 I have several new computers, and a cup of tea, but that's not the important bit. So what this is, is a very early Toshiba laptop from about 1987. It's honestly moderately terrible, but it is rather interesting, and this does not work. Now, I have actually done a ton of work on this machine trying to make it work. I've recapped the motherboard, and I managed to make it run for like five minutes when something happened. These have notoriously flaky power supply electronics on the motherboard, and this one is just defunct. However, recently I got this. This is another identical but much grubbier T1000. Now, this one apparently has a working motherboard but a defunct screen. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to do a brain transplant and move the motherboard and battery and so on from this one into this nice clean one, and hopefully end up with a working computer. So the first thing I want to do is actually verify that this thing works, which I haven't done yet. I've powered it on so I know that the electronics work enough to like light the appropriate light, but nothing more than that. So what I'm going to do is since the screen is defunct and let me open it up, come on, here we go, and you can probably see exactly what's wrong with it. I am going to connect my favorite little cheap and nasty composite reversing monitor for a car if I can get the wires untangled. And we go and see what happens. So we plug one of these in here. I plug this into the composite video port and trying to find a place I can prop this where you'll be able to see the screen without any glare. Okay. And now I need the 9 volt power supply, which I actually plugged in earlier. Here we are. Now I haven't actually done this yet, so I have no idea whether this will actually work. So let's have a go. This plugs in here and I press the switch. So the screen lights up. The power LED here goes green. This means that the battery is intact. These things have a unique power supply system where the battery is actually a vital part of the entire power supply module. So you can't run them off the mains unless there's a battery in it. My other one, I've tried powering it through the battery terminals. And oops, that did a thing. Not a very good thing. Nothing's happened here. So the other thing is that they may need a key sequence to start the CRT. So let's just start pressing keys. And I also have not heard the floppy drive chug, which usually happens. The screen clearing here is about the right time for it to attempt to boot. Okay, I just bet that something to have happened. So sometimes you need to press the key sequence to make it switch to the CRT. If I plug this into the right one, yellow is usually video, but let's just try the other one in case. Nothing's here. This won't do anything until it receives a valid signal. The other thing I need to check is that it's actually getting power. Now the power supply is getting warm, so I would expect it to actually be doing something. So down here there's the contrast knob for the screen. And you can see it's just like not in good shape. So I think something has bashed the screen here and damaged a lot of it. But the fact that you get just these lines does not bode well. Hmm, okay. Well, I kind of want to make sure the motherboard works before I start dismantling it. Let's try a disk. There's nothing on it. I just want to try and make it boot. Draw it out there, maybe. Nothing. Power cycle. So normally what happens when you turn it on is it will sit and check its memory very, very slowly. And then it will attempt to boot from floppy. And if it doesn't boot from floppy, it will attempt to boot off the internal ROM because this thing has DOS in ROM. That's what one of the things makes it interesting. But I would also expect here to beep. Interesting. Okay, well, if this motherboard does not work, I actually have a third motherboard which I could try. So I do need the battery out of this one because this is the only battery pack I've got. So I have to dismantle this anyway. I was hoping to have DOS working, but it's unplugged all. Okay, well that was not particularly promising. So dismantling. The thing is a pig to take apart as are pigs. Not that I've ever taken apart a pig. So it's got lots of screws, some of which are not the same size as the others. Well, maybe the screen is actually working, but the CPU is defunct. That would explain why it's not displaying anything. I got this as a lot of Toshiba stuff from somebody who wanted to clear out their collection. So some of it is working and some of it not. I got a lovely 286 laptop, 1990, weighing about 8 kilos. It works really nicely, but it's far too big to actually fit under the camera. And yes, it is a laptop. How do I do the next bit? Lift off. I've done this before, you see. This is a screw. I haven't done. I think I've got them all. This is the amount of feet. I don't remember that. That's not a screw. I think I'm just not doing it right. It's probably plastic clips. There's some pry marks. That will be where the previous owner prided apart. Now I had a plastic prying tool. There we go. I hate plastic clips. Just use honest screws for heaven's sake. Okay. So what we've got here is the battery, which looks like a new retrofit stuck together with tape, which is awesome because it won't be leaky and horrible. And all I need to do is to screw. Actually, I didn't need to undo that screw. It just lifts out. But I do need to unplug this. There we go. What have we got here? Four slightly grubby NICADs. Oh, this