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Thank you for those. I'm not sure how I missed them.

I spent quite a long time yesterday ferreting through various parts of the Toshiba help sites and at one stage trying to make sense of a synthetic bimbo at the other end of the line who must surely have been blonde.

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5 minutes ago, Boris said:

catgate - what are the two models you have ?

Thank you for your reply Boris.

 

One of them proclaims itself to be a SATELLITE L500-1CQ     Part No PSLS0E-01J01DEN

and the other prefers to call itself  EQUIUM L20-197  MODEL NUMBER PSL2ZE-001002CY

 

G

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I'm not sure which is the elder of the two. The appearance the Equium suggest that it is.

I'm running MInt on this Desktop machine. I have not made my mind up yet about Mint. In some ways it is better than Ubuntu, yet in other ways Ubuntu is better.

I think that it is highly likely that neither of these desktops will get hitched to "the net", and one of them will become a repository for the village Women's Group's matters.

All that depends on "Do They Work" and that will only be known for sure when I get a charger (now on order). We  have a plethora (markII) of chargers for everything from flash lights to Yamaha keyboards and yet we do not have one for these Toshiba offerings. So it looks like progress will be halted until the ones I have ordered (from some far flung battery chandler) appear on the scene.

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I'm still trying to get my head around losing the chargers to two functional  laptops, one would be for me difficult but two ?  That requires effort.

 

I was OK with Ubuntu right up to the point where they introduced the new interface, I didn't like it and still don't. In many ways Mint is Ubuntu for reactionaries like me that want it to look more like Windows, you pays your money and makes your choice, or even better being Linux you DON'T pay your money and make your choice.,

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If you had a daughter like mine you would have no difficulty in understanding two Laptops.

She has only been back in England for less than a couple of years. Prior to this she had a business in Southern France where she sold artists requisites/materials. She had a home in England, which is where she lived for several weeks in mid summer when the artist were on holiday or drunk. Her main computer was still an olde upright tower one.  As far as I can make out she had one for Purchasing and one for Selling. Yes I wondered why, but I seems that they were mainly carriers of information back to her UK base to feed her olde tower model.  It was whilst she was clearing out one of the rooms in her house ready for decorating a couple of weeks ago that she found these laptops in a cupboard. Did I want them? If not they were going in the dustbin (which is where I think the chargers will have gone).

 

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The Satellite is by far the newer bit of kit.

 

IIRC I had one to look at 2-3 months ago with a dead 250GB spinner in - Win 7, Dual Core T6600, 15.6" Trubrite screen - I think it can take 8GB of DDR2, but probably only 2/3GB fitted ?

Nice bit of kit - I put a cheapo 120GB SSD in it, installed the free upgrade to Win 10 and it booted to the desktop in about 15 seconds. 

He was delighted, especially as he was going to skip it.

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The Satellite looks as though it is the newer of the pair, Boris. The other one does not look as though it has had a hard life either.  I am assuming that both will be on one of Mr. Gates creations.

My last experience with Windows was with 98SE

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30 minutes ago, catgate said:

My last experience with Windows was with 98SE

 

Well you can safely say that Billy G's products are a bit more user friendly nowadays, more stable with far fewer occurrences of that good old heart attack creator the BSOD than you used to get on 95 & 98. XP is still one of my favourite operating systems, but the lack of support does render it a bit vulnerable. If you're going to stick with it third party firewall and AV should be mandatory.

If they were mine I'd be burning the latest Iso files to CD and testing them till I found something that worked for me.

 

Quote

when the artist were on holiday or drunk.

 

isn't that part of the job description for French artists, en le piste as it were ?

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I don't wish to be the prophet of doom but last year I was given a 7 year old Asus laptop that had vanquished to a cupboard and last used 5 years ago by our son-in-law who wanted to breathe life into it so our grand-daughter could use it at Uni.  We were hoping to install Windows 7 on it.

 

No matter how long I charged it - it would retain a charge just enough to boot into Windows Vista for about 20 seconds - then it would die.

 

I had to buy a new battery for it and it worked perfectly (Or as perfectly as Vista ever did).  I installed more memory, a larger hard drive, Windows 7 and she is still using it.

 

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On 14/08/2016 at 2:20 PM, AlanHo said:

I don't wish to be the prophet of doom but last year I was given a 7 year old Asus laptop that had vanquished to a cupboard and last used 5 years ago by our son-in-law who wanted to breathe life into it so our grand-daughter could use it at Uni.  We were hoping to install Windows 7 on it.

 

No matter how long I charged it - it would retain a charge just enough to boot into Windows Vista for about 20 seconds - then it would die.

 

I had to buy a new battery for it and it worked perfectly (Or as perfectly as Vista ever did).  I installed more memory, a larger hard drive, Windows 7 and she is still using it.

 

 

That is a very timely post, Alan.

As I was sat looking at these two "dead boxes" I thought I would have another "rummage" through our drawer dedicated to "Chargers". Every damned thing seems to have a charger these days. I found nothing .

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Today I received a new charger which, being 19vDC, should service either of the two Toshibas.   I plugged it into the elder of the two (the "Equium") and had instant action.  I tried it in the newer one (the "Satellite") and had instant disinterest from it. As I was turning it over  I notices a one of the screws which hold the underside cover to the body was missing. On further inspection I found that there was only one of these screws still "in situ". So it seems like I will need to find a chandler of minute screws before I can  progress any further with this particular box of tricks. Someone must have had them out and I do not think it will be my daughter. It's not her scene.

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May be worth a few questions to the daughter, the obvious one is "Is it not working because it's unscrewed, or has it been unscrewed because it wasn't working ?" Largely as I doubt that case screws missing would adversely affect function.

Obvious contenders are :

  1. Defective power connection.
  2. Dead Mobo
  3. Dodgy power switch

Not sure how these would qualify as home fixes. Anything else be it hard drive or screen would usually still give some signs of life on the assorted LED indicators.

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After further inspection I have concluded that the charger socket on the "Satellite " is broken  away from its "moorings" and is free to "float" within the case to the extremes allowed by the length of it wiring. It therefore looks to me like a lost cause, unless by some miraculous stroke of chance the battery will fit the  Equium.  ....pause....  (just looked and they are very dissimilar)

 

 

Re    IMTNT."Smash them to smithers and throw them in the rubbish".

If you are so pleasured by this I  will send you the "Satellite", if you send me the price of postage and packing.  You can then "have your way with it".

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If you can get the bottom of the case off, a loose charger point may be fixable with quantities of Araldite or similar epoxy glue, depends what access you can get to the breakage point.

 

I'd also think given the spec of the Satellite it could be viable to pay for a repair and then flog it. Smash would not be my chosen reaction at this point, or any point really.

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Sorry chaps, but since both of these boxes are still holding info about my daughters business, they are not going anywhere until I have ensured that everything  has gone.

I will play with them both for the next few days and then reassess their fate (acetylene cutter or big hammer and anvil).

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  • 2 years later...
On 6/12/2016 at 6:37 PM, catgate said:

I know of several people including myself, who build there own computers. However none of them build laptops.

I have looked on CCL's site and can find no mention  Redtube Beeg Spankbang of Laptop cases. They seem to sell one or two components but cases do not seem to occur.

Has anyone any thoughts on the matter please?

It was just my luck to find one card under a removable panel on the underside - but the second card was under the key board. I had to remove the keyboard and all sorts of gubbins to get at it. Everything is so crammed together - I don't think I would try to build one from scratch even if DIY Components were available. I imagine the cost would be prohibitive anyway.

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