Computer Gallery

#1. My first computer, bought at a yard sale for $2, that launched me into computering. It's a GRiD 1660 from 1991, and was top of the line back then. Monochrome screen, i386 CPU, and math coprocessor. I had to hotwire my mother's laptop charger to it's charging port to get it to work, but it worked like a charm after than and I loved it (played Minesweeper, Gorillas, and Nibbles a lot, and didn't have any floppy disks to transfer files to it) for about two weeks, when I got too curious and wired the A/C power to the wrong place on the motherboard entirely. Still seeking a replacement 1660, if anyone ever finds one - they're very rare!

#4. HP Omnibook 2000CS, bought at a thrift store for around $2. It always ran poorly, and died under the blade of a botched BIOS update. Nearly identical to the 5700CTX, they made quite a pair. 32MB RAM (and these models used HP proprietary RAM, so it's gonna be valuable someday). Notice neither laptop's hinges work, so they're leaning on each other. It makes them a little hard to use.

#7. 2002 HP Pavilion 752n. Was given me by a friend without a hard drive, and I bought a 10GB one from Goodwill for it. Back when all hard drive capacities were all the same to me. It gave me good service for a long time until I got the Core 2 Duo machines, obsoleting it. I used to play Minecraft on it, because unlike the Dell, it could actually run it, albeit at around 6 FPS - I got used to it. It's one of the computers the Dell made look good. 2GHz P4, 512MB RAM, Intel Gfx. I tried to sell it for about a year, but it never sold, and eventually I gave it away.

#10. A 2003 thingy. I got it for $10 at a thrift store where I helped sort stuff (got paid in cookies! and opportunities to get stuff). Then I put it's motherboard in the aformentioned eMachines, and for a few days it served as an i486 system (pictured). Later, I was given a Gigabyte motherboard for free from that thrift store, whose case was smashed, and they said they suspected had marijuana stored in it, along with a few other needed pieces, and put them in this case. I added a 10GB 5.24" hard drive from the 90s in it and Windows 2000, and actually used it for a while! It was my #1 computer, but slowly it's components fell apart. PSU blew up, rusty GPU failed eventually, hard drive died, etc. It just sits around under my bed now. It's another of the towers that the Dell made look really cool. This one had 768MB of RAM (3 slots...) and a AMD Athlon XP 2600+ CPU.

#13. 1989 Zeos 386SX. Got this at a thrift store for $10 (funny story about that, the written tag looked like it said "20", but we wanted it to say "10", so when we brought it up that's what we said, and they accepted. My brother and I each paid half, so I only paid $5). Got it cause it looked really cool to me, no other reason. Tested at the store, it worked fine, booting, beeping, and lights, but after trying to use it for a while, it seems to have some sort of RAM issue causing it to operate ultra-slow when doing anything not BIOS-related. And the HDD is slow (somewhere around 30MB too, and huge), and the FDD sometimes fails. If we got it working it'd be a good machine. Has a video card like an aircraft carrier, but it's color. It's currently just something to store in a heap of stuff.

#16. Enter the 2007 Dell Latitude D620 with a 2GHz Core 2 Duo, a computer that changed my computer-related-direction as much as my first computer. I saw this laptop laying around the office I worked at the time and asked about it, and learned it had a broken screen and wasn't worth fixing, but I could have it. It was missing HDD and A/C adapter, and needed new screen, touchpad, and battery. I saw an 80GB HDD laying around the office and asked for it, and it worked with it. Anyway, I replaced the CCFL bulb in the screen for like $8 and it worked great. I used it for quite a while, then dropped it on the floor an busted the HDD. I upgraded to a 120GB, then upgraded the RAM to 4GB and the resolution to 1440x900, parting with the scratched screen I had repaired. This laptop is a brick, I love it! It's cheap, and with it's specs making it run Windows 7 Pro reasonably well, it's easy to maintain and reliable, and I can edit videos, run Minecraft, or whatever. I know from experience though, it's Nvidia gfx chip will die like them all - it's a glorious chip, 64MB VRAM, much nicer than the 8MB Intel one, but apparently poorly designed. I love it's solid metal case and now would never want to use a plastic laptop. In June 2016 I replaced it with a desktop computer.