might be original. Four slightly grubby 1600mAh NICADs. This plastic film has been cut open. And there's a lot of corrosion in the wires. It's not supposed to be brown, apart from the brown one. But it's enough to keep the supply electronics happy, so that's fine by me. This tucks under here and the screw does up, and that holds all the batteries in place. Okay. So here we have a new battery module, which I'll just slightly bendy battery module. Maybe it's not original. Pretty gruesome. Okay. So what we've got in here is this is the dubious power supply system, and I don't see any obviously bulging caps or anything. The other machine I actually recapped it. I took all these off the board and replaced them, and it was a horrible job too. And it didn't actually help, so I'm not feeling resentful at all about that. The keyboard on these things is this nasty spongy affair. Like, I'd like to rebuild keyboards and turn old keyboards into USB PC ones. I have a video series on where I'm doing that with an old Casio typewriter, but this one, I don't think I want to do that. It's, actually, this one's better than mine. That's very interesting. That's what they were all saying. This is actually a little bit tactile. These aren't. These are spongy as heck. And this is the UK model, though it's still antsy-ish layout. Looking at the case, there's some gruesome slime there, which isn't brilliant. My one has a rather nasty bent piece of plastic for the screen, but I'm not sure I can easily get that out, so I think I'll just live with it, because it's, like, not critical. Okay, let's stick this thing back together again. Without the battery in it, it won't start up at all. It just, like, nothing works. We'll put the screws back in. Maybe to hold it all together. So the T1000 is extremely early laptop. It has no internal storage at all. What you get is a single 720K floppy drive and DOS in ROM, and that's your lot. It doesn't even have a full complement of 640K of RAM. It's got 512K, which is kind of on the small side. You can get... That's not right. You can get upgrades, but I have never actually seen one on eBay or anything. Extending the RAM probably by another half megabyte to one megabyte total will give you a full 640K of DOS memory, plus probably some expanded RAM which you can use for disk cache. My tip's not done up. There we go. And that will make the thing much easier to use. The processor is a very, very slow 8088. Okay, I'm going to fetch the other motherboard out. And here it is. One bare motherboard. Now, the package I got said that the spare did actually work, but I was hoping the one in the laptop would too. I still don't know if it doesn't, but... So, let us attempt to fire it up. Let me just... I think that way is off. Plug in the... That's it. Right, now the battery without which everything is futile. The 9V supply is here. Green light. That means the battery is functional. Nothing on the CRT. So, I'm waiting to see if the light flashes. I think the... Yeah, the beeper is not on the board. The beeper plugs in here. So, we're not even going to get a startup beep. The only thing we'll see is a red light. There we go. It just tried to boot. And it will fail to boot because there is no floppy drive attached. And I was hoping it would switch to the CRT, but it looks like it's not. But that does tell me that this motherboard is live. So, let us go ahead and put it into the working chassis. So, dismantle all this. With care, I do not want to zap the board, given how much effort I went to to try and find the working one. I probably ought to recap it, but I ain't going to... Oh, it's interesting. I think this is different from mine. I don't remember the lines. Of course the... There's a glare in the camera. The white lines here are obviously dividing up the board. This horrible, horrible mess is the power supply. It takes the 9 volt AC and the 4.8 volt battery and it charges the battery and it generates all the positive and negative voltages the rest of the system needs. And they are notoriously flaky. That's really interesting. Ferv S4 Series 4. My one doesn't have that cap on it. I remember that much. What have we got here? Yeah, it's all bespoke chips. I believe this is probably the processor, the big one. And this is... Yeah, this is RAM. I can tell that because it says RAM right there. This connector is for the RAM expansion and I was slightly hoping that my... that laptop would have one, but... Okay, right. Let's get the other computer out. Okay, here is the nice clean one. This came from a junk shop in Silicon Valley. A legendary weird stuff warehouse sadly no longer functioning. It was sold like unseen. It was in pretty good condition on the outside. Somebody who was visiting brought it for me knowing that I was into old computers but they didn't check to make sure it actually worked. When I took the lid off the first time it was obvious that someone had gone through the inside and systematically removed everything that was of value. So the battery pack was completely missing. The power supply had gone, you know, that sort of stuff. But the case is lovely and clean and not at all yellow. It's in really good shape. So I'm hoping that this thing I'm about to do will give me a nicely working machine. Yes, this is the... This is the US keyboard model. So you can see the at sign here other than that everything's the same shape. And yes, this one is spongier than the other UK keyboard which is extremely interesting. Right, now... So here is where I've recapped stuff. I