 Well I have a new computer, some assembly required. So what this is is a LNX-1T laptop from about 2008. It's a re-badged Alpha 400 popularly reckoned to be the worst laptop computer of all time. It's a grotesquely underpowered MIPS-based machine. It's got 128 meg of RAM, a sub 400 megahertz MIPS clone processor. It runs its own custom Linux distribution which you can't install programs on. They sold in large numbers back in 2008-2009 and then nobody ever mentioned them ever again. This one is broken. It's the only one I could find on eBay and I am I'm going to try and put it back together and make it work. And that is why I have tea. So the first thing is select, let's unbag this thing. This contains a bunch of components that the previous owner removed while trying to repair it themselves. I got it like this. This is the battery which looks like lithium polymer actually. I wonder if that's still good. It's not it's not bulgy which is a good sign. Let's stick that over the side. Alright the keyboard module. I think that was a screw that just fell on the floor. The keyboard is repulsive. Let's get this. It's you can see from the size of my hands it is extremely small. It is nasty and plastic. It's got these tiny little keys. Miniscule spacebar. But it ought to work. I don't think there's anything wrong with this. The touchpad is as plastic as you can possibly manage. I wanted this because it's a MIPS-based machine and for some of the compiler stuff I do I want a MIPS architecture to test on. And there aren't very many. Apologies for the loud rustling noises. What do we have here? The screen unit. Surprisingly scratched for something that's apparently never been used. And the main board. Here we have the these are the mouse buttons. So the keyboard fits on like this. And these two buttons here push these micro switches. We've got here a row of LEDs including a unpopulated one interestingly. So let's just unplug this. So that allows us to remove this board. And here we have the main board and screen. Yes I have actually opened this up previously just to take a look at what's inside. So we have the usual system on a chip. Some RAM or possibly flash. I can't imagine why they'd want two ICs for a mere 128 mega RAM. More on this side. Ah yeah I think these are RAM. These four. And this is flash. Anyway I don't particularly care about that. The tape's interesting. What was under there? I don't want to open those up. That would be the battery connector. This is a button. What does that button do? That's on the underside. Ah the reset button. This one here. We've got ethernet. We've got three USB ports which is surprisingly many. SD card slot, earphone and microphone. And here we have the power jack. And this is the bit that's broken. So let me pull out the other half. Zoom in and I will show you what the problem seems to be. Okay camera zoom. Okay we're now zoomed in a fair bit. Now what's happened is the plastic on the power jack connector has broken. This I believe is supposed to fit in here somehow. As a result you can't actually plug the power in. Is this way up? I also don't know how much of the jack is bent. So it would have gone on like this. There's a piece of plastic missing. Do I have a pointer or some description? There's a piece missing here. This pad here is cum loose. And there's some stuff going on here. Now this does not look right. So I need to see what's going on. There are four solder terminals to the power connector. I know that some of these power connectors have switches in them so that the device knows when the jack is plugged in. I don't actually see anything in this. This is the... where did I put the power supply? So this is the pin half of the connector. So that just pushes in like this. And the plastic here is solid. There seems to be no opportunity for a metal piece. However this goes in this way round and the bottom is flat. So I think the bottom is exposed to this. So has this been bent? I do actually have, just sourced earlier, a replacement connector of the right size. And you can see that this has red and black wires for positive and negative. Positive being the middle. Positive being the middle. And a third connector on the side which is the switch. So this thing with its four connectors. Yeah, there's a sprung piece here. So as the jack goes in, this piece makes connection to the barrel. So what's this? At least some of the pads will be for just holding the thing down. Look at this. Oh yeah, that looks absolutely great. Excuse me, I need a closer look at this. Yeah, this has actually lifted. Hang on, let's see if I can get some more zoom in. Yeah, that's better. So that's actually pulled the pad off the board, which is not brilliant. The other thing I could do of course is to just take the connector off completely and solder some wires on. This thing come up, does bend. Ah, that is the switch. Okay, I can see this piece here that bends down. There are two little tabs, two little pimples, and those would have pushed onto this before I bent it and that was not going to work anymore. So as the barrel connector goes in, it pushes that piece away and no longer makes contact. So we have this piece holds the connector down. This is the negative terminal and this would have gone in like this. So you can see here this would have soldered down to that pad there. That would have been the positive terminal. Now what I could do is to just insert the plastic, attempt to glue this down and solder the tab and solder this thing back on again and with