Just bought an ebay laptop

D

dennis68

New Member
I picked up an IBM 390E for125.00. Good deal huh?

Anyways, it has a 333mhz P2 processor and 128mb with a 6gig drive. I have a brand new tToshiba 20gig drive at the shop, will it work. I had heard that the P2 and earlier machines won't take more than 8gig.

It also needs as battery (don't they all), does anybody make "super batteries"? I know with my digital cam the brand or type of rechargables makes a difference as to how long they last between charges.
 
The HD size is a bunch of bull. The only limitation to your HD size is your motherboard, and there's usally some way to get around that. As long as it's a 2.5", it should work fine.

Batteries, I wouldn't even try to find them. I bet the battery will cost more than the laptop did! Now I've made some batteries out of other recharable batteries, but it wasn't that great...
 
I found a replacement with a 1-year warranty for 60 bucks. Just wanted something with a longer charge-hold time.
 
I don't want to get you annoyed man, but you bought the whole notebook for $125 and a new battery for half the price, this is a little bit expensive notebook :)

Anyway, as "The_Other_One" said, your motherboard is the only thing who can tell if you can use a larger hard disk or not. You can search for BIOS updates for the mother board and install it to make the board able to identify and use higher hard disks than it currently can. This is an easy search for desktop mother boards, but it will be a little bit harder for a notebook mother board, specially for an old one like the one you have.

There will never be magic batteries that last long years, or else, we won't keep buying batteries for our notebooks from the manufacturers :D

What you don't know about notebook batteries, and mostly no body knows, is that there are 2 ways to operate the notebook through the battery while the charger is plugged in:

The charger keeps charging the battery untill it is fully charged, and during charging, the notebook is getting it's power from the battery itself, but charging is pumping more power into the battery than the power going from the battery to the notebook, thus the charge of the batter increase even if you are using the notebook. After the battery is fully charged, one of the 2 scenarios can occur:

1. The notebook continue it's operation from the battery, and the plugged power continue to pump the difference into the battery thus keeping it fully charged all the time

2. The battery is disconnected and the notebook gets all the power directly from the external power source without feeding the battery all the time as an intermediate source


95% of the notebooks use the first technique, why? Because simply the second technique will extremely longer the battery lifetime, and they don't want this to happen. In the first case, the battery is in continuos discharge and charge all the time as long as you are plugging the external power charger, and this shortens the battery life a lot. And since I am originally an Electrical Engineer, I know like everyone, that re-chargeable batteries life are measured by the number of charge/discharge cycles, so your notebook in the power plug is consuming these cycles while you think that you are protecting the battery, and at the end, you get astonished that you have been using your notebook for 1 or 2 years only, and always keeping it in the external power charger, and you find that the battery died? And you ask yourself desperately, why? I never used the battery?

That's why I hate notebooks, they are not reliable at all from the power point of view.

Also, manufacturers use the one of the bad types of batteries ever, the Li-Ion. Can you imagine what will be the battery life if they used the Ni-MH or the Lead Acid Sealed Batteries??? Battery life will shoot up to 2-5 years based on usage!!! That's why Lead Acid Batteries are mainly used in Cars, Long life, High Current and huge number of charge/discharge cycles.


Don't get frustrated, enjoy your notebook, I am just telling you something that might help in the future, but you will have to live the present happily man :)

Thanks,

Nader
 
Well you could always take the battery out when you set it up and know you wont take it anywhere for awhile, then charge it the night before you do go somewhere. Im sure that will greatly increase the battery life.
 
speedyink said:
Well you could always take the battery out when you set it up and know you wont take it anywhere for awhile, then charge it the night before you do go somewhere. Im sure that will greatly increase the battery life.
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Is there any notebooks out there that really offer this option?? To work with the notebook without a battery while on Plugged Power ?
 
Mine does, the 4 other laptops I've used do. Actually since my battery is dead I just keep the battery out of the laptop and it still powers on when plugged into the wall. Im not sure about the newer ones though.
 
speedyink said:
Mine does, the 4 other laptops I've used do. Actually since my battery is dead I just keep the battery out of the laptop and it still powers on when plugged into the wall. Im not sure about the newer ones though.
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Can you tell me what notebooks have you been using? I mean which brands support this feature? You can't imagine how much battery life will be improved using this technique, at least double life.

I don't think new models support this. Anyone out there can help ?
 
hmm...i sold my P3 900MHz laptop, 128MB RAM, 40GB HDD for $100. had XP and everything on it. guess i should have asked for more:)
 
4W4K3 said:
hmm...i sold my P3 900MHz laptop, 128MB RAM, 40GB HDD for $100. had XP and everything on it. guess i should have asked for more:)
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You should have told me man, I would have bought it from you :D

This is a very good price for a notebook compared to prices of notebooks here in Egypt. Your notebook can be sold here in Egypt for around a $350-$400 :P
 
narafa said:
You should have told me man, I would have bought it from you :D

This is a very good price for a notebook compared to prices of notebooks here in Egypt. Your notebook can be sold here in Egypt for around a $350-$400 :P
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yah it was kind of a spontaneous sell. guy came over to house and asked to buy it for $100. i needed $75 to finish paying for sumthin...so i did it. could have gotten alot more if i did eBay or something.
 
narafa said:
Can you tell me what notebooks have you been using? I mean which brands support this feature? You can't imagine how much battery life will be improved using this technique, at least double life.

I don't think new models support this. Anyone out there can help ?
Click to expand...

Mine is a Fujitsu FMV Biblo, One of my friends has an IBM thinkpad that it works on(he doesnt even have a battery), I had an uber old 386 one that worked without a battery, forget the brand. And I think the last one was an NEC laptop. Mind you these are older laptops (my Fujitsu is a P2, as is my friends thinkpad), but why not give it a shot on yours. Its not like it will will take much effort.
 
speedyink said:
Mine is a Fujitsu FMV Biblo, One of my friends has an IBM thinkpad that it works on(he doesnt even have a battery), I had an uber old 386 one that worked without a battery, forget the brand. And I think the last one was an NEC laptop. Mind you these are older laptops (my Fujitsu is a P2, as is my friends thinkpad), but why not give it a shot on yours. Its not like it will will take much effort.
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Ya, you are right, I shall try with mine, but actually mine is Harddiskless right now :D

So I will have to buy a new hard disk for it first and then try. I was just asking because I was considering a new notebook. The one I have is an old Compaq, AMD, it's not that great, that's why I am asking about those ones. I will check with guys at work, they use notebooks, may be I will remove the batteries from their P4 notebooks and see if it works :D
 
It's a Presario 1720. Old one with AMD processor, as far as I remember a 366 Mghz, 14" LCD, CD-ROM drive, no floppy although you can install one, 192 MB RAM, No Hard disk as mentioned, Hard disk actually died a few months after I bought it.

That's it.

But just for curiousity, why are you asking? :D
 
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