i still don't understand why people throw out computers when there are so many better options nowadays

Only once in my life about 10 years ago I got lucky like that. Driving down my street I saw that a neighbor had thrown away 2 huge desktop PC towers. I slammed on the brakes (exaggeratingly) got out and put them in my car. These were P4 era PCs and were in great shape. The best part to me were the cases. They are heavy gauge metal that are built like tanks which I gutted and put modern components in them. I still use them today.

Old Laptops are always nice to look at. Its also good that these were saved from being scrapped.

ThinkPad 600 series is soooo familiar to me! They came in 3 different configurations, basic 600, 600E and top-of-the-line 600X as yours! 600 and 600E had only Pentium II processors, 600X had Pentium III. You can also recognize these from audio jacks, 600X has those 3 audio jacks, 600 and 600E only had 2. Those also have easily replaceable CMOS battery, just follow that little wire under RAM door and you'll find that familiar yellow wired battery.

as you know, ,computers can certainly fit into both categories! 😂

Is anyone else intrigued by the best waffles ever?

I'd love to have a copy of that tropical wallpaper from the third system.

I had that same Dell laptop in college. Mine was sold as a C510 with an Intel Celeron but dropping in a Mobile P3 makes it a C610. I installed a Dell TruMobile Mini PCI card which actually added internal Wifi. The antennas are already built in and it utilizes the Ethernet Status lights when Wireless is connected. Very stable machine. In its later years in life for giggles I even installed Windows 7 on it. Not the best performance there but it worked. The video out port actually supports S-Video directly and with an adapter can use Composite. When I was working for Disney I was able to acquire the C-Dock which included PCI slots. The more I see in your video I can see the subtle changes from the 600/610. I had Crystal Audio and 16MB Ati Graphics.

I wish I had be able to keep all of my ThinkPads. Awesome laptops. Just ran out of room.

Owned several of these Thinkpads (My favorite model being my 512MB- maxed out, Pentium III-600 modded, and wireless upgraded x300 running Windows XP, circa 2005) back in the day; great, super reliable and rock solidly built machines, used a few in the rain no problem. They generally arent broke, and its usually a pretty simple fix getting them to run properly.

About that proprietary port - you ARE correct!!

Quite a few years ago I was given a 380XD. Still works to. Old Thinkpads are very, very reliable.

Love Old PCs and 💻😊😊😊

Laptop time!

If you don't find the retro the retro seems to find you! The 1st one is probably the 'worst' off with the backlight & a (slightly?) flaky hard drive. Definitely happy that they are all still viable. I never really got to use Pentium II / III laptops back in the day, wish I could've!

The screen issues are common on those 380Z systems. Don't rule out a bad flex cable.

26:05 If you look at the model number on the external sticker for the 3com LAN/modem, it is the same as the one visible trough the white sticker on the square card in the Mini-PCI slot, on the left side with a bar code next to it. So you can safely say that is the LAN/modem combo card. And the model is a PP01L, which in Dell speak translates to "Dell Latitude C610". The label with the model number and Express Service code etc. is only obvious to service techs that work on Dells, so don't feel bad about not noticing it.

That Dell would make a very nice Windows 98 machine!

The 600x is a very sought after system by both Linux enthusiasts and retro guys. Damn what a nice find for you and its even in perfect working condition. I really wonder why it was tossed..

They give you a foam keyboard sheet these days, but thankfully the keys didn't rub on the screen and mark/scratch the screen.

Just came back from doing a big I.T. job... this made my day. ty

Your luck was in that day!👍👍

I got me a Dell C610 from a thrift store in a town with a single stop light. Fully loaded 1.2GHz PIII with the 1400x1050 screen. Power plug is broken and it doesn't look easy to fix as it snapped the board, so I got a dock for cheap and that's how I use it.

Found a HP workstation laptop at the second-hand store. According to the people, it had been purchased and returned twice. I booted it up with my handy Ubuntu thumb drive, and the only thing wrong with it was a failing hard drive. I did look through the drive and found some nudes of the previous owner! Replaced the hard drive and the computer still works today.

Screen damage on the C600 looks like it may be vinegar syndrome just starting. Breakdown of the polarizer layer. Very difficult to repair but possible, will be easier to just source a replacement panel instead though. Keep that one away from other laptops - I’ve heard that the fumes let off from the breakdown of the PVA film can cause the issue to spread to other nearby panels!