potentially some glue to actually make it hold. I'm not sure if that's going to work. Let's try the multimeter. Okay, so that's negative. Okay. Right, the spring bit now seems to work. I touch this here and touch this here. I'm going to push this down. I would have thought that would disconnect. So the other thing is that it's entirely possible that they're not using the switch. At which point, in which case, they may have just soldered these two together. So let us, with great trepidation, try bending this thing up again so we know it doesn't make contact about the there. Do we still have contact? We do. Okay, I think that's just junk, which is good. So this does suggest I can just re-insert this just about here. Find a way to stick this hoop down and then it may just work. The biggest question is going to be how to stick this down given that the solder pad has failed. This is grounding plane. This stuff. So there is copper under there, but it's not actually connected. I don't think it's connected. It's not connected to this. These two planes are connected, which is a good thing. So I may be able to scrape away some of the solder mask from here and then use that as an anchor for this thing. There is also another piece of plastic missing. This is just the top half of the connector. A little bit of showing up on the camera, but you can see that here there's a chunk missing. Now I don't believe that's particularly structural. So if that goes in like this, then provided this end is anchored with a solder, which I mean this little bit here needs to be bent a bit. Wow, that's tough. Then that will probably hold together. I wonder if I can get away without any glue actually. That's pretty solid. That's not. Yes, I was originally planning on replacing the entire connector with this one, but this is too big. It sticks up above the board way too much. The right thing to do is to find a completely new surface mount connector and put that on, but that seems like work, so I'm not going to. Yeah, I think that'll work. Okay, so step one is going to be to solder this pad here down. That will hold the whole thing together, I hope. I just want to make sure that the central pin does not actually make contact with the ground. That's quite hard. Okay, let's fire up the soldering iron and see if I can actually stick that down, this down, because that would be the first stage. All right, the soldering iron is hot, so let's see if we can make this go. Now this inserts here, and let's just try melting this pad. I'll do it. That's actually solid. I think that's worked. There's quite a lot of force on that pad, so I think I want to re-solder that, but first let us try and lock this down instead. Can I take some of that solder mask off? I need a scrappy thing. I have a whole draw full of scrappy things from a cheap soldering tool kit from China, most of which I've never used. The other side. Ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch, ouch. I think that's down, but now the other side is broken for you, which is actually kind of what I expected, but that is now, if that's come completely loose. I managed to get some more solder onto the pad, so I shall just be able to melt this. That's a good chunk of solder. I think that's relatively solid. It really isn't. That is incredibly fragile. It may be making electrical contact, but it's also seriously not straight. I think it'll do, but there is one more bit I rather want to do. You can see if I can make the camera focus. This is all really, really tiny. Hopefully that's focused. You can see here the plastic has broken. The top half is skewed off to one side because of the need to solder onto that pad. I want to try and get that straight. I think I do want to try and get that straight. Okay, that's straighter. Okay, I think that's as bad as good as I'm going to get, but for robustness, I actually want to apply a chunk of epoxy to the crack plastic on this side and try and glue that together. But before I do anything else, let me just zoom back out to something a bit more reasonable, and I'm going to try and actually power the thing on. I do want to know if it works, so that'll require a little bit of setup. Okay, the power adapter is plugged in. So what I do is I insert this in here, push the power button. Okay, that's working. That's awesome. All right then, in which case, they said it took about 40 seconds to boot, which is painful. Anyway, I'm not going to let it boot because I need to do the epoxy thing. So I've got this stuff. This is awesome. It's a twin syringe of epoxy and catalyst. Uh, it's pretty easy to mix. I've had this for ages, which means it's now probably well past its sale by date. So let us try mixing some stuff up and dobbling it on this thing, see what happens. And for this, I need a bottle top. Be right back. All right, to make epoxy work, you really need two things. Firstly, is a Coke bottle top. You can never have too many Coke bottle tops. If you can, if you saw the box in my kitchen, you'd realise that you can, but they are endlessly useful. The other thing you need is a box of matches. And this is a Swiss box of matches, which is why it has a picture of the Eiger on the front for your door. Yeah, what you do with the matches is, first thing is you light one, then you blow it out. Right, that's what you need the match for. Because just wait for that to cool down before I put it down on my plastic subbook surface. You're going to use that to mix your epoxy. Now, you take the lid off the epoxy. Uh, this is harder than