Check out my hacked Satellite 1605CDS (+ question about CPU and LCD upgrade)

***NOT A SALE AD***

Since you all seem to be into old hardware I thought Id make this offer. I have a 533mhz K6-2+ ACZ. Im not sure if it still works, it looks fine, and I have no way of testing it. If someone wants to pay for shipping Id be happy to send it your way. PM me if youre interested.
 
Well, first of all I would like to thank "repoman", "treppiede" and others that had made great posts regarding this toshiba sattelite kind, and reading them was not only interesting but, in my case also a lot of money saving: my cd-rom on my tosbiha doesn´t work and I was planning to spend a lot on a replacement-upgrade on a dvd, but now I know that his amd 475 - even considering an upgrade to a 550 that I plan to do following a previous post,- is weak for dvd reading. So I will buy another cd, maybe a teac22e, to replace the bad one. Has anybody here did it, or know on how to do it?

Thanking in advance any help,
Carlos
 
I honestly don't know how universal laptop optical drives are. I have watched a few auctions on Ebay from a seller who is evidently parting out a number of older Toshiba laptops. I was originally thinking of buying a DVDROM from him, but since I know that won't work, I was toying with the idea of a CDRW.

If anyone else has any experience with replacing laptop optical drives, please chime in.

And I'm interested in anyones experience with replacing their battery.
 
ProperX, the default XP video driver works fine, but it does not allow you to use the dual monitor function. But the one available here does, http://www.geocities.com/ziyadhosein/rprow2k.htm . You'll want to disable the monitor power saving feature. When it goes out, it won't come back until you reboot.

I don't have any input on the memory. Try running CPUz, and see what it reports.
 
repo man said:
I honestly don't know how universal laptop optical drives are. I have watched a few auctions on Ebay from a seller who is evidently parting out a number of older Toshiba laptops. I was originally thinking of buying a DVDROM from him, but since I know that won't work, I was toying with the idea of a CDRW.

If anyone else has any experience with replacing laptop optical drives, please chime in.

And I'm interested in anyones experience with replacing their battery.
Click to expand...


Most drives are able to be used in all laptops, I know the cd-rw in m gateway came from a dell, you just have to have the right setup for it and the bios be compatable
 
Also, does this Toshiba kind ( minee is a 1620cds 475amd) support and deal with an external usb tv, for seing televison on it ?
 
Wow... haven't checked the board for 2 days and it picks up quite some popularity I see...

To those of you that expressed their appreciation for our 'efforts', thank you and welcome aboard our adventure... ;)

As far as battery is concerned, mine too would last no longer than 5 minutes so I did some research and it turned out that (back in december) the best deal was offered by these guys. What you see there is a link to the actual eBay auction I had won, the shipping was very slow but the battery turned out being very good, and if taken care of (no overcharging) it will last you several hours. I don't know if they are offering any 1600-series batteries right now, but you could email them and find out.

carlos39 said:
but now I know that his amd 475 [...] is weak for dvd reading.
Click to expand...
Carlos, it may not be produce the smoothest DVD playback, but DVD-Drives are great to have for Data DVDs as well, for example look at my case: I am trying SuSE 9.2 on my Satellite in favor of my beloved FreeBSD setup due to better compatibility, if I had a DVD drive I would have had it installed already, but since I don't have one I need to configure the NIC manually to fetch the install from FTP which is a royal PITA... ;)

As far as BIOS upgrade, stay tuned guys because I am currently talking to the man himself - Jan Steunebrink - and he is currently working on a BIOS for us!
So lets cross our fingers because Phoenix BIOSes seem to be quite the challenge to patch.

LadyMakoFox: congratulations on the two laptops, now you have too many eh? Hold on to the Satellite, we'll help you beef it up so you can go wardriving with it... ;)

Regards,

Walter
 
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Canterbury said:
***NOT A SALE AD***

Since you all seem to be into old hardware I thought Id make this offer. I have a 533mhz K6-2+ ACZ. Im not sure if it still works, it looks fine, and I have no way of testing it. If someone wants to pay for shipping Id be happy to send it your way. PM me if youre interested.
Click to expand...
DIBS
if its still avaliable
 
Treppiede said:
Wow... haven't checked the board for 2 days and it picks up quite some popularity I see...