#19. 2009 HP Pavilion dv7-1264nr. Given by a friend for free which was amazing. Something about it's original motherboard blew up soon after I got it, so I switched it, changing it to a dv7-1245dx... and sadly making it unable to charge the battery, I'm not sure why. It seems the power supply circuitry on the motherboard was damaged. It was very nice and new, however, it recently came down with the GPU error that always plagues HP Pavilion dv7 laptop, and no longer boots. 2.1GHz AMD Turion X2, 4GB RAM, 320GB HDD, ATi Radeon HD gfx. Had lots of cool features like a Blu-ray drive and very very good speakers, but it's 17" size - I call it slabtop - and lack of portability made it fairly useless to me. Great specs, but legendary Vista and plasticy unreliability. I could easily twist and bend the screen, same as the Toshiba C655D and Lenovo G505s.

#26. 2003 Dell Inspiron 5100. Got this for the cost of shipping from my friend in California. It's very similar to the 1100, but with specs that make it run (the 1100 doesn't really run). 512MB RAM upgraded to 1 GB - pretty impressive for a DDR SDRAM laptop I think - a Pentium 4 CPU, ATi gfx instead of those wretched Intel 8xx ones, 30GB HDD instead of 20GB. Still, very thick, very plasticy, small touchpad, loud mouse buttons, very heavy, and low res screen - and it still runs XP. But! It has WiFi, so that in itself gives it a LOT more usability than a laptop without! But since it also can't compare to the almighty Core 2 Duo, and also is heavy and has inferior battery life, I don't use it much.

#29. 2010 Lenovo IdeaPad S10-3 netbook. Bought in the same lot as the W510. In this picture, you can see me booting ArchLinux off a USB flash drive.It was troubled with dysfunctional Wi-fi, it had a card (and I tried a couple different ones too), but if the BIOS had wireless enabled, it suddenly couldn't boot the OS, no clue why! Disable it, and it could boot fine. I never got past live-booting Linux though, ran Irssi mainly which was fun. But I updated the BIOS and it never booted again - the power lights light, but nothing on the screen, which is odd since it said the BIOS update succeeded. Tried new RAM but it didn't help. So now it's waiting for a new motherboard; since a netbook with no charger, HDD, and a broken motherboard is worthless, it was a failed investment. The design was pleasant but generic, though really lacked a keyboard backlight. Touchpad took some getting used to - small, but the "buttons" were touch sensitive which helped but I moved the cursor accidentally a lot. Anyway, if I get it working I might use it for my own, it's only 10" which makes it the smallest computer in the house, not counting my 1996 NEC MobilePro HPC. But it's a frustrating problem.

#32. 2007 Dell Latitude D630C. Nothing to say about this really - dude on eBay was asking $20+$15 shipping, and I offered him $5, and he accepted! :D No turning down a $5 computer. However, it was uninspiring. This particular one, someone poured something gross into it, and the keyboard was totally dead, the screen had medium damage though was quite usable, and the motherboard worked only intermittently. You often do get what you pay for though. And the D630C didn't differ from the D620 in any way that affects most people. The WinXP Pro CD it came with was nice though! I sold the screen for a few bucks, then the base I sold with all the others.

#35. 1986 Toshiba T1200 laptop. Got it on eBay for $60, and it worked really well! So far it's a staple in my vintage computer collection. The screen is 640x200 and CGA compatible; 80C86 CPU, 1MB RAM, a 20MB HDD, DOS 3.3 (I believe in a ROM chip), and a 720k 3.5" FDD. As seen in the picture, the screen is backlit blue-on-green. Amazingly, the battery is capable of holding up to a 10 minute charge, though it's never been recelled or anything.

#38. 1990 Zenith Z-Note 325L. This was a good deal - I actually got it on Craigslist for $30! As seen in the picture, there was a lot of two, one mainly working, one not working (found the motherboard, CCFL, and LCD PCB dysfunctional), and it also included two chargers, two batteries, all the manuals, half of which were still sealed, including a copy of Windows, and a copy of Windows 95 on 30 floppy disks. This system was very innovative - sort of like using a Mac might be. There were unusual things all over the system, such as the keys always made a clicking noise through the speaker, or the power button, when pressed, bringing up a menu asking you if you wanted to turn the computer off or not. 80386 CPU, 8MB RAM (2MB on board, 6MB in 3 proprietary expansion chips - it has three slots, I have them all), 120MB HDD, 640x480 VGA LCD.However, this system has an annoying flicker to the screen - the pixel part, not the backlight part, perhaps faulty capacitors.