You uploaded this the day I found an identical Dell Latitude C610 in E-waste (I went back today for the accessories, the hard drive was trashed. But I found a Nintendo Gameboy DMG in the same bin so that made up for the lack of a hard drive. It does work but the Power button is very finicky, I also picked up another laptop from E-waste an unbranded machine with the model NB7D

Oh man, those are some great systems you found there! I've wanted a late 380 for a long time and with a backlight repair/hard disk yours looks like it'll make a great vintage system. Another option for the hard disk is a 2.5" CF adapter. I've gotten my hands on a couple and as far as mounting they directly replace a 2.5" ide hard disk, and are typically available with either one or two CF card slots (Master and Slave in the dual slot version). The 600X looks like a great machine too! I had one once that I got from a local recycler but it was rough and had... issues lol. Wound up trading it for some other retro tech. I also have a Dell C610 and a CPi and the batteries/bay devices are indeed inter-changeable. Even the power supply from the C610 works for the CPi. I imagine the same would be true for your C600 and your CPX. I can't believe you found those at the side of the road. That's an amazing find and I'm glad that you were able to save them! I didn't realize you were also in Canada! Where are you located?

About batteries swelling, they are made from 18650 cells. As far as I know, they don't swell at all.

It's crazy what people just throw away these days.

ooo another Dell latitude

Amazing find and fun video. Thanks.

Can't believe all of them booted considering you found them in the trash well done to you sir 👏 wish I could find something like that knowing my luck I'd find some cheap and nasty laptops 😅

system 3 also had the best waffles ever. i really want to get one of these old chunktops one of these days

Absolutely Amazing . . . ;-)

Both ThinkPads have Keyboard/Mouse capabilities via a Y/Splitter cable (proprietary,because IBM...) plugged on the PS/2 port...

Again I would do bios update plus CPU,HDD and Ram update to the max!!

Recently I picked up a slightly battered ThinkPad X100e for around 12 USD on the local auction site. Despite the missing hard drive and battery, the rest of the hardware was intact. Took a while to put things together with some "new parts" like a fresh CMOS battery, an aftermarket battery and most importantly, a SSD. Put Windows Embedded Standard 7 on and the underpowered laptop is ready to play some old games! Even NFS Most Wanted runs at a playable framerate🤣

Great finds!

12:43 The bottom docking station port was also bad if someone was a klutz and knocked over drinks frequently. I am not a klutz but I have killed my own computer with a glass of wine, over the years I have spilled more than one cup of coffee on my desk. I have fixed many computers that have a distinct smell of coffee and cream odour as well as 7 & rye once you get them open.

I always buy pc's and laptops that are easy to upgrade. I don't buy anything that has soldered on ram or storage because if it goes wrong you're screwed unless you can repair BGA chips, I can and have done but it isn't my favourite job. I much prefer just to swap out ram or a drive and my Acer Predator is great for that, 11 screws and you can upgrade the ram, 1 screw to upgrade the 1TB M.2 drive and 4 screws to install a 2nd drive (I've got a 1TB Crucial SSD), so easy to work on.. I have a Dell AIO that is similarly easy to work on although getting the back off is a PITA, my desktop is 2 thumbscrews to access everything so you don't need to go the crApple route if you shop around and do some research before you buy a PC of any flavour..

I used to work a lot on old Dell laptops, mostly from the Latitude range. I liked that C600 as I would often be working on S500, S505 and S600 machines which were a lot like that. I spent some of my latter days at that job cleaning up machines like that, DBANning the drives and installing Linux for later sale. Never really ha dmuch to do with Thinkpads but I still have aan HP6730b from around the Vista period.

Awesome video with some nice, classic laptops. For that Dell, it's of the era of my first laptop, an Inspiron 8000. I'm willing to bet the nub is disabled in the Windows driver. My old 8000 nub would drift really bad, and that keyboard looks identical to the one I had. It should have a thermal pad and heat pipe under it to help cool the discrete graphics if that's the case. The graphics may also be upgradeable. My 8000 came with a GeForce 2Go, but had an ATI option as well. (Edit - Looking it up, the 600 series Latitudes didn't have the upgradeable graphics, but I'm still willing to say that nub may have some drift issues if it's disabled in the Windows driver.)

that 3rd laptop is the one i had back in 2006 when i was still learning the ropes.

I *love* old laptops. 2004-2015 is my sweet spot, like the weirrd 19" models from HP & Dell and thick Toshiba Qosmios "media centers" as well as some of the funky Sony Vaio Duos and military laptops (Getac, etc). Of course every generation of Thinkpad is fantastic. Still buy a new gaming laptop every few years but for coding, I can't even used my razer blade pro (KB controller crashing is a known issue, aluminum case gets too hot and kb just sucks) but a 10-15 year old bulky Lenovo W520 is pure joy as all I need is vim or sublme edit or vs code. At some point, I'm hoping to get a Xeon P-model.

but then again i do like tower pcs because of the cards inside

Nice video!

good finds

Had both D600,and D800. The D800 i still have, with a bad touchpad.

