Friday, July 31, 2009

Compaq 12XL405

My friend Moggie drag over a busted Compaq laptop and asked me if I could do anything for it.

Well after looking through it there a few problems:

The battery is dead.

The 6GB hdd is dead.

The laptop plastic has gone brittle.

Bios battery is dead too. Cost: RM3.5

So we both looked into replacing the hdd which was more or less impossible to find being ide and all.

So I told another way is go Compact Flash. So I sourced a CF adapter to 44 pin ide. And a cheap CF card. The adapter was RM32 including postage and the CF card was a Kingston for RM56.

Whack the lot together and installed Windows 98SE cause his laptop gpu doesn't have a WinXP version.

So Moggie when you do come back from KL next week you can expect to see this :P

The Compaq with the dead battery and hdd pulled out. As you can see the small CF card in the adapter is plugged in.

The desktop after booting.

The Compaq playing a FLV file. Its a bit jerky but I guess you can watch YouTube on it if you can watch FLV videos.

The Compaq 1200 XL405 or 12XL405 specs:

700 MHz Intel Celeron processor (Coppermine core, 0.18 µm, 128 kB L2 cache)
64 MB on-board RAM
1 x SDRAM SO-DIMM slot with support for PC-133 SDRAM
6 GB hard drive
1 x Type II/III PCMCIA card slot
No CompactFlash slot as in the 1245
24x CDROM drive

Waiting for Moggie to come back so he can bring his USB Wifi adapter since this sucker has no LAN so we can test the interNETZ.