#41. 2008 Dell Latitude E6400. This model is very similar to the E6410, but with a Core 2 Duo CPU. I bought it for only $30, added a 320GB HDD and a charger, and sold it for $100. This model had a 1280x800 LCD, 2.4GHz C2D (800MHz FSB), and 4GB RAM.

#44. 2016 custom computer. Finally built myself a custom computer. Loved geeking out getting my own components. I'm quite happy with the base build I chose: Asus Z97-E mobo, 3.2GHz Pentium G3258 CPU, 16GB 2400MHz Corsair Vengeance RAM, 120GB OCZ/Toshiba SSD, cheap PSU from local junk shop, and the old case from computer #10 in this list. Still need to get an HDD and GPU. The Pentium is an excellent processor, providing more than enough power for what I do at a fraction of the price. Cost $65 new, but a mate in Australia I know online sold me a used one for only $16! Also got the mobo on sale for $85 which was awesome. Picked up a monitor for $20 on craigslist, that plus one I had makes a great dual-monitor setup. I run Windows 7 Ultimate, and it runs awesome, takes anything I throw at it.

#47. 1984 IBM PCjr. Its not a device that holds a lot of interest for me, primarily because of the way every single thing about it is proprietary. Keyboard, monitor, connectors. And it boots to IBM basic as if it were a C64 or TI-99. Haven't had a chance to run any software since it only has a 5.25" FDD and I only have 3.5" diskettes. Also it has the venerable but quickly outdated 8088 CPU that would likely only run a fraction of the software that I have, since I'm primarily a 286/386 fan. Sometimes 486 but 386DX is my fav. Still, its nifty that I have the original infrared wireless keyboard, monitor, and power adapter, he (yard sale man) charged $5 for the computer and another $5 for the monitor, so $10 for the whole lot.

#50. 1985 Atari 520ST. Got this at the same lot from a yard sale. Monitor was $5, same as anything, but the main unit was free because it was cracked and the owner didn't think it was worth anything. Admittedly it wasn't worth a whole lot but it did work! It came with the mouse and a power supply for the disk drive, but not the drive itself nor the power supply for the computer. Later models had both built into the computer but this is an early model. I got the drive on eBay for about $40, and I hacked together a power supply from one I found at the local junk shop, replacing the end with a DIN-7 connector, then it worked fine. I have the low-res color monitor and the dual-sided diskette drive. The system has TOS 1.00 on ROM - quite old - and 512Kb RAM. I hope to upgrade the RAM to 2Mb and get some kind of hard drive for it. I used hydrogen peroxide to whiten the keyboard keys and mouse, that improved it somewhat too. In the picture it has a monitor stand thingy which is handy.

#2. My second computer, an old Dell Dimension. I got it from the town dump. They didn't allow anyone to just take them, so I had to ask the manager's permission for it, and he seemed to be a former police officer, and interrogated me about why I wanted it. It even still had the hard drive in it. I sold the computer, but switched hard drives first, and still have that one as of 2014, though it's failing now. It was a very poor computer, but first of all helped launch me into computering, and second - made the next desktop look really good! 384MB RAM, P4-based Celeron CPU.

#5. Toshiba Satellite 225CDS, from around 1997, bought at a yard sale for an amazing $15! It... really was only bought cause it sounded like fun at the time, and came nearly unused from a Target employee with the leather bag and all the trappings. It sort of runs, but the hard drive is failing. Besides the hard drive though, it's a rock-solid machine - especially the sound system was great. When I was roofing once, I sat this laptop on the ridge and it played music for us, it was awesome. Always ran slow - had a 6-minute boot time for 98 - due to bad specs. 16MB RAM, Pentium CPU *without* MMX, 1.33 GB HDD.

#3. My second laptop, given to me by a friend who felt sorry for me that my own was broken, and didn't need it. It's an HP Omnibook 5700CTX from around 1997 - a lot newer than the GRiD, not really vintage, but a definite dinosaur! Pentium MMX processor, 64MB of RAM, 2GB HDD - and CD-ROM, yay! It's the thickest laptop I have at over 2 inches, and it still runs.

#6. 1993 Zeos 486 notebook. Bought this on eBay about a year after the GRiD was gone, to replace it, and while it's not perfect - the top case where the screen hinge puts pressure on it is cracked, it's inferior construction, and not as upgradable - it's actually able to be like it, since it runs DOS, albeit DOS 6, not 5 like the GRiD ran. Ironically it's thinner than most laptops were for 10 years after it was made. 4MB RAM, 170MB HDD.
Now, a nice thing about DOS is - I actually was able to pop the hard drive out of the GRiD and into the Omnibook, which was cool.