it looks. Problem with taking the lid on the epoxy is that it is actually stuck on with epoxy. It's not catalyzed epoxy, which means it's soft, but it's still really difficult to get off the smell. Uh, into any epoxy glue is poisonous. Do not use it for, for example, filling replacements. If that seems very carefully, very carefully chosen example, people have actually done this in like emergencies and it's never ended well. Okay, we squirt quite a lot into the cap. You have to use a fair bit. Otherwise, you don't get a even mix and it goes horribly wrong. The next thing is, you use one of your soldering tools to get the dried, uncaplined epoxy out of the cap, so you can actually get the plastic thing back on again. And you do it very quickly because the epoxy in here is starting to react. Yeah, this stuff is rank. Come on. Okay, cap and lock. Good. Now, this is the bit you wanted the matchstick for because you have to mix together the epoxy from one tube and the catalyst from the other. The first time I did this, I didn't put enough into the cap and I ended up with way more epoxy than I actually had catalyst and it didn't harden. It just ended up as disgusting goop that you just can't do anything with. So we now have a bit on the end of the matchstick. Grab it on the side of this. That's way too much, but never mind. That is way, way too much. Let's get another matchstick and pick some of that up again. Okay, let's call that done. I'm going to remove this glue from my hands and now there will be a short pause while we wait 10 minutes for this stuff to set. Okay, be back in 10 minutes. Well, that was about 20 to 25 minutes and epoxy is completely hard there and quite hard there. So I think that is pretty good. The only thing I need to worry about now is whether I actually managed to get epoxy into the barrel and as a result make the thing fail to work. So let us just try plugging it back in again. Fits fine and it feels solid. Okay, let's try putting this sucker back together again. Given that I never actually took it apart in the first place, this could be slightly exciting. All right, let's move the toxic chemicals back in the drawer with the knives. So the one bit of dismantling I did was I unplugged this thing. So let's plug this back in again and it's another of these nice little clamp cables that just slots in. Done. I love these things. They're so easy to get in and out. So this presumably fits in here somewhere. The earphone sockets down here are not going into their holes. What's going on here? Okay, this needs to go in like this. That's better. Okay, now I can plug this in. I can get it into the slot. So this is actually quite a snug fit. The plastic pegs here go into these holes. So it actually clips into place. That's not bad. The build quality of this thing actually seems recently good. I mean, it's still cheap and plastic use anything. There we go. Good. But it's actually dismantled quite easily and there's now remantling again straight forwardly. And if you look at the bottom of the keyboard, all these things are brass bushed. I was expecting a lot less. Anyway, this is the keyboard connector and it's another of these clamp cables. Except this one's really awkward. Let me open the clamp and insert the cable. We have this. This is the hinge for the screen and these screw on like this. So this work. Do the screws just go straight through here and fasten the screen on? What? It covers up the hinges. Is there another piece? Something I'm missing? Ah, is this? No, that's the battery connector from the bottom. Right, it's these. These clip on some. Ah, right, I see how it goes. The keyboard fits underneath the hinges so that this slot in the keyboard case is immediately under the hinge and then these fit over the top. Okay, so the screws though do go straight on. So let's get these out. Now we've got four of the chunky silver. Ah, here's the plastic. There's a foot. Two feet. These go here. I'm assuming that these chunky silver ones are the screen screws. I have a screwdriver that will fit. Is it magnetic? It's not magnetic. We insert the screw into the hole and that's not so bad. And this one, hey, it is magnetic, but obviously not magnetic enough to hold the screws up in a useful fashion. Okay, so we've got two of these screen screws. Now, I need to be really careful with these wires because the wires go into the hinge and we have to make sure that we don't pinch them with anything. I'm not quite sure how this works. Should I put the keyboard on first? Let's try putting the other two screws in and then seeing if the thing will close up. Yeah, this is a magnetic screwdriver, but the magnetism is so weak it's not actually useful. Okay, I have a quarter inch bit small enough for these screws. Yeah, that's fine. The problem with this screwdriver is it's kind of huge and with these very small pieces, there's a bit of a liability. I moved the bit from the works and the last screw, the last screw is here and I've just noticed here there is a brass bush screw hole. I wonder if I'm doing this wrong. Okay, I think the screen goes on, then the keyboard goes on. I'm doing this in the wrong order. Anyway, let's insert this screw. All right, you see there's a bush there and there and I think these are supposed to hold the PCB down. So take a look at the bottom. Yeah, so let's try inserting a couple of these black ones. That doesn't feel at all right. Let's remove this stupid keyboard. There we go. Give myself some space to work in. Small screwdriver. Come on, get in