was unable to find the capacitor that would fit this so I, you know, wired it in like that. These two sockets are for a Modem expansion card that fits in here for, you know, telecommunications, internet access on the road. First let's just remove the floppy disk drive. At least I don't have to dismantle the other one. It's good to have a nice set of spare parts. This should unhook. Just unplug this. This is the display. That allows us to put this aside completely which gives a lot more space to work in. Okay, there is a grounding screw there that normally connects to the floppy disk drive cage which I didn't bother to do up the last time I took it apart. Come on. There we go. Just unplug this somehow. The floppy disk drive is non-standard. You can make them work but yes, that is a different motherboard. This is the Ferb S7. The other one is obviously older. Interesting. So yes, actually it's quite different. Okay, not that different. This layout is different. They obviously reworked the power supply. This side looks the same. Here is the capacitor here. Jumpers, same layout. I found the maintenance manual for one model of motherboard which wasn't this one. I think it could have been this one. That would be interesting. I wonder if they've had trouble with the power supply and the series 7 was supposed to fix it if so it didn't work. I see that all the analog components are the same. No matter. Okay, let's get this keyboard off. Just lift off. This is a variant of the Ubiquitous PCB Clamp Collector. And that just pulls out. Thus giving us access to the motherboard. Here is the horrible puto electric squeaker. And two screws. Never go to work without a magnetic screwdriver. Now this lifts up and it slides. Is that warm? That's not warm. Something felt weird here, but it was just an illusion. But I have been trained extremely successfully that you feel anything like heat. Or there's a bit like heat. Or like electricity. And you jump. Okay, I just misremembered. This does have the lines on it. Although they are much less prominent and laid out a little differently. The back of the board is significantly different from the two models. At least this stuff is. Interesting. Okay, well, let's take the dead board and put it aside. And now we just have to reassemble it with the good board. Try not to break anything while we do it. We have broken things while working on them. And this annoying one being an extremely rare floppy disk drive for the Epson PX8 CPM laptop. Which I actually managed to connect up to the wrong power supply while doing a battery removal. There's an internal battery that was beginning to leak and corroding. So I had to remove it. And while I was testing I connected it to 12 volts instead of to 5 volts. And the internal fuse stopped working and so did the rest of it. And I've been slowly diagnosing that and trying to figure out what the hell's going on. I managed to get all that on video including the dreadful moment when I actually killed it. I have some parts on order that might actually repair it. We'll see. I may have fried the processor on that. Okay. Do I want to... Okay, keyboard is next. So we open the clamp. This just drops in. And it goes down. Cool. I have to say this machine, despite its many, many, many flaws is a pleasure to work on. You can get all the bits really easily. Nothing really gets in the way of anything else. So this simply plugs on. And which of these screws was the floppy drive? Short ones, I think. Let's try these short ones. I need the long ones. I need the longer ones. There is not really a lot you can do with a 512K DOS 2 machine. And then we're going to do it. So there's no expansion other than the Modem. However, it does have a parallel port. And you can abuse parallel ports for mass storage using devices known as zip drives. And if you've ever used a zip drive at this point you will be cringing because they are quite rightly considered absolutely vile. But they do work really well for this sort of thing. So that plugs in and drops into place. And I believe we're done with this. So I can use a zip drive as 120 megabytes of rather slow storage. And on a machine with no floppy disk drive that's actually a godsend. Sorry, no hard drive, that's a godsend. They are really annoying and whiny. Though I recently had the pleasure of working with a genuine Kona 20 megabyte drive from 1990. And I have to say, annoying and whiny, you have no idea. Those old drives are dreadful. Because they hadn't invented modern bearings. And they just whine and whine and whine this mosquito-like irritating noise. I actually replaced that with a compact flash adapter just to make the noise stop. Also 20 megabytes is ridiculously small. It's a shame to lose the head seek noises which are actually rather nice. But you couldn't hear it over the noise of the drive. So, yeah. So now that machine is quite a lot nicer to use and it boots quickly. Doing these screws up when they are in fact all mismatched is probably a guarantee that when I connect the thing up it won't work. But this has not been a particularly complex operation. So there we go. Hardware engineers are not superstitious. It is all fact every bit of it. Right. Well, we don't need the CRT anymore. So... Oh! Yikes! That was actually starting off battery. It's charged. Okay. So what have we got? Memory test. Can you see that on the screen? There we go. On the camera. The speed of the memory check might give you a bit of an indication as to just how slow this machine really is. 512. And it boots to Shiba