To those of you that expressed their appreciation for our 'efforts', thank you and welcome aboard our adventure... ;)

As far as battery is concerned, mine too would last no longer than 5 minutes so I did some research and it turned out that (back in december) the best deal was offered by these guys. What you see there is a link to the actual eBay auction I had won, the shipping was very slow but the battery turned out being very good, and if taken care of (no overcharging) it will last you several hours. I don't know if they are offering any 1600-series batteries right now, but you could email them and find out.


Carlos, it may not be produce the smoothest DVD playback, but DVD-Drives are great to have for Data DVDs as well, for example look at my case: I am trying SuSE 9.2 on my Satellite in favor of my beloved FreeBSD setup due to better compatibility, if I had a DVD drive I would have had it installed already, but since I don't have one I need to configure the NIC manually to fetch the install from FTP which is a royal PITA... ;)

As far as BIOS upgrade, stay tuned guys because I am currently talking to the man himself - Jan Steunebrink - and he is currently working on a BIOS for us!
So lets cross our fingers because Phoenix BIOSes seem to be quite the challenge to patch.

LadyMakoFox: congratulations on the two laptops, now you have too many eh? Hold on to the Satellite, we'll help you beef it up so you can go wardriving with it... ;)

Regards,

Walter
Click to expand...

Yeah, I have WAY too many now...

I've got Q the Quantex 233mhz one I gave my gf
Q2 my new gateway
the toshi to be delivered on the 11th (I most likely am going to give her the toshi because shes on 233mhz)and another Toshi with a 1.13 celeron which needs repairs baddly (board and case toast and no hd/ram with it)

I went from no laptops to 4 in less then 6 months lol and I use my new gateway more then my desktop
 
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Great news, Treppiede!

But, since I never did an update on a bios on a notebook, would be it worth to take the risk? Well, if the new Bios will allow higher multipliers to the processor, higher graphic resolutions, etc., of course I will also enter on it, after of course, making a couple of prayers.

Regarding the DVD drive on it, I´ll rethink it, but I was thinking more on film viewing than data, but I think that there are some kind of software and programs that help and "simulate" particially the processor effort, maybe this way it will go...

Meanwhile if anyone has the service manual, or know a place where to download it, for this Toshiba kind ( mine is a 1620cds, but others like the 16o5 and similar, are good) please let me know, because I need to replace ( or maybe i profit the opportunity and upgrade to a dvd drive) the cd-rom drive that isn´t working.
 
carlos39 said:
Well, if the new Bios will allow higher multipliers to the processor, higher graphic resolutions, etc., of course I will also enter on it
Click to expand...
Not gonna happen Carlos. We would be happy with full K6plus series support. Additionally, USB booting would be a God-send for me since that way I could ditch the hard drive and boot SuSE or BSD from a 1-2Gb Thumbdrive which would shoot battery life to the roof and drop the temperature down by a lot.

Regards,

Walter
 
The resolution is limited by the LCD. The GPU is capable of higher, but the LCD is not.
 
Well, if that would give support for all the k6 plus, that would be already very good.
 
I just installed a k6-III+ 450mHz in a Satillite 2100CDT (originally a k6-2 400 ack 2.0v) along with a Seagate 40gb 8mb cache 5400rpm drive st94811a momentus and the max of 192mb of ram. So far I can manipulate multipliers and write combining with CPUCool or PowerTweak under WinXP sp2 but k6speed won't work.

My question is does anyone know of a European or Austrailian satillite in the 2100 series that came with a k6-II+ or III+? I'm also looking for alternate bioses. I'm going to install linux (probably gentoo) and there are sufficiant tools there, so the bios update isn't necessary but it would be nice for 2k/winxp.

I'm happy to find other satillite upgraders here... I've also got a presario 1692 on the bench that will run with the III+ but it has other problems booting unrelated to cpu.