there. So I think these are supposed to hold the PCB down. All these screws look the same. So I think we need a screw in each of these two places, possibly here and here. Not having taken this apart means I don't know how it goes together again. Okay, so that seems to be the board down. Yes, there are two more bushings in these two holes, but these are for access from this side. Likewise, these two holes here, that's the reset button. Right now I think we want the keyboard. Yes, the keyboard goes on and then those holes from underneath go into the bushings in the keyboard. That holds the keyboard down and also the case closed. So this, whoops. Oh dear, that was not so good. Right, I have broken the clamp. I think it will still work with just one side, but I could be in trouble. So this inserts in here. This cable is too small. Maybe this way is better. And close the clamp. Is that going to stay in? That is going to stay in. So I am probably not going to be able to get this off again. That's going to be a peg. Right, so this may be my last chance to assemble this. So the keyboard goes on like this. Let us close the lid and make sure it closes. That looks closed. Now screw this thing down quickly before I break anything. That making contact with the bush. Yes, good. That's down. So the software package on this thing I did, whoops, that's not so great. That's not right at all. I managed to pinch a cable in the case. Okay, that's better. So I did some research on this. The software package is a custom Linux distribution that is like the worst thing ever. It's everything runs as root. You can't install your own programs. It's ancient and pretty nasty. Luckily, the system for making sure that you can't run your own programs is utterly broken and it's fairly easy to work around. So you can install your own stuff on it. I don't want to risk breaking this device. So I'm not going to attempt to change the software package, but I do want to be able to run my own code on it. So I'm probably going to put something like a Debian charoot on and just do the minimal changes needed to make that run and do everything from in there. It supports a SD card, so there shouldn't be any trouble with storage. Anyway, I haven't actually played with one of these before, so this is all hypothetical. So I am looking forward to once they get this thing put together, assuming it still works, firing us up and having a bit of an explore. There's a lot of screws here. It is not the worst laptop I've actually dealt with maintenance office. Is there a way to recharge the magnet in a screwdriver? There must be because it's just like the tip of the screwdriver is magnetized. There isn't actually any specific component. I know that you can magnetize metal by stroking it with another magnet over and over and over again. It takes forever. Okay, I think that's all the screws. No, there's one missing. Okay, so let's open the lid. We've got four screws for the screen. I believe the previous owner may have attempted to open the screen. I don't know why there's usually never any reason to do this. That did not go all the way in. So the two little rubber things are feet for the screen. Once I've got this screw in, I will demonstrate. So this one has already got one, but these fit in over the screw hole, like so, so that when the case closes, the feet hit the plastic and just, you know, provide a little bit of shock absorbing when the thing snaps closed. Now the last foot. Okay, I think one of the feet has gone missing and this is still stuck in the bag. Yeah, I think it's gone missing. Never mind. It's this foot, so I don't really care. Now what about these plastic things? These plastic things clip on and cover up the cables. Did they just push in? Possibly not when the case is closed. Are they symmetric? No, they're not even the same shape. That's interesting. So this is the one. Okay, this is the one for this side. So therefore, this must be the one for this side. Okay, well, all right, it's assembled. Let's plug in the battery. There's a proper battery connector. It's just like there's a motherboard connector exposed here. Okay, this is pretty grim. There we go. Batteries are really awkward to deal with because you can't turn them off. This battery probably still has charge in it. Maybe not very much. But you have to be careful. Same with solar panels. They're always on and I have to undo these screws. And you don't want to short them. You don't want to apply the voltage from the battery or the solar panel to the wrong thing. So you have to be pretty careful with them. The battery compartment appears to screw closed, which is unusual. That's not right. I put this thing in upside down. Okay. So what was happening there was the battery compartment wasn't closing, which made me think that maybe the battery has bulged somewhat in the years. But trying to move the battery around so it was the other way up, I managed to pull the connector out. So now I have to go through this again. Oh no, it just clips down. Okay. Right, that's fine. So we do up the screws and now we once this is in. Come on. They're long and short screws. Right, that actually explains the thing I noticed with the screen. Yep. Okay. So the screw I put down here I thought was unusually long. That's because it is unusually long. It's the wrong screw. It should be a short screw. And the long screw goes into the battery compartment. Right. So it is reassembled into, hopefully, a fully functioning laptop. Next stage is to power it on and try it out. But