Good Morning Gentlemen.
I'll make the story as short as possible. A friend of mine recently gave me a spare Satellite 1605CDS with dead HDD he had laying around. The very next day the puppy had his old 6Gb replaced with an almost new 15Gb and the 64Mb of RAM upgraded to the maximum allowed which is 160Mb. Installed FreeBSD 5.3 on it and, together with my trusty Orinoco Wireless card, I started having a lot of fun with it.
In a few days I started really having feelings for this little laptop, I mean it's old and it has only a 450MHz AMD K6-2, but I had upgraded it and the little thing was really making a big effort to run KDE3.3 at a decent speed. I eyed an old Cisco Aironet with external Coax mount and antenna on my friend's desk at work, and the day after here's what I was working on:
Back together:
With Antenna:
KDE Loading...
As you can imagine, I can do fairly clean work when I really want to, and with this newest mod I am officially in love with my little Satellite on steroids and I really want to bring this to the next step.
I have two questions for those of you that are extremely familiar with this family of Satellites:
1- The CPU sits on a regular Socket 7. I spotted a row of dip-switches and tables printed on the pcb (frequency, multiplier and voltage). You know where I'm getting. I may have an extra K6-2 500 sitting somewhere at my house, and I know I will be slapping that bad boy on the socket very soon. My question is, has anybody ever done this, and can the motherboard handle a 500MHz K6-2?
2- The LCD on this laptop is really disappointing. It's only a 12.1", and although I don't mind the size much, what really pisses me off is that I'm having trouble running any resolution/color depth higher than 800x600 with 256 colors. A good friend of mine has an even older Dell laptop (PII 300MHz) and his supports 1024x768 with 16bit color. Looks a million times better than mine, especially while in KDE. I would really like to upgrade the LCD on this Satellite. My question is, does anybody know if there's a higher-quality LCD out there that will connect to the Mobo ports of my Satellite? Could be just the LCD or the whole frame/latches assembly, I don't care as long as I can mount it on this laptop.
Any input will be immensely appreciated, and please let me know what you think of my project so far.
Regards,
Walter
I'll make the story as short as possible. A friend of mine recently gave me a spare Satellite 1605CDS with dead HDD he had laying around. The very next day the puppy had his old 6Gb replaced with an almost new 15Gb and the 64Mb of RAM upgraded to the maximum allowed which is 160Mb. Installed FreeBSD 5.3 on it and, together with my trusty Orinoco Wireless card, I started having a lot of fun with it.
In a few days I started really having feelings for this little laptop, I mean it's old and it has only a 450MHz AMD K6-2, but I had upgraded it and the little thing was really making a big effort to run KDE3.3 at a decent speed. I eyed an old Cisco Aironet with external Coax mount and antenna on my friend's desk at work, and the day after here's what I was working on:
Back together:
With Antenna:
KDE Loading...
As you can imagine, I can do fairly clean work when I really want to, and with this newest mod I am officially in love with my little Satellite on steroids and I really want to bring this to the next step.
I have two questions for those of you that are extremely familiar with this family of Satellites:
1- The CPU sits on a regular Socket 7. I spotted a row of dip-switches and tables printed on the pcb (frequency, multiplier and voltage). You know where I'm getting. I may have an extra K6-2 500 sitting somewhere at my house, and I know I will be slapping that bad boy on the socket very soon. My question is, has anybody ever done this, and can the motherboard handle a 500MHz K6-2?
2- The LCD on this laptop is really disappointing. It's only a 12.1", and although I don't mind the size much, what really pisses me off is that I'm having trouble running any resolution/color depth higher than 800x600 with 256 colors. A good friend of mine has an even older Dell laptop (PII 300MHz) and his supports 1024x768 with 16bit color. Looks a million times better than mine, especially while in KDE. I would really like to upgrade the LCD on this Satellite. My question is, does anybody know if there's a higher-quality LCD out there that will connect to the Mobo ports of my Satellite? Could be just the LCD or the whole frame/latches assembly, I don't care as long as I can mount it on this laptop.
Any input will be immensely appreciated, and please let me know what you think of my project so far.
Regards,
Walter