#8. Fairly obviously, it's a Commodore Plus/4 (1984). Bought at a thrift store, it cost $20, but happened to be 90% off it's color that day, so it was only $2. Seriously. It worked well and came with it's box and a/c adapter too! The Plus/4 was similar to the C64, but came with 4 built-in utilities, had those weird looking dedicated cursor keys, and had more RAM available for Basic programs. However, since it was not able to run C64 programs, these benefits didn't help it, and it flopped. And I never did anything with it (cause it ran nearly nothing) but write little Basic games that couldn't get saved. It definitely did not come with a monitor, disk drive, or anything like that. Still, it looks cooler than the C64, in my opinion!

#9. I got the case from a friend, the mobo didn't work, and then took the motherboard out of the next one - the CTL, #10 - and put it in here. Then it worked nicely. But it only had a Celeron and 512MB RAM, so we sold it, for $30.

#11. 1985 HP 110 Portable Plus. got it from the same thrift store as most of the others (it was within biking distance from my house, I went there every saturday). It cost only $5, but I held off buying it for week cause I figured it was some sort of typewriter or word processor. But I got it's name and wrote it down so I could look it up - kept that model name for those weeks. When I finally got around to looking it up I was like OH I WANT ONE! and was so nervous someone would get it before I could get there. Well, noone else who went to that thrift store had wanted it, and it was half-off day, so I got it for $2.50. It came with a pretty leather case too - but no charger, and since the charger costs at least $35 on eBay, and the disk drive around $250 (it's much more rare than the computer itself), I've never tested it. Good thing too, because I probably would've fried it in curiosity, but I had learned my lesson. It's exactly three inches thick at it's thickest point, and is supposed to have around 512K RAM, an 8086 CPU, and a non-backlit monochrome screen. It's battery could last a week on one charge when new (good thing, since it was needed to keep the RAM loaded, it had no hard drive at all).

#12. A big box of computer parts I swiftly accumulated. I'll call it one computer, since there's more than enough parts for one, including a tower elsewhere. Theres motherboards with AMD K5, Pentium II, Pentium III, and Intel i486. And a lot of assorted cards, largely ISA and PCI audio and video, and a great collection of 5.25" floppy disks! I got a good portion of it from salvaging a dump made of
stuff a landlord pulled out of rentals. A good portion of it was rusty - the computer case I got the components from was especially rusty - but it all worked! I rode my bike there, so I had to ride it back home holding a lot of components in my hands while steering, and in all my pockets... it was a good life back then. :)

#14. 1981 TI-99/4A computer. Bought this specifically on eBay for $36, cause it was *the computer* we wanted! Heh. Before, I saw some "Texas Instruments Command Modules" - cartridges - and just wanted to buy them, they looked cool, and the titles, like "Munch Man" and "Hunt the Wumpus" sounded cool. I was a crazy kid. So we did some research on what the cartridges were for, and this came up, and eventually we bought one. While I don't use it a lot, we invested more into it than the C Plus/4, so it's more useful at least than it. The games are fun (we got a total of about 10), and I bought the tape adapter and tape recorder, so we can save programs if we want (by the way, a computer recording program works well for this). Had an astoundingly poor 16KB of RAM... very little, and wasn't powerful enough to do anything cool. But hey, at '81, it's the oldest computer in my collection, which is awesome.

#17. 2003 Dell Inspiron 1100. Given to me by a friend nonworking - lacked an A/C adapter, and the keyboard and touchpad had soda all over them. Well I took the keyboard and touchpad out and washed them in the kitchen, found an A/C adapter for $4, and it worked! It originally had a horrifying 256MB RAM, which I upgraded to 512MB, also 20GB HDD, P4-based Celeron, and Intel gfx, all very bad, really. I eventually replaced the keyboard cause some keys stopped working after the washing. Then I sold it for around $40, cause I had no use for it - it had a 4:3 screen and was very thick, giving me the impression of a cube compared to other board-like widescreen laptops.