first I have to take care of the camera. Okay. So let's try plugging in the power. That was a bit of a bit stupid. That's quite a lot stupid. Right. So all the stuff I did about fixing the connector, it no longer lines up with the back of the case, which means that this won't go in anymore. What is the best way around this? Probably to cut into the case, because I don't think I am going to be able to move this. Right. I have managed to push the connector off the board. God damn it. So now I'm going to have to disassemble the thing and replace the everything. Oh well. At least I know the electronics all works. See how I was about to try and fire the thing up and demonstrate it and call it done. I thought this video was going to be unusually short. And I'm particularly worried about that bloody keyboard connector. At least this time, I know how the thing goes together. Oh my God. The screws. Yeah. To be fair, trying to push the power connector onto the plug onto the socket was a pretty stupid move. But if it broke off that easily, it was never going to hold together anyway. I thought this was more solid. Well, the plus side is that now I know that I do not need to dismantle the screen. The downside is that I know that the connector is on the bottom of the board. And why isn't that coming off? I think I've got all the screws. The screw is not actually rotating. There we go. That was embarrassing. It really felt like the screw was going round when I was using the little screwdriver on it, but it wasn't. So it was never actually unscrewed in the first place. Oh God. Credibility. Well, anyone who's been watching these videos knows I don't really have any. So that's a relief. There is the clamp for the keyboard connector. Oh, I do have to undo the screen because I need to get the PCB out because the barrel connector is on the bottom. Right. That's why the previous owner dismantled the thing as much as they did. And there were two screws holding the PCB down. And let's see what the damage is. Okay. The whole pin assembly just snapped off. This metal thing has remained intact, which is good. I could just attempt to repeat the same fix. I'm not sure that will work. Give me a moment. I'm sorry. I was just unplugging the power supply so that I can try and connect this up again. So that goes on there. So the epoxy here is now completely hard, but it did flow down onto the PCB, which is why it didn't really hold the top on. And the whole thing is slightly skewed. So yeah, I think I could do a lot worse than simply attempt the same repair again, soldering that pad on and adding more glue. I can add glue around the back as well. That will strengthen the whole thing, but it's still going to be a bit skew. So I am going to have to increase the size of this hole. Okay. Well with that in place, that will hold everything straight. Right. Let's tack that down with solder that hasn't actually made contact. Right. To tack that down with solder and I'm going to need to mix up some more epoxy. So more matchsticks and I can just reuse this. Okay. Now the reason for using epoxy is that I want something that's relatively space filling and also very strong. Something like super glue isn't space filling. So it won't actually hold anything. It won't transfer force onto the board and there's actually quite a leverage in one of these things. So it needs to be strong. Okay. Right. And that is actually sufficiently strong. It's intact in place for the solders that's sufficiently solid to actually hold it in place. So let us unplug the screen. The reason for this or not, that's actually fastened in pretty solid. So let's not unplug the screen. Yeah. That one's glued down, which again explains why the previous owner shipped this to me as a bag of parts, but with the screen connected to the PCB. So yeah. You see here that hasn't lined up at all. I'm just looking to see where I'm going to have to extend the hole in the case. Okay. And let's just hold that upside down while it cures. And the next thing is I want to make the hole bigger. I need to extend the hole around this side. And the simplest way to do that, I can make it bigger all the way around with an electric drill. That's not so difficult. That'd be the easiest way to do it. Or I could file it down. I'm going to use the drill. Okay. So pause while I go and start filling the drill bits. Okay. I've got a drill bit about the right size. So let's drill it into the drill. Place the board out of the way and drill into it. That's working nicely. Okay. Brush the plastic out of the way. Now it does see. That's interesting. There's a space for a capacitor there in the chip. I wonder what that would have been. There's something unpopulated. But what was it? I have no idea. Anyway, let's see what that looks like. Yep. The barrel connector will go in. Let's just verify. As it does indeed go in. I suppose we start assembling it again. The solder joint will actually hold things in place while I reassemble it so I don't need to worry about curing quite so much. It will take me enough time that by the time this thing actually starts going together, it will be solid. One screen screw. Two screen screws. Come on. Two screen screws. Now the other interesting thing is this connector here, which I don't believe that I have anything to plug into. I mean, this is the LED and trackpad strip. This is the keyboard, but there isn't anything else. So what would this have been? It's quite big, whatever it is. It's another of these flex connectors with a clamp on it. Sadly not