I have a dell d610 that I still use for certain things. I recently restored it to factory fresh as I could manage. Been using the machine to play music from KZfaq. For a laptop that was given to me I've fixed everything that stopped me from using it. Some of the parts I installed happen to be NOS. I can even get up two hours on the replacement battery I have in it. I delt with the dead backlight issue on this laptop as well. You could tell it was going to happen with the weird color the display would show as the bulbs warmed up. Eventually the bulbs would only light after a cold start up and only last about ten minutes before going dark. The display was a marked factory reject though I'm struggling to find said flaw despite it coming circled in sharpie. For a display that had less than an hour on the backlight it looks great and even has a higher resolution than the original. I've used the IR port on my machine though I've never tried it with a second laptop just my palm pilot. I also have a ThinkPad R51 I recently found a set of recovery discs for, so it now has a factory fresh image for the first time since owning it. Despite being from 2002 the main battery does surprisingly hold a charge.

My dad’s old college laptop is almost the same as the Dell except it had a 750mhz cpu and a 10gb hard drive. I replaced the keyboard, hard drive, and screen assembly(to replace the broken hinges) As for the card, there was an option for a modem only card, a modem combo Ethernet card, and a Wi-Fi card. With the modem only card the Ethernet port doesn’t work, and with the Wi-Fi card I’m pretty sure the modem and Ethernet jacks don’t work. I would share a link to a page I found that shows the original options, but my comment has been removed twice because of the spam filter already.

I used to have the dell laptop it was a dell windows 2000 but it had no picture or sounds card installed so couldn't do much with it.

i played sims on one of the ibm's back in elementry school.

i kinda wanna see the best waffles ever text document lol

max out each one with the most memory biggest hard drive and the most updated operating system you can get on them

I recently trash picked a Dell Dimension XPS Gen 5, very similar to a Gen 4 I was given a few years ago. It's mostly intact, but missing a hard drive. I figured at the least that one could provide spare parts for the other. Congrats on your haul!

yay my fav old laptops

Pentium 3 laptop with 256mb and modern Linux please 😊 I assume USB speed 1.1 Install plop to boot to access new settings Test new Linux from there... Maybe Puppy Linux or antix...

Great find! Absolutely love the 600 series, I'm using my 600 and 600X on a daily basis. Which CPU do you have in the 600X? If you have the 650MHz one your machine's got speedstep, so it can lower the clock speed of the CPU depending on usage!

My question is, with machines like these, what actual effective use would they be good for today? That's what i'm curious about. I have an old intel atom n270 laptop that i got laying around but i unfortunately have no idea how to make any form of use for it.

You are one lucky guy loo

802.11n compatible on a PCMCIA card? What the hell? *Edit:* Did some research and they're exceedingly common. I would have figured PC cards had stopped being made well before that standard came about. Guess there's still a lot of hardware floating around that could use them.

I have a C600, it was my 2nd laptop. Sadly it has issues with freezing and crashing now and I haven't been able to pinpoint the cause...

as of previous story I have the IBM600E (PII 450) that got all tacky from the melting rubber that looks exactly like your 600X, I can see your rubber hinges are starting to give up, hint, they be rubber and yours also have started to deteriorate. You even have the exact same problem with the hard drive controller as I do on mine and it is somehow conflicting with itself but this driver is the only one I have gotten the DMA to work on the hard drive with on mine and the drivers I been able to get from IBM. in a way it seems it is the only way to get the controller mostly working but with resource conflicts or you get no DMA speed on the hard drive. if you fix this issue I be all in for the solution as I not been able to find any properly working drivers for my computer either. I do have the sound and graphics drivers for it that likely work on yours too however. I be happy if you could solve this computer and make it fully happy with 98. I kinda think if the Dell screen is possibly starting to get the Vinegar syndrome? maybe the screen is deteriorating on it, then I think they should smell a bit like vinegar too, you even see the color in the picture have changed where you have this damaged area

I don't care about data protection or whatever you called it. I really wanted to know what Shawn thought were "the best waffles ever".

Dell looks like a C400 if memory serves me correctly

I have a IBM Thinkpad R31 it turns on and it has a lock on the drive and the bios I think

One word: lucky

How do you know what power adapter to use?

I have the drivers for the Pentium 3 based systems that Dell and others made archived if you need it.

Anytime you can get a PC for free and put little to no work on them to get it running is a win.

What, don't you ever used some pda, with it's IRDA capability?😅

i have no idea if the hp pavilion 8766c from my firends hosue works well what was my friends house after he passed it was just his mom there i rescued this one from ending up in the landfill im fixing up a AGP card for it as the one that was in it had all its caps bascially failed

Awesome video as always. I need to get my hands on an old IBM think pad for some mobile old school gaming but I never seen one for sale here in Sweden only Lenovo think pads which are way to new.