760XL and budget update.

FloppyZyn asked for photos of the ThinkPads I shared yesterday (completely unprompted and not totally because I asked for it at the end of my ThinkPad Update), and I'm glad to provide! I don't want to share images of the X230 just yet because it's not in its final form, but I just captured some photographs of the 760XL to share.

Here is the 760XL in its native environment: a room that hasn't been updated since the 90s.

The 760XL is a beautiful machine that I'm quickly growing attached to and I cannot afford to do so because it jeopardizes the whole SumZero mission (which is to obtain the perfect classic ThinkPad for essentially free by means of buying, selling, and flipping ThinkPads.)

This particular model of the 760 was built in 1997, making it 28 years old at the time of writing this. There's something really enjoyable about using this device - it feels safe, focused, and brings me back to a more innocent period of my life, when my country didn't scare me and all my family was still alive! It beats any emulator by far, and hearing the physical harddisk brings me back to a time and place :-)

Close up of the keyboard.

But more than just bringing me back to the 90s and reliving my childhood, this device in particular is just really interesting to me. The little display on the keyboard, the sliding volume panel to the right of it, and the 3.5mm travel keyboards are so soft and easy to type on. It also boots up and operates faster than I remember. Perhaps not literally, we perceive time differently as we age, or at least I do from my own experience, but this thing is quite snappy! Given that there is no easy way to connect this thing to the Internet, I could see this being a lovely writing deck for pounding out novels or articles.

I mean just look at that raised keyboard! I'm very pleased with this particular copy. For one, it's working, which is amazing to see, but besides your typical scratches and wear on the outside, nothing is cracked or broken, the keyboard is in particularly excellent shape with no apparent wear to the keys, the battery - as described by the seller - is "new old-stock". It actually holds a charge for a few hours without being plugged in! It has also been maxxed out with memory for a total of 104mb, making it perfect for some classics like Age of Empires, Rollercoaster Tycoon, and SimCity 3000. It also came with a floppy drive (which is easily swappable with a CD drive), though I couldn't find any floppy disks to test it out with no matter how much I searched the house. I guess the 90s were really that long ago.

What's just as interesting as the keyboard is just right under the keyboard. This laptop was designed to be highly modular, apparently, and sliding two tabs on each end of the laptop lifted the keyboard to reveal the hardware underneath, which you could apparently swap out pretty quickly! It looks so cool and it's great to see such a user friendly approach to hardware.

I want to keep this laptop, my friends, I really do, but I can't justify it. I'm going to load it up with a few games once the CF card and adapters arrive, and then clean it up a little bit, and list it on eBay. The perfect ThinkPad mission isn't over, I want my X230!

Speaking of the ThinkPad budget, I want to be transparent and mention that another $48 has been added to the negative balance. I'm keeping a running list of expenses this ThinkPad obsession has cost me, with the goal of eventually bring that back up to $0, and right now we're currently $181 in the red. My ThinkPad budget is now officially at -$181. This is because I bought another ThinkPad today, an X220, and there's a good reason for it. I chose the X230 for my perfect classic ThinkPad build because it was the newest generation ThinkPad "compatible" with the classic style keyboard. By compatible I mean, you can mod it to accept it. Part of this entails finding a classic keyboard from the xx20 models, such as the T420, or the W520, or the X220. You can find these keyboards used on eBay for $20, coming out to about $23 with shipping and taxes. Now you can GRIND down parts of these keyboards to fit the palmrest on the X230, or you can simply buy an X220 palmrest as well, for another $15, and attach that to the X230. This felt like a far less invasive approach in case I sold this device someday and someone in the future wanted to swap it back. So $38 on a couple X220 parts for my mod. Great!

But then I saw it.. a pristine X220, with 8gb of memory, and a CADDY, which my X230 is missing. For about $9 more, I could get the keyboard, I could get the palmrest, I could get a caddy for my x230, and I could probably take the memory out and sell it for $10, and resell the X220 for $20 without those parts. The logic here is that if I can resell some parts for $30, I'll end up paying $18 for the keyboard, palmrest, and caddy, rather than paying $38 for just the palmrest and keyboard. IT MAKES SENSE ON PAPER, we'll just see how it plays out in reality.

We're gonna balance this budget, folks, I'm telling ya. Selling this wonderful, tug-atcho heart strings, retro 760XL is going to be an important part of that.. *sigh*

-Onio