the same size as this clamp. So this is a cheap OEM machine, which is then rebadged by a dozen different resellers. So it's possible that that was some kind of expansion port, but I have not heard of anybody ever expanding one of these. The other interesting thing is there's a missing chip here. So I think this could actually be RAM. This would give you the upgrade if you put another one on both sides to 256 meg. And I realized that I have in fact forgotten to screw down my PCB. I'm going to assume these are the short screws. I have actually doored enough epoxy onto that power connector that if it breaks off again, I'm just going to have to remove the entire barrel assembly, chip the epoxy off the board. And I may end up with a damaged board, but we'll see. I won't be able to do any more repairs to that particular barrel connector. So in that event, I will probably just run a couple of wires from handy pads out to the hole on the back and use the other barrel connector, the one that was too big to fit on the board to power the thing on. It's not like this is going to get serious use. And this is going to be a machine to sit on a, it's going to be a set up as a server and be and being used as a compiler test box. Also, you know, demo periodically. Got ethernet. Okay. Yeah, I need the thing to stand up. So I'm going to have to place the screen in the place where you're not going to get a good view. Yeah, I'm wondering how much I need to edit this video down before posting. Not many people actually watch these things. And I think that the people who do, that went on reasonably well, put these videos on for as background noise, which is fine by me. I mainly make these as a reference to myself. I mean, I want to record what I'm doing so that I know what mistakes I made in the events that I lose components and so on. And I might as well stick them up on YouTube so that, you know, for, for giggle factor. But I'm wondering, should I show the entire epic fail of trying to reassemble the thing for the first time? Would that actually be interesting? I don't get a terrible lot of comments on these, which, you know, is fine. But if anyone does have any opinions, do let me know. Okay, that seems to be on the screws in. So I need to save two of the long screws for the battery connector. Let's do the ones in the middle first. These go through the PCB and screw into the keyboard. And now we just insert all the others. These two, the problematic ones. I think that's the last one. Yes, it is. This one is covered in goop. So I don't know what was going on there. Okay, now the battery. If I have practice in doing this now, they should really have forked out for a proper battery connector. Ah, there is in fact still a screw left in the battery compartment. So I have one long screw spare. Where does that go? There we go. Here. Battery. All right, I'm going to leave these until I know it actually works. So pause to reboot the camera and plug the power supply in. And then we'll see if it works. All right. Well, let's try it out. Let's see if I get that. Okay, now you can see down here the battery light is on. It is charging. And you can see the screen, but I can't. So let's try that. And there we go. And it boots quite slowly. The next V66. That looks like a Linux console cursor. Okay, so this does look like it's working. If I can avoid breaking the connector again, which means being pretty gentle with it, then I may actually get some work out of this thing. Right. Okay, this is X. This is the traditional X desktop. All right, we've got software. Wow, that software looks extremely 2000. What do we have here? We're on power. Battery level 100%. Yeah, right. Clock is wrong. Web browser, email box, sky chatting. This touchpad is kind of terrible, but it's usable settings. That's a task manager. This is settings. Desktop template sound. It works better. There's no Wi-Fi. Of course, there's no Wi-Fi. I've had the thing open. It's obvious there was no Wi-Fi, but it didn't actually occur to me to think that a laptop would have no Wi-Fi because you're just so used to it. I've got some ethernet somewhere I could fire up. Skytar sounds dubious. Where installer? Do you have any games? Some games? The screen's not bad, actually. I mean, it's small, but at least from my angle, it's colorful and doesn't show much in the way of angle of vision issues. PenguPop. The game is starting. There is no forward key, so I'm just going to use the mouse instead. I wonder whether the keyboard is working. The touchpad was connected by the keyboard, so the touchpad works. I don't know how to quit this. Yeah, let's try forcing it off. Yeah, I wonder if the keyboard's broken. That would be my connection. Interesting that the touchpad would work. I can see from the lights the cap slot key isn't making the cap slot light go on, but it hasn't booted yet. So that may be the issue. Wow, does this thing take a long time to start up? I don't believe anyone's... oops, that's not good. I've got a wire trapped there. Yeah, I need to take the bloody keyboard off again. Okay, that now works. Let's try work. Skyward. It's going to be AbbeyWord. AbbeyWord. AbbeyWord is a fairly old RTF word processor. It's actually pretty good. I used it for a while. Okay, the keyboard's broken. Cursors. But the touchpad is working. Now that's interesting. They are connected by the same connector. Okay, and when you close the lid, the screen doesn't turn off. It has no way of sensing whether the lid's closed. Awesome. How much do I need to dismantle to