All the stress, waiting, deliberation and expenditure surrounding the once-blinded, now substituted Thinkpad laptop I got for free a year ago has finally come to a culmination, and I am pleased to report that it has a new home.

The original plan, three or four months ago, was to relegate that machine to a friend who needed a new computer, but wasn’t really in a position to buy one. (You might find that difficult to believe given computer prices these days, but try to be open-minded. Not everyone in the world is as fortunate as you.) I gave myself a week or two to test the “new” machine before offering it with the 40Gb hard drive and Windows 2000 that the computer shop installed.

And it was gratefully accepted, which is no real surprise since the friend’s old machine was a full 100Mhz slower, had less memory and a smaller hard drive. Systemwise it was a rather tangled mass of partitions, some dedicated to the original Windows 98SE installation, with the addition of an unlicensed version of Windows 2000. BootMagic, or something like that, allowed you to pick the OS on startup, and the partitions were “connected” with a series of folder shortcuts. Very complex.

All that aside, it was a simple matter to pull my friend’s personal files out of the desktop machine, and copy them into the new machine. Both machines have only USB1.1 ports, but there wasn’t so much stuff that it needed more than 30 minutes to copy. And with that, the deed was done.

I tried to offer Linux as a split-boot for the machine, but it was declined. On the other hand, both Firefox and OpenOffice.org are on it now, and since it lives offline, it should be fine.

And in return, I now have this monster as a charity case. May I introduce you to the Sotec PC Station M260RW:

 

This sports a 600Mhz Celeron, a 30Gb hard drive and 192Mb SDRAM as an upgrade. At some point someone added a Realtek 8139-based network card as well, so it has high-speed (relatively) network access. Graphics are Intel 82810E-based, with sound out of a CS4281 sound card.

Some unfortunate omissions were original system disks, since it’s licensed to run a Japanese version of Win98SE, and a working mouse. Keyboard is a little finicky, and might need replacing. On the other hand, someone installed a rather nice Toshiba SD-R1002 DVD drive in it, and it also has a funky drive-bay drawer that I’ve never seen before. And maybe best of all, down at the bottom on the front is, of all things, a PCMCIA card slot.

But much like the VAIO I took home six months ago, the real albatross for this machine is the monitor. I do believe this one is bigger than the last, and suffers the fault of not being a Trinitron, making it even less desirable.

On the other hand, beggars can’t be choosers, if I can say that without sounding rude. I’ll give it a cleaning and a testing inside and out, and see if I can find a home for this too. No harm in trying. 😀