#20. Lot of 7 2006/07 Dell D620 bases. From this point on, I entered the refurbishment business, and this lot was a rough but very useful lesson in what worked and what didn't in the market. I paid an amazing $70 for these, and 1 was totally dead, 1 worked fine, and the other 5 all had blown GPUs. I'm counting the whole lot as 1 since only one really did anything. So, I had imagined I'd buy allllllll the parts these needed - a lot considering they're just bases and motherboards - and then sell them, but since that was financially impossible, I skipped it. Now I just have them sitting in a banana box; if anyone wants one, I'll give it free plus s&h! Still, they were the beginning of a D620 craze (I won't mention all the D620s I went through, but it was around 9)...

#15. 2004 Medion m3 Composer 5200. This was my father's computer til about 2007, when it stopped working. I tried replacing the processor, and then the motherboard (which I had to ship from England cause Medion is European and pay $60 for), but neither helped! For years it seemed somehow cursed, just impossible to fix, but then I tried replacing the capacitors (which I had bought long before for it but decided couldn't solve the problem), and it worked great! During the process the ownership sort of transferred to me. After it was working, it was our premier computer, better than the CTL and the HP, but sadly it's reign was very short before the Core 2 Duo came and blew it's performance to pieces. Powerful 3.2GHz P4 CPU, an SD card reader, SATA DVD burner at a time I'd never had one before, 512MB RAM but upgraded to a powerful 2GB (for a P4!), it's 200GB HDD was until very recently the largest in the house, and a 128MB VRAM gfx card. Now it's ailing again, and mostly unneeded, just sometimes used by the little siblings for older computer games. It still runs Windows XP too.

#18. 2006 Dell Inspiron E1405. Sold to me by a friend of mine in California for $30, free shipping. Basically he mentioned he had an extra computer, and I thought it sounded cool, so I bought it. It is an excellent machine, fairly stylish, beautiful screen, great sound, well built like most Dell laptops, and runs like a top, even for CAD or 3D gaming. But it couldn't really compete with my D620 - which had a better battery and that metal case etc - so I sold it to my brother for about $38. 1.8GHz Core 2 Duo, 2GB RAM, 80GB HDD, Intel gfx, Win 7 Pro.

#21, 22, 23, 24, and 25. 5 more Dell D620s! I sold 3, then the screen of one leaving a base, and so I have one extra D620 left. This lot cost me only $35, and every single one worked well, one was even fully complete. It was a lot of the same model of laptop. Well actually one was a D630, but upon examination, it offered no benefits over the D620 at all except Firewire. I'm VERY familiar with this model now, and could diagnose and repair any hardware issue very fast. :) I had a great time. While I was at it I familiarized myself with comparable models - the IBM ThinkPad T60 mainly, but also the Dell Latitude and Inspiron E series. Anymore though, I'm trying to make money flipping newer laptops than these, if I at all can (which leaves me selling nicer laptops than my own, like the XPS M1530 that just went through my hands).

#27. 2006 Gateway with no model name. We got it when it was the cheapest laptop you could buy at Best Buy, and it's been horrible ever since, but never died! 2 years after it was bought, the screen went out and it overheated very badly, and sort of hung out at our house for a while, but then I took it all apart (this before I knew hardly anything about computers) and put it back together, and it the backlight started working again! It's performance was horrible due to 512MB RAM, 1.5GHz Celeron CPU, and IDE HDD, but we upgraded it to 1GB RAM - still lame for DDR2 but tolerable sometimes - and I put a 1.6GHz Core Duo in it - a lot worse than my own 2GHz Core 2 Duo, but a lot better than a Celeron! And it had 64MB VRAM ATi Radeon gfx - could play Minecraft (my universal benchmark) about as well as the 2002 HP Pavilion desktop - around 12 FPS. While I replaced the CPU I pulled a ton of dust out, and that solved the heat issues. It was of very poor contruction anyway, and it's end was I sold it for $75.

#28. 2010 Lenovo ThinkPad W510. And yes the picture is mine - I'm learning how to use the alpha channel, in GIMP! Bought only as an investment, an a lot of 4 Lenovo laptops. 1st gen i7 CPU, 4GB DDR3 RAM, some nice graphics, don't remember what, no HDD, and the screen res is really nice, 1920x1080. 15.6" though, fairly bulky, though it doesn't touch the dv7. I got it to boot with an old 80GB HDD and a ThinkPad T60 charger, but the results were uninspiring - for whatever reason, it got about the same FPS in MC as the 2007 T60, and had tons of drivers it needed. I was favorable impressed with the hinges, keyboard, and touchpad for quality and feel. Still, I have yet to get it it's own HDD - at least 500GB - and charger and battery, and get a better feel for it, and hopefully it gets better performance then. Personally I'm not a fan of laptops bigger than 14", but it's res is pretty, and it's got plenty of features and ports like SD, webcam, DisplayPort - and the coolest feature of all, to me, this laptop has four RAM slots! Not that I'd use that feature, sadly.