Dose. And the date is now... Error 0, 1980. Hmm. I wonder if it's got a real-time clock. That'd be nice. The current date is... What format does it want? The date in... American Month Day 18. It accepted it. Yes, it did. Time... 21, 25. There we go. Wow, it works. There's quite a lot of stuff in it too. This is on ROM. Because it's on ROM, it's difficult to configure. Okay. I was not expecting a error on the ROM drive. And I didn't want to type config sys anyway. Yes, I did want to type config sys. What? Why am I getting an error there? Bizarre. Check disk. We've got through... Er... How big is it? Total disk space, 730K, three-quarters of a megabyte. Nought bytes available. Yeah, it's a ROM. No kidding. We've got the setup command. I've got the exact bat. Why is it doing stuff with drive D? Go to no IC. No internal something. Now, it is now June 20th, 2019. Okay, that's good. We've got the setup command. What is there to set up? So set the RAM config. Ah, right. So I believe it's possible to, like, configure things. Yeah. This is why I was getting the error with config sys, because it's cheating. When I look at the config sys in the ROM, it's actually being redirected to a RAM disk. Built-in RS232 port assigned. It's probably on COM2, because it's expecting the mode empty on COM1. Bidirectional, hell yes. Er... Let's not reset now. Yes, I do want to change the setup annual. Primary display type. 40 by 25 or 80 by 25. Interesting, okay. So there's also test 10, which will let you test all the things. Test the FDD. I'm not going to run that through that now. The one thing I really like about the Toshiba keyboards is that I put the control key in the right place. System configuration. Ah, that's what it's set up as. So let's try floppy disk. Yeah, it looks like it worked. This is actually some DOS installation. This is... Okay, so I've got expand, but I don't have QBasic. I can't run gorillas, which is on this disk. Maybe it's on the other one. Yeah, I was installing DOS 5 on a different machine. I overwrote one of the disks once I'd finished, so... That one's got QBasic on it. Triple is, I have to get it off from one disk to the other disk. Do not believe, yeah, there is no RAM disk. There's no RAM. Ooh, I can do that. That's gruesome. Er... I need to restart the camera. Okay, yeah, I was reaching the end of the 20 minute limit. So I can actually copy a file from one to the other. So there are two logical drives, A and B, but only one physical drive. And the way this works is you can operate on both drives and it will prompt you to change disks. So I can actually copy QBasic from one file, from one disk to another. Yeah, I'm not going to bother doing that. If I do try that, it will be for another video. Right now, I'm getting distracted playing with it rather than testing it. I want to give the CRT a try. So... Oh yeah, a rather nice design feature of this is the screen that goes all the way flat. Which makes it very easy for me to film. Okay. Oh yeah, that changes the font. I don't know if you can see that, but it toggles between fat and thin fonts. All the Toshibas do this. Page up or page down is usually CRT. No. Okay, that should have switched to the CRT. Screen power supply is warming up, but no screen. It's the yellow wire. See, maybe my screen is broken. It wasn't the last time I tried it. It is plugged into the right port by the setup command again. Primary display type, yeah, it doesn't have to give you the option. So no, I don't want to set that. Okay, well, either the CRT electronics is broken, the composite electronics are broken, or my screen is broken or something about the signal this thing generates doesn't get on with this screen. The defunct machine, I did actually get a signal on this screen with it and I have that on camera like I have actual proof. So I do know that it's supposed to work, but that was the other revision of the board. Yeah, I have no idea what's going on there. But it works. The battery appears to be either charged or charging. Is there a battery monitoring command? No, there isn't. I remember looking at this last time. The only kind of battery monitoring there is is a single voltage comparator that changes this light from red to green and something to make it power down completely when the voltage isn't high enough. So you cannot tell what the battery is doing from software. You just have to, you know, guess. But this does look like it's working. Select, what does select do? Oh, OK, that lets you install Dawson to a disk. Yeah, I don't see anything particularly interesting. Dawson, a floppy disk, I suppose. Is that interesting? But yeah, this machine is now working. The brain transplant was a success. I wonder whether it is worth trying to put the motherboard from the old, from the old case. No, I have one known broken motherboard and one potentially broken motherboard. So no, I don't have the facilities to actually get to anything else working. I was thinking it might be nice to try and compare the working board's power supply test points with the broken one to see if I can see a difference. But as they are different revisions, that isn't going to work. The two boards I currently have are the Series 7 defunct one and whichever one is in the dirty case. But they're probably not comparable and besides the one in the dirty case is probably broken too. OK, well I'm going to call this a success. So that is how you change the motherboard in an old Toshiba laptop. I hope you enjoyed this video. Please let me know what you think in the comments.