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commodorez · 6 months

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Got a "new" laptop: Toshiba T4900CT!

Presumably this is the highest end machine they made in this color scheme before moving onto the gray plastic computers, like what @aperture-in-the-multiverse has. This machine is technically not a Satellite, but it's Satellite-adjacent.

Pentium I at 75MHz 40MB of RAM 8GB CF card for a hard drive VLB video chipset driving an SVGA 640x480, 64K color 10.4" active matrix TFT-LCD Analog Devices AD1848KP & Yamaha OPL3 audio Windows 95B (originally shipped with 3.11)

And a broken floppy drive!

Seriously, you have to disassemble the entire computer to get at the floppy drive itself, and I'm pretty sure the belt is busted. So far I've worked around it, but it's getting to be annoying. The good news is that the hard drive is accessible from a separate bay, unlike other contemporary Toshiba laptops that bury it just like the floppy drive.

Oh, and Toshiba was really intent on protecting their highly proprietary Toshiba Card Manager 3.0 software (which I'm sure this post will poison that search term for all others, it always happens when I talk about technical things here -- sorry). I'm betting that they only had it installed on machines from the factory, but if you needed to reinstall it, things got complicated. Turns out you had to get a passphrase from some convoluted bullshit on their website back in the mid 90s, and this only applied to a select handful of machines that were even compatible with it in the first place. I don't imagine I will be able to use that for PCMCIA hotswap management, which sucks.

Another fun bit is that despite being released in 1995, this machine is clearly intended to run Windows 3.1. None of the drivers I was able to locate for the hardware are the expected VXD or INF files.

For the moment, I've got a Backpack external floppy drive connected via the parallel port, but all other file transfers involve me removing the CF card from the hard drive bay. It's faster that way. Hopefully I can get this thing configured well enough to use it.

#toshiba #t4900ct #windows 95

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