#30. 2007 IBM (Lenovo) ThinkPad T60 (and T60p). Are very old and ugly. And obviously in the same lot. I'm not used to the 4:3 screen, but actually, it's not bad seeing more vertical stuff! I was favorably impressed with the performance of the T60, especially for only having a T2400 Core Duo CPU, and 1GB RAM - the ATi Radeon X1300 graphics were pretty nice, and knowing they aren't affected by the Nvidia BGA underfill issue is real nice. Compared to the D620, the ThinkLight is a really nice feature, as is the center mouse button, and while they have a taller screen, they are actually noticeably thinner than the D620! The plain black box look is inferior though, and I can't say the case is sturdier. As always, the hinges, keyboard, lack of screen flex, and touchpad are very good. But a couple key design flaws turned me off, which make me know Dells are better: #1, the battery couldn't charge, and without a battery diagnostic in the BIOS, it was impossible to find out the source of the problem, I'd be groping in the dark buying a new motherboard, and #2, taking it apart was much harder and less intuitive, especially how it had 3 different types of screws where the Dell had 1. So, I sold both on eBay - the T60 for $65 as fully functional but unable to charge battery, and the T60p I sold for $60 with broken CPU fan, broken HDD, and unable to charge battery. The T60p's ATi FireGL graphics and high-res screen were the only really nice things about it.

#31. 2008 Dell XPS M1530. Bought it on eBay for $30. It had a broken GPU, the aluminum was peeling off, and no hard drive. But it did come with 4GB DDR2 RAM and a good battery, so that was nice. I took the RAM out and put it in my own D620, and then sold the rest for parts on eBay for $70. I applied some Gorilla Glue to the aluminum palmrest and stacked some encyclopedias on it overnight, and it made it look fine in the regard. Now, the GPU I reflowed which made it boot, but sadly it was affected by the BGA underfill issue, so I'd give it a max of 4 months to work before it needs a new motherboard, $50. Aside from that, the M1530 was the most beautiful C2D machine I've ever seen by a long shot! I'd keep it for myself if I wasn't getting an i5, and didn't have a dependency on the pointing stick. The M1530 has a slot-loading optical drive which is awesome for reasons, an all-metal case, silicone treated lid, brushed aluminum palmrest, and thick, sturdy metal base. The media buttons are touch controlled, it has an excellent selection of ports, vibrant 1080p 15.6" screen, 800MHz FSB, enabling use of C2D CPUs like the T9800, and Nvidia gfx that are swell when they work. Obviously I never got past live-booting Ubuntu before selling it, but I wanna say, it was one of the best designed machines I've ever handled; too bad it's finally aging!

#33. 2011 Toshiba Satellite C655D. I bought this laptop from an acquaintance for $30 because the hard drive didn't work. It also was unable to charge the battery - happily I discovered the problem was merely a bad port which I replaced. A new hard drive later, it works pretty well. The screen is a big plus, it's large, bright, and sufficient resolution, and the keyboard and general design, while not outstanding, are quite adequate. Chinsy and flimsy, but for the price range it's okay. Had 3GB RAM, 320GB HDD, AMD Radeon HD 6130 gfx, 1.5GHz E-240 CPU. The CPU was a very lame one - single core, runs slow, boots slow, doesn't run multiple programs all that gracefully, doesn't run more intense applications like loading a complex webpage all that well. It's like a Celeron!But for the price range, it's enough. Mine came with no COA, so I just put Windows 7 Professional on it, and since no Satellite C655Ds ever came with Pro, only Home Premium, I had to use RemoveWAT. Well I coulda searched for some Win7 Home Pre install media but didn't feel like it. Also, it had a broken hinge - the hinge was fine, but the plastic base where it was attached broke. However, it was missing a screw screwing the hinge to the palmrest; attaching that seemed to secure it well enough. It sold on eBay for $125.

