which proves it is possible to get here
by car.  You may prefer to leave it at Jim's house, on the far westside,
instead of near downtown.  1730 Charlton Ave, front porch, inside the red
metal box on the right side.  Between Liberty and Jackson, not far from the
fork on Huron to Jackson/Dexter.  This will be a major upgrade from the 486,
which has 12MB RAM and no CD-ROM.  In fact, it is even faster than the Pentium
laptop another kind grexer gave me (which does have a working floppy drive).
It will be much appreciated.  

Dropped by 512 last night.  There seemed to be no one home.  I left it
on the front porch.  I hope you can make some use of it.

Thanks.  There is never anyone home there because the house is under
construction (since 1986) but it is a good enclosed dropoff point.  We will
pick it up shortly on the way to or from the farmers' market and Jim can
investigate it during my piano lesson so he won't get bored.  It should, in
theory, be no harder to repair than the nice folding chair that I picked up
with a cracked armrest, and is much more portable by bike.  

That was clever of you to figure out my 512 address.  You are welcome to a
quick tour of the place - just let us know when to meet you there.  Also to
a repair of anything electrical, and an attempted repair of something
electronic.  Or a bike.

Jim is trying to figure out some way to make the hinges sort-of work this
week, possibly with a stiffener, or possibly by disabling them and leaning
the monitor against a book or ones knees.  Probably not disabling because then
it could accidentally slam shut.

Arthurp - you left a 10MBit (10baseT) linksys ethernet card in the PCMCIA slot
that is missing a dongle - do you have that dongle?  We would love to get the
card working because we don't have any PCMCIA ethernet cards, and the
replacement dongle is $19 plus shipping (or $34 elsewhere for something that
works with D-Link or Netgear too).  I will check Kiwanis, but they have lots
of cards and far fewer dongles.

There are two RAM slots, one empty, one 16MB, and it can take up to 128MB.
64MB is $65 new.  We might have something from a deadish computer that would
fit it.

It can take an internal floppy drive, $70 new on sale, but Kiwanis saves such
drives from dead laptops and might have something.

ES1878 or 1879 sounds, uses sb module.
Video is something unusual, for which someone posted the linux modeline. Chips
and Technologies.  I needed help setting up our 486 for a C and Tech chip.

Has USB port and touchpad, for which Hitachi (visionbook plus 4140) supplies
the DOS driver.  In theory we could compile a kernel that runs it because
Redhat 7 seems to work with it (not that we have figured out how to use fvwm,
but I think you are supposed to click on the background somewhere for a menu).

We are having fun with the computer and learning from it, if nothing else,
and it will be made at least somewhat usable.  We might keep it if the hinge
is not really fixable, and pass along our 486 instead (with floppy drive and
more RAM).

For the network card, I don't have a dongle for it.  The whole thing
came to me used and that was already missing at that time.
As to the hinges my thoughts are layers of epoxy and fabric after
figuring out what position the flattened metal part should have.  It
would look pretty ugly, but I think it should work.  If it looks like
the epoxy would flow inside the unit then significant disassembly and
packing with something to fill the void and wax paper as a barrier. 
Seems like a pretty big project to me, but I know you take on things
like that regularly.  I hope it works.

I was able to buy a replacement dongle for a PCMCIA network card at Computer
Alley - something like $10, I think.

Jim says it needs to be a stiff hinge in order to stay open and not slam shut,
so he asked me to bring back the hole punch (for metal).  He has some idea
about how to get this working.

Unlike two other newish computers given to us, this one displays text properly
full-screen without distortion, and I know how to deal with the video for
linux, so it will be a prize if we can get it to work right, even without
floppy drive and more RAM and dongle.  

I will pass along your ideas about epoxy and fabric.  He has rebuilt tape
decks with missing or broken parts and this should be easier since the parts
won't need to move much or often.  

We also have a nice laptop from Scott, not quite as fast but completely
working, which will be mine if Jim fixes this other one and keeps it (and
passes along his 486 to someone who does not need the USB).  Got to set up
one or both of them for a trip this fall with the USB camera.  I wonder how
hard it would be to make a car power adaptor for this car trip.  

Scott slipped in, thanks for the info, but Kiwanis has used 10MBit ethernet
cards for probably under $10, with dongle.    Perhaps we can make a dongle
out of a dead ethernet card somehow?  It would take some clever soldering...
We can also use parallel port transfer, but one version of linux gets messed
up that way, needs ethernet transfer or floppy disk transfer.  Possibly the
parport zip drive would transfer it - it is up to 37MB now.  I have been
waiting for a PCMCIA ethernet card to put linux on the computer from Scott,
also for a working dosemu, which someone just compiled for us.  Time to set
it up for use on hot days in the basement here (only 75 degrees) with a plugin
full size keyboard.  It has an enormous (1.2G) hard drive, which will hold
all the DOS and linux files that I ever use.

I fixed some broken laptop hinges with epoxy putty, once.  The putty 
has the advantage that it won't flow where you don't want it to, and 
you can kind of mash it and mold it into place. 

The hinges are fixed and the computer mostly works.  The pcmcia modem even
works (unlike our 486 that we took on vacation) and the USB mouse works but
we have no idea how to get the USB cameras to work in linux.  One works in
DOS on desktops but not on this laptop.  We can use the parport zip drive
instead of a floppy drive.  Jim fixed another parport drive by transplanting
into it a good head assembly from a scsi zip drive to replace a bent one after
I read about related fixes on the web.  We can use this camera on our next
trip and fix up Scott's for more regular use when we want a floppy drive too.
(It is not quite as fast, but the floppy drive sure is handy).  

Jim screwed some metal reinforcing pieces on the hinges somehow.  It took a
few hours.  

He is still keeping four mostly-working 386 laptops.  One needs an external
keyboard and he took out the CMOS battery because it kept dying. The other
needs to run setup every time too, probably low battery, but you can choose
a setting 46 which is similar to the actual setting and only lose 5MB.  These
have 1-5MB RAM and will be perfect for monitoring temperatures in the new
house if we ever finish building it instead of playing with computers.

I am busy crashing a desktop computer trying to get it to do USB with either
Damnsmalllinux or Slackware 8.1.  Someone said to try a newer version of
insmod with this newer (for us) kernel which we are using with SW7.1.

Just in case you get to the temperature monitoring and you don't already
have something specific planned check out my setup at
http://mynet.whitehat-inc.com/  In the "this network" section is a link
to  the output from a kit I built and wrote some linux software for. 
And you can see what it is like to live in the high desert.

Do you want to briefly summarize here what you did? Jim also wants to turn
on a fan when it is hotter in than out, and between 3 and 6 am, if the inside
temperature is over 70 degrees, for instance.  This requires comparing three
numbers (if and or.....) and then activating some switch.

Got and built kit that reads temperatures and sends them down serial
cable. Connected that to server. Wrote a C program that reads from the
serial cable about once per minute.  It takes the returned data and
stores it in a database to make the graphs.  

It could also act on that data and send bits out the printer port to a
device made with a little power brick, some relays, and a block of power
outlets controlled by the relays.  Or some other similar output plan.  I
haven't looked at that part of the project too hard yet as I don't have
time.

got one yert? .... a few yrs later

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