take the keyboard off? Quite a lot of it, I think. So if the keyboard... ah! Right, you can't see what I'm seeing. This is the keyboard connector. That goes here. Oh wow, that's horrible. How am I going to plug that on? That explains what the big connector is and why the keyboard wasn't working. In a way, that's a good thing because it means it's not the problem, not the fault of the connector where I damaged the clamp. But oh dear, how inaccessible is that? Okay, well, so we open the clamp and I'm not even going to try. We can just show up on video. How is this going to work? Oh, you know, I think I managed to get that in. Okay, well, that may have gone in. Let's... okay, I take back everything I said about maintenance. That is really dumb. It's a layout. Good god, how are they supposed to actually get the thing on and off again? Anyway, let's try... assuming the cooking has still worked, I didn't just blow it up. Let's try applying some more power. Good, the lights come on. Wait for it to load. Wait for it very slowly to load. Still nothing here, but now the capslot light comes on and off. Can you see that? So that gives me some confidence that the keyboard is in fact working, including X starts. See what I'd really like is a custom Debian setup on this thing. Oh good, this still works with just a console. I don't really need X. Okay, hello. Right, good. Over there. Easy dog. So I can type lowercase t's but not uppercase t's. 9 0. A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P X Y Z E R. Right shift. B C D E F G H G K L M N O P Q R S T V W X Y Z. An interesting left shift. A B C D E F G H I J K L M P Q R S T U V W X Y Z. That's weird. Some keys work with the left shift and some with the right. I am trying to think whether that might be a problem with the keyboard connector not plugged all the way in. But given that the T key works fine, I don't see how it could be. Could be a software issue without saving. What I wanted to terminal but there isn't one. Does this thing have Wi-Fi after all? It does have Wi-Fi but I didn't see any Wi-Fi hardware. Oh well. Connect to my Wi-Fi network. Authentication. Web. Okay, let me just shift this over here. In fact, let me just do this while I type in my key. It's just sitting there doing nothing. I suspect it won't. It's too old to understand this particular flavour of... Oh no, it has connected. Connection acquired. Acquiring IP address. Is that an error? Nope, it's got an IP. Okay, it's got Wi-Fi. I apologise to it for dismissing it earlier. Let's see what the web browser is like. And I assume this icon down here is it telling me last bar on echo session closed unexpectedly. I wonder if the previous owner was doing something. Let's try restoring. I may regret this. Okay, the clock's incorrect, the HTTPS isn't working. Whatever URL this is is no longer functional. It isn't going to work until I set the clock. But let's just try connecting to my website and see if that works. Yeah, let's continue anyway. Just do it. Well, it's not loading any of the JavaScript. Not loaded. Just do it. Yeah, this machine is simply too slow to run a web browser. It's doing a decent job of it. But bon echo is not a good web browser. And I still can't type capital T's with the left shift key, which is weird. So do I want to try and fiddle with that keyboard connector again? Or am I going to call this as good as it gets? Let's have a look. Need something to type on capital T's. Yeah, this does not feel like a keyboard connector problem. It feels like a software problem. But I just, there goes the power again. Yeah, that's not a good power connector. It's just not secure. Never mind. It'll be good enough. Once the battery's in, it'll be a bit more robust. But you can see here, that's the keyboard connector. Okay, well, the power went out. So let's reset the camera and have another go. Yeah, the keyboard connector wasn't improperly. It just popped out. Yeah, this is repulsive. I just do not know how you're supposed to do this. Do I need to take the screen off to get more space? Take the screen off again. Yeah, I'm sorry that this is like, completely unintelligible, but I can barely see let alone the camera and wait for it to boot again. Yeah, I'm afraid I just run out of things I can say about this. Ah, good, good, good, good. Oh, shift A doesn't work with the right hand shift key. Let's just reassemble it before I break anything else. Right, and then we power it up again, and we make sure that everything still works. And then I haven't managed to break something by moving the keyboard connector. That's interesting. What just happened? Okay, stuff's failed. Yeah, the A key stopped working completely now. Well, that's failed as well now. It's going to have to come apart again. And I'm going to need to try and plug that bloody keyboard connector in again. But this will be the third try. I don't really have a good strategy. It's just going to be try it again and see what happens. But this is now worse than it was the first time. Taking the screen off didn't help much. Bear in mind that nearly over half the time spent working on this thing has just been trying to clip that keyboard on. Even after I screwed up the barrel connector fix once. What have I got that's long? Got one of these. I've got more of those. Let's try a long thing with a hook on it. Should be able to just lift the latch in this side. Yep. Now I can use the straight one to move this out. Let me re-seat that. Okay, that seemed less fraught than I was expecting. But I unplugged and