#34. 2010 Dell Latitude E6410. After shopping around a while on eBay (and wikipedia), I chose the E6410 as my official upgrade from the D620. I got it "Not working" for only $86 because the seller thought it's HDD might not work right, but it worked fine. It has a first-gen Core 2.5GHz i5 CPU, 4GB RAM, Intel graphics, and a 160GB hard drive. I upgraded the keyboard to be backlit and love it now, and I got a brand new 500GB hard drive which is very nice. Upgraded to an Nvidia GPU which was awesome. The battery life is very nice at about 5 hours medium usage, though Nvidia graphics drop that noticeably. The screen res was the main disappointment - the D620 can use WXGA (1280x800) or WXGA+(1440x900), but this E6410 can only use WXGA, so I've lowered my res. It runs very smoothly. Mine also came with a Windows 7 Ultimate COA which was nice. The build quality is very good - including a metal base - and it's easy to service for the most part. Except the Bluetooth card for some bizarre reason is buried under the motherboard. I chose the E6410 cause it's a business laptop, and business laptops tend to be cheaper and easier to service than consumer laptops, and the build quality is good and reliable - and it's the first successor to the Latitude with a Core i series CPU.

#36. 1986 Toshiba T3100/20. Tried to follow up my success with the T1200 with this luggable - it's bulkier and has no battery - but failed. Also paid $60. It worked somewhat, at first, but had severe issues with it's HDD and CMOS battery, but after I replaced the CMOS battery and installed an OS on the HDD (though the HDD always worked intermittently), the screen abruptly stopped displaying anything at all. It still booted fine, but the LCD never displayed anything - not an OS or HDD issue, the built-in screen acted as if it were not plugged in. 80286 CPU, 1MB RAM, 20MB HDD, 640x400 red gas-plasma screen, 720k 3.5" FDD. Included a very intriguing adapter in the back that turned the proprietary Toshiba connector to 8-bit ISA, then into SCSI. (system was unable to function while the adapter was in, cause it demanded an SCSI HDD). Another thing to note about this system is, the BIOS settings are in a file called TESTCE.EXE on the hard drive, not in the ROM anywhere.

#39. 2013 Lenovo G505s. I returned from the old computers, with my newest one yet! Bought it on eBay for $46, quite the steal. It was listed as having a dysfunctional LCD and being unable to boot, but I bought it (And it included 6GB of DDR3 so I couldn't possibly lose anyway). Turned out the LCD was perfectly fine, as was everything else, just the power cable had broken a wire and it wasn't getting power anymore. I resoldered it together and it worked fine. Only issue was, the corner was crushed, so it flexed when you opened or closed it and didn't look as cool, but it still held together. It had an AMD A10 2.5GHz quadcore CPU, 6GB RAM, integrated ATi Radeon HD 8650G graphics, 1366x768 15.6" LCD, and originally shipped with a 1TB HDD. The seller took that so I replaced it with a 500GB one. The build quality was this thing's biggest detraction: like the HP Pavilion dv7 series, this model was all about kool specs, for low prices. So while it was real snappy and could play 3D games (for example) well, the keyboard was mushy, the touchpad buttons clicked loudly, the huge flat plastic case flexed all over, felt cheap and tacky, and collected grime/fingerprints, and the hinge design was cheap and breakable. The 3-cell battery was uninspiring too. Still, it's the newest laptop I've ever owned, so it has that going for it! Windows 8.1 still really needs a touchscreen to be worth using.

#37. 1990 Dell 320n laptop. Still on a vintage computer kick! This one was $50. I really liked all the Dell systems I've had so far, so I thought maybe this one would be good, and it was very interesting, but not all that good. Manufactured by some chinese company and then branded Dell. 80386 CPU with math coprocessor, 8MB RAM, 60MB HDD, tiny 640x480 VGA greyscale screen, 1.44MB 3.5" FDD. In the picture I have the screen off for testing. There's a door on the front for RAM (proprietary shape) and coprocessor upgrades. It worked real nice, but I could not get the screen to work - it always displayed what seemed to be all pixels fully black, and I can't figure out why, and the backlight worked fine. The backlight slider also worked fine, but not the contrast slider (I even opened it all up and tested the potentiometer behind the slider, it was fine). Maybe a bad capacitor.