JohnY
 
JohnY said:
along with a Seagate 40gb 8mb cache 5400rpm drive st94811a momentus
Click to expand...
Eheheh... I just bought the same exact drive for my External USB 2.0 enclosure... What a great little drive so far, and the 5 year warranty is great to have.

Can you give me quick specs on your 2100CDT? What kind of screen does it have? As you may imagine, the screen for us 16xxCDx owners is the sad part, and if your laptop has the same motherboard as ours but a decent screen as opposed to that sorry excuse of a screen we have, that would be very interesting... ;)

Have you ever taken it apart? If you do, can you please post some good-res pics of your motherboard/chipset? I will do a part # search later on when I get out of work.

Walter
 
well I got mine today, found the small problems on it and fixed most of them..


I found it was dark gray and gray so I was happy with the colors :) as it closely matched my gateway.

but looks like I'm gonna have to bite the bullet and sell it cause I gotta get a new place to rent.
 
Treppiede said:
Eheheh...

Can you give me quick specs on your 2100CDT? What kind of screen does it have? As you may imagine, the screen for us 16xxCDx owners is the sad part, and if your laptop has the same motherboard as ours but a decent screen as opposed to that sorry excuse of a screen we have, that would be very interesting... ;)

Have you ever taken it apart? If you do, can you please post some good-res pics of your motherboard/chipset? I will do a part # search later on when I get out of work.

Walter
Click to expand...

I have had it apart (to install the K6-III+ and drive), and on this particular laptop that means all the way apart - screen disconnected from base etc. Unfortunately, it has an 800x600 TFT screen. - It's not bad - but I have an old Tecra 720 with a 1024x768 TFT that is much nicer. I don't have a digital cam for pics but I may be able to borrow one....

Sysid is able to change multiplier and writecombining etc in winxp and it's freeware. The chipset ... hmmm says toshiba but I'll have to look more closely. Does toshiba rebrand ALi?

Besides booting win98se, and winxp, I've also installed BeOS5 as a test and that works too, but my pccard nic is not supported there.

All in all it's a good machine especially with the Seagate momentus drive....

JohnY
 
So is it possible to upgrade the amd processor from 475 to 550 with only that freeware program syside, thus not making the need to open the computer and get the switches? Well that´s good, if it works just that without problems. I ^ _ ^ I
 
Hey all,
I had been having a problem getting XP to recognize my 256mb stick of memory on a 1625cdt. But it was fine when I got the laptop with Win 98 loaded on it. I saved what I needed and went back to 98 last night and it saw the memory just fine (320 total). Then I tried upgrading rather than a new install of XP and no go. So for now I am going to run 98 because XP with only 64 mb of memory is just too slow.

Any luck getting the new BIOS?

Thanks
ProperX
 
Hi Proper and all,

I am very curious on the fact that your satellite works with that memory, I think that, liKe mine ( a 1620cds) the official maximum is 160M; so I am think of tryng to install a huge ram upgrade and see if it also works.
I bought a cd-rom drive from ebay last week ( but damn !) ; I know how to go inside and change the hard disk and etc., but I don´t know how to change the cd drive...

Regards,
Carlos
 
Sysid will change the multiplier on a k6+ (either II+ or III+) because is has - what is it called? PowerNow? I don't think that a regular k6-2 will work. The board in the 2100CDT doesn't have any switches that I can find, but with Sysid I've had it running at 550 (default of the board is 400mHz). This CPU was stable at 600 in a Fic503+ but I haven't tried 600mHz yet on the laptop (much weaker cooling). I'm surprized that XP sp2 runs as well as it does in 192mb with the K6-III+ and the Seagate Momentus drive.

JohnY
 
Sup Guys...

Well I am still waiting for Jan's verdict in regards to the BIOS, so let's keep the fingers crossed.

Carlos39: BIOS updates are easy and safe on a laptop, just ensure the battery is charged and the power adapter plugged in, and - of course - that the BIOS you are flashing is the correct one and you're set. Just wait for Jan to get back with me and then me and Repoman will let you know if it proceeded smoothly for us...

