January 2024

I believe this was some relative's computer (Tom and Jean?) and then the HDD died on it so they gave it to us as a toy.  I figured out that I could boot it with some sort of DOS boot disk (looks like one could "Create and MS-DOS startup disk" straight from the Windows 98 Format window) and then was able to take that disk (3.5" floppy) out and put in other disks with games on them.

So I would download abandonware games and put them on floppies to play.  I remember taking it on Science Olympiad bus trips.  I guess it actually had a decent battery in it.

I'm not entirely sure of the start date on this one.  It was released in 1988.  Also not 100% sure of the model.  I'm reasonably sure it was a 286 so not the Model 70, and I'm thinking the pictures of the Model 30-286 fit my memory most closely.

Very similar to this example.  And based on the ad from there which matched exactly on specs, I think it was the 5150 model.  It was purchased from RadioShack.

I think I cobbled this together from a massive pile of junk that a guy from our church gave us.

On 2020-07-16 I found some more info in this newsgroup post from 2020-05-08 when I was digging into some old newsgroup posts for nostalgia's sake:

This processor was around 800MHz I think.

The PC was auctioned at a surplus sale that the BSC Vocational Center and my friend Jeremiah was at the sale.  He didn't know what speed it was but did know that it was a Duron so I looked up that processor and was VERY excited to be able to get it for some price ($50?) even if it was the slowest model.

This lived in my clear case (almost all parts built of clear plastic).  Maybe the Pentium II system did too?

I really wanted a tablet PC for college so I convinced my parents to get this one.  It cost $1500 and I believe I had to chip in about $500 of that.

I purchased a second battery for it.  Then they issued a battery recall so I got each of my two batteries replaced, except I did not send the "dangerous" ones back, so I had four batteries that I used.

The story of why I put an SSD in it.

I took my Proview PL713s with me to use as a second screen.

This had very similar specs to the Toshiba Satellite R15 system.

I bought it from my friend Sarah for maybe $50 when she no longer had a use for it, in the fall of 2008 I believe.

I used it to run Linux, possibly in relation to my senior design project?  But we rented a couple laptops for that so maybe not.

Shortly into my freshman year at NDSU my friend Mike and I went to Best Buy and purchased copies of Half Life 2.  My Toshiba R15 was all but unable to run the game so I soon ordered $800 worth of parts.  This system played the game quite well.

I spent a bit more to get the ATI All-In-Wonder graphics card.  The drivers were crap and always crashed so I was never really able to watch or record TV like I had dreamed of.

This was given out to attendees at Microsoft's PDC 2009 event.  I did not go; I bought one for myself a while later while I was working at Microsoft.

It had a resistive touch screen which I believe was sort of lame as capacitive touchscreens of that size were just starting to become available around that time.

Convertible mechanism was twist-type.

This was a gift from Microsoft while I worked there; it was cool but I never ended up using it much.  The keyboard (cover) had no moving parts but worked very well.