#40. 1986 Toshiba T3100. Pictured here next to my T3100/20, I bought it cause I really wanted a laptop with a red gas plasma screen and my T3100/20 wasn't working. I got it a long time ago, paid around $60 dollars, it always worked fine except the CMOS battery was dead and the "D" key didn't work. I was able to take apart the keyboard and desolder the key, and found out that there was a diode beneath it that was rusted completely through. (I don't know why as there was no other rust or damage anywhere else on the system.) I actually succeeded in replacing that diode with one from some piece of broken toy and it worked great after that! Also replacing the CMOS battery worked well, so now it's a perfectly functioning 1986 laptop, including it's 10MB HDD. it has a CGA 640x400 two-color screen and an 80286 CPU. No battery and no VGA support. Unlike the T3100/20, the CMOS settings were accessable without testce.exe, which was very handy (it has different BIOS chips, see more at http://forums.bosaik.net/viewtopic.php?f=30&t=99.

#42. 2013 Dell Latitude E6430. I used this as my main computer for a good while, but I sold it because it's bulky and I never moved it and I have a decent desktop to replace it. It's an amazing laptop, its only weak points are one, it's huge but that's also a benefit, and also it has no high-resolution screen option, only WXGA and WXGA+. Mine was WXGA, so lower resolution than the 2007 D630 which was sad. However, it was built like a tank, metal from top to bottom, and it's great size meant it was super easy to repair/upgrade and ran coolly and reliably. Backlit keyboard, fingerprint reader, stereo mic, responsive touchpad, lots of ports, all added to it's appeal. It's CPU had been downgraded from a 3rd-gen i5 to 2nd-gen, but even so, with 8GB RAM and 500GB HDD, it could handle anything I threw at it while still running quietly and coolly. Could up the CPU to 3rd-gen i7 and get the Nvidia option, but you'd get less battery, more heat, and more noise. Anyway I highly recommend this laptop as a desktop replacement!

#45. 2007 Dell D630. Still at it, got it for $33 in poor condition, added in new hinges, 160GB HDD, and touchpad and it was pretty decent! It has apparent impact to one corner, some cracks and broken out plastic there, and a line of deadness on the screen. But it included the charger and 4GB RAM so that was cool. Prolly worth around $90 on eBay.

#48. 1983 IBM PC-XT.

#51. 2014 Lenovo Thinkpad L440.

#43. 2014 HP Pavilion X2. Got it at the same time as a Asus Transformer, but ended up liking this one better. It's very thin, has a full USB port, and a very long battery life. Dropped it and cracked the digitizer once, but was able to replace it. I think it has 2GB RAM, 16GB flash memory, 720p LCD, Atom CPU. It's performance is good as a tablet for browsing the web and playing phone games, and I've never used it for anything else. They keyboard cover, unfortunately, tends to lose it's connection, that plus the fact it cannot stand on it's own makes it pretty impractical to use as a laptop. It's keyboard base is held on magnetically and looks like a piece of cloth wrapping partway around the tablet, it's pretty attractive. And all things considered, the internal layout was very nice to repair too!

#46. 1984 Macintosh. This is the original model, M0001, that I picked up WITH keyboard and mouse at a yard sale for $5! What a nice guy the seller was. He was selling off nearly his whole collection (had a Next box but said he was keeping that for himself) for next to nothing. The first day I didn't expect his prices would be so cheap so didn't bother bringing much money, so I missed out on the more valuable systems that someone after me got, but at least I got this that day. The next day I came to see what he had left and picked some more stuff up, as will be next in this list. Anyway, I found a guy online who I bought a startup disk and a game disk from for $24 - a great deal since I couldn't make those disks, and he printed two lovely original-looking labels for them. Got System 3, it worked excellently. The 84 Mac was a very impressive system for it's time! Mine has been upgraded to 512k of RAM from the original 128k, which is pretty good, and the FDD appears to have been upgraded to one capable of reading 800k (double-sided) disks instead of the original 400k disks. So it sounds like a Mac 512K or 512Ke, but the model number on the case is still M0001.

#49. 1986 IBM PC Convertible 5140. I got it from the same yard sale, for about $5 as well with the power supply, just so that I could resell it. It's not a system that I'm interested in, I tend to be less interested in the proprietary systems and more interested in the standard systems, so I like the similar but more featured Toshiba T1200 better. I found the boot disk online, and got it to boot once, but generally I can't get either of the floppy disk drives to work, and I know nothing about them since they're specific to this system. I'll try selling it on eBay. It's a funky design, with the pop-up keyboard and drives! But lacks a backlight and hard drive and any ports at all. 256Kb RAM, 4.77mhz 80c88 CPU, 640x200 CGA LCD, 720k FDD.