JohnY, only the K6plus series of CPUs have the PowerNow! technology which is similar to Intel's SpeedStep and allows the CPU multiplier to be changed via software to optimize battery life. A regular K6-2 will not be compatible with the software that K6plus owners use to overclock their machines because it lacks PowerNow! technology. The only way to change frequency/ratio settings is by opening up the baby and playing around with jumpers and/or switches. ;)

ProperX: strange, once the system recognizes the memory stick the OS should automatically detect it... press ESC in the Toshiba screen to see the POST screen... how much memory do you see in there? Let us know.

Regards,

Walter
 
Guys,
I just wanted to let you know that Jan emailed me today and gave me an update on the BIOS situation for our Satellites...

Concerning the Toshiba 1605 BIOS, I've made some progress. Until now I've only patched Award and AMI BIOSes and the 1605 BIOS is the first Phoenix BIOS I'm trying to patch. Amazingly, the Phoenix BIOS structure is completely different from that of Award and AMI...
So analyzing this new BIOS type is a slow but interesting process. ;-)

I started by identifying each module in the (compressed) BIOS and its function. Then I took the 3! core modules and analyzed them with my disassembled. This is the most time consuming part, and I've done this for both the 1605 and 1620 BIOS.
The next step is to find the CPU detection algorithm and find out how it works. After this step I need to find a way to patch the 1605 BIOS for K6plus support.
Finally I will need to find a way to get the patches module(s) back in compressed from in the BIOS ROM file and get the checksum bytes correct.

As you see, still a long way to go... ;-))
I will keep you posted.
Click to expand...

So... it may not be ready tonight but Jan is on it and is working hard to help us out. Let's make sure we get some spare change together and offer him a couple of drinks via PayPal when we get the final patch!

I will keep you updated.

;)

Walter
 
I'd be happy to send a few bucks Jans way, even if this BIOS doesn't pan out. I've used several of his BIOS files, and he has always been willing to help out.

I have a sticky at Overclockers.com, even though I no longer participate in that forum. It is about running K6 plus CPUs in older motherboards. A new member sent me a few PMs requesting help with an old Iwill Socket 7 board. I was able to help him get it going, and I mentioned how Jan might be willing to patch a BIOS for that board if he asked nicely. Sure enough, Jan patched a BIOS for him.
 
Walter,
I haven't posted here in a while but I do check in once in a while to see what is going on. Thanks for the update on Jan's work. It looks like it is pretty involved. I have the PayPal account ready to shoot something his way when he's finished.....

Elton
 
I just put in a cd rom and floppy yesterday, in my 1625cdt . Its a piece of cake. If you havent done it yet just ask and ill give you the details.
 
I just tried a samsung 256 memory chip in me 1625cdt and it wouldnt post. Its a PC133 like pictured on page 3. But mine is part M464S3254BT2 different last three digits. But oh well now we know.
Thanks Jeremy
 
Hey guys, health problems from a car accident have made me being far form here during some time.

Thank you, 44, I Don´t know yet how to put a new cd-rom.
I know how to open this baby and how to overclock it, - I tried it but I only got to 500, from my 475, after 500 that´s a lot of heat and the computer stops- Thanks to Repomen, Ewells55 and others. My greatest problem is the jumper configuration of the cd-rom and putting it inside the plastic case, I don´t see any screws to atach it.
So I would really apreciate your help.

Carlos39
 
All this talk makes me want to toy with the 730cdt I have sitting behind my bedroom door! ;)
 
Ok, almost gave up on you. You have to get the keyboard up by removing the led light cover, keyboard screws under it , and screws from bottom marked "K". Remove the memory exp cover. From there you can see the wire plug in. From under the keyboard you can see the one or two screws that hold the cd rom in. Mine came rite out. But the new one was a Mother to get in, Would have swore it wasnt going to fit. Took alot of Finness, no muscle, so dont give up if your sure its the rite one.
Good Luck, Jeremy
 