re-seated it. So you've got power. These are technically soldering tools. I'm not really sure what you're supposed to use with them, but they are quite good at just sort of poking things. I've got various hooks. This has got a round point on one side and a square point on the other. The caps lock key work, which is a nice stuff. So I've also got a sort of screwdriver prying thing and a sort of angled screwdriver prying thing and a thing. Not quite sure what any of them are for. Happy word. Let's see what the keyboard says. I've got A's. That works. Shift Y doesn't work. Okay, so Y works. W, X, Y, Z. I got a superior key pressed with the backspace. U, X, Y, Z. It's better. Zero, zero. Okay. So the only key that seems to be problematic is left shift Y. That's weird. A num lock works properly again now. Okay, that is totally good enough. I do not want to have to dismantle this thing again. It's good to remember about the poking things because that actually makes that connector slightly simpler. Let's just reassemble it and call it finished because, wow. Yeah, this thing is totally not user friendly. Everything about it is great in terms of access except for those keyboard connectors. I mean it would help if I hadn't broken the touchpad one, but the touchpad one even broken was fine compared to the other one, which is just in a really stupid place. Do wonder how they managed to assemble these. Now the software stack, everything runs as root, including the file manager and the applications. It won't let, it won't give you access to any of the file system, but that's not actually enforced anywhere other than in the file manager. So the way you get access to the system is you insert a, doing anything, manage to strip that. It's not turning. The way you break the file manager protection is you put an ext3 formatted SD card in the slot, which it will mount fine. And on this there is a sim link from a text file to the file in slash ETC that's got the list of directories that you're allowed to access with the file manager. And because this is a user file, it'll let you access it and edit the text file, which of course edits the file on the main file system, which is kind of, that's not how security works, so that you can then spoof the, you can simply tell the file manager that the user is allowed to access all directories. And then the, that just means the user can access all directories running programs. I don't know about yet. It's MIPS. So it's, uh, it's old MIPS. I think it's a 2.4 Linux kernel. So I need to find some way to cross compile programs for it. What I really want to do is run Debian in a Trute. Okay, I can some power and see what it does. Well, the battery is charging, which is the good news. And it's booting. So the main thing I need is a terminal. It may be possible that they haven't actually got rid of the terminal program from the desktop environment. So if I can find a way to simply invoke it, I'm in golden. I do know that there is a telnet demon in this that is commented out in the startup script. So it doesn't actually run. So one thing you can do is just, you know, uncomment it, then you can tell it into it, which gives you a remote shell, which frankly is going to be way easier than working the horrible little keyboard, even when it did work properly. Okay, has it connected to the Wi-Fi? It may just be being very, very slow. It's not a fast machine. Right, it has us connected to the Wi-Fi. Also, I'm not sure where that application went when I minimized it. Oh, just here it is. Okay, so let's find settings. Can I get it to set the clock from the remote server? No, of course not. That would be useful. Anything network setup? Probably not. Right, that just takes you to date and time setup. It thinks it's the 4th of December 2019. Odd. What is this? Now I have a keyboard. Maybe people will be playable. Lian Lian Khan by Alpha. Is this, is this just a match too? I think, I think it's just a match pairs puzzle game. Okay, the one thing I do want to try is software installer, because now we have like connection to the internet. I can do updates online. I want to see if the remote service is still running. No, the remote servers are not running. So nobody knows whether there's any more updates. It seems like they wanted some kind of package management system, which by the looks of it doesn't work. Whether it doesn't work now because the servers are down or whether it never worked, I don't know. Let's try removing the printer stuff that nobody wants. Maybe that wasn't a good idea. Oh right, it did do it. That should have saved me 50 megabytes of stuff. Okay, well, I believe it now works. All except for, you know, couple of shifted keys. Skychat is just pigeon. What's the email box? Sulfide. Of course it's Sulfide. So yeah, if you just want to use the built-in apps, this is like not necessarily a bad choice. The screen is too small for anything really gooey related. And it kind of needs a web browser that's a web browser rather than Boneco. Skytable, I'm going to guess that's numeric. There aren't really any other spreadsheets. Any other like simple open source spreadsheet, yeah, it's numeric. I think I've slightly run out of stuff to do with this. That was a complete shambles, but at least I do have a functioning MIPS based laptop out of this. I do wonder what I will decide to edit this down to or whether I'm just going to upload it warts and all. Yeah, well, whatever it is you just saw, I hope you enjoyed it. Please let me know what you think in the comments.