Carlos let me know how yours runs at 500, heat? reliability?. If its dependable how did you overclock it? Switches? I tried the download they talked about but I think it only works with a diff. k6 . not sure.
Thanks Jeremy
 
ewells55 said:
I got my K6-2+ 533MHz chip in yesterday and didn't waste any time playing with it. The first thing I did was install it in a Super socket 7 desktop I have because I am considering an upgrade for it as well. This motherboard is a DFI K6BV3+/66 with 768 mb RAM. The new chip performed well at 550 MHz/ 2.0 volts. I got a 29% increase in CPU performance over my previous 500 MHz K6-2/ 2.2 volt as measured by the benchmark program PCMark2002. Before and after CPU scores were 627 and 807 respectively. I don't know how to get it to 600 MHz with the jumper settings I have. I have heard that it can be done but 100 x 5.5 is all I can figure out.

I then installed the chip in my Toshiba at 550MHz/ 2.0 volts which is also the maximum I know how to achieve. If you guys know a way to get it to 600MHz, please let me know and I will try it. According to a before and after benchmark using PCMark2002, I got about a 33% increase in CPU performance. Before and after CPU scores were 615 and 820 respectively. The big shock was how much cooler the laptop ran with the new chip. The previous chip ran so hot that I had to make some cardboard shims and place under the unit to allow better airflow and cooling. Now the shims are not needed and the unit is cool to the touch. I don't know why, but I expected a bigger increase in performance. However, I am still happy with the upgrade.

Walter, I took the cover off and snapped a picture of my new RAM chip but I can't figure out how to post it. I tried a simple cut and paste but that doesn't work. I tried the "insert image" icon and that doesn't work for me either. Tell me the secret and I will put it up.

Elton
Click to expand...

Use a multiplier of 2, and it will recalculate the mult. to 6.0... ;)
 
Hi 44newman,

Thx. for the telling on the cd-rom issue. My 1620cds is running well at 500 ( I did the overclock using the photos here in the begging of this thread). To reach the maximum, 550 I think it tis necessary another Amd processor, at least a k6 -533, because of the litle heat-cooling that these mobiles computers allow.

I´ll look in Ebay for a 533 or a 550, and then I´ll try the multiplier trick and the software talked here to reach the 600 - If it would really work would be great , but that I doubt...

Cheers,
Carlos
 
Hi guys,

Any news from the new Bios updates?

My 1620cds is now giving me problems: the cd drive I bough didn´t fit, and now after a bad unistall of a freeware language program, :eek: the hard drive is very slow, and doesn´t do the defrag, so I´ll need to format it; a new Bios would be great :) since I would have a way, through the USB boot, to reinstall the operative system, the win.milenium.

Regards,
Carlos
 
Hello everybody


A friend gived me his old Toshiba Satellite 1605cds/4.3 laptop. :)

Somebody tell me about this: http://fandelem.com/toshiba2.html
where it says that it is possible to add a 256 Mb so-dimm and get a total of 288 Mb (32 Mb on board + 256 Mb so-dimm).


Well, I did it and Windows 98 Second Edition show it: 288 Mb of RAM. :eek:

But when I try to install Windows 2000 Professional, I get a blue screen saying that the BIOS isn't ACPI compatible. It also says that I could try to press F7 key during the boot.

If I do this, Windows 2000 installs well but then it reports ONLY 32 Mb of ram
:( :(

If I remove the 256 Mb so-dimm and plug the 64 Mb so-dimm, windows 2000 installs well (even not pushing F7 during the install process) and reports well 94 Mb of ram (32 on board + 64 so-dimm).


I want to run windows 2000 because I need to manage files larger than 4 Gbytes (windows 98 works with FAT32 which doesn't support this size of files).


I have read all entire this post, looking for a solution.
I have found some of you has 256 Mb plugged but I don't know how you did to run windows 2000 with these quantity of ram.

Thanks and sorry my English.



PD: The bios is the latest that can be downloaded from toshiba: 1.14A

PD: I also will run any Linux version than can be installed and supports the 256 Mb so-dimm.
 
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