intermodal's Journal: INTERNAL USE ONLY

upon purchasing a lot of 10 Thinkpad 600/600E chassis on ebay as a gamble on upgrading my wife's laptop beyond its Thinkpad 600/300mhz status (plus its bad motherboard), I discovered on its delivery that the person who posted the auction had much understated the specs of the chassis in question. Not a single Thinkpad 600, all were 600E. Not a single processor below 300 mhz (two 300mhz), and many of them worked fine.

Interesting part hasn't come yet. The processor list, all MMC-2 interface:

2 300mhz Mobile Pentium II
4 366mhz Mobile Pentium II
2 400mhz Mobile Pentium II
1 433mhz Mobile Pentium II

This may not seem significant until you consider there is no such thing as a 433 MHz Mobile Pentium II. It's marked "INTERNAL USE ONLY" and "SAMPLE". After discussing it with the population of #gentoo, I decided it would be my new laptop processor in my Thinkpad 600E (up from 400mhz). Anyone else have experience with engineering sample processors? there's no obvious tinkering like soldered wires or anything like that, and it seems stable enough on use. Isn't running any hotter than my 400mhz did.

Oddly, it has the same stepping, model, and family as a 400mhz, so it may just be a factory-overclocked one with a different setup in some way, but i'm no processor engineer.

In other hardware issues, anyone have any recommendations as far as BIOS supervisor password recovery? 2 or 3 of the boards that were working well were also protected. There's a guy online who claims he can get the output from a homemade device and then for a fee decode it, but i'd prefer to do it on my own since I don't really need the boards and just want to sell them off. CMOS battery removal won't do the trick on thinkpads, thanks to IBM's security-minded engineering. In fact, none of the boards came with CMOS batteries, though I had two spares already.

If anyone's interested in buying any mobile pentium II spares I have lying around though, let me know. I've also got spare boards, modems, casings, and fan assemblies for TP600/E/X series. If there were a local market for the things i'd refurb and sell them locally, but without that I've just got a fair stock of backup parts for the two I have, which is also nice. Hopefully I'll find work soon, since everything I do is turning into a way to turn a few bucks that nobody has the money around here to pay for. it's a pretty frustrating mindset.

Interested

[GMontag]

I am interested in one. How much are you wanting for a fully functional machine?

About 5 Dec. is when I can buy.

Re:Interested

[intermodal]

you mean to build one? depends on what prices I could get on the parts. If you mean a working board minus keyboard, floppy drive, cdrom, hard disk, battery and screen, ~50 maybe. the testing is pretty time consuming and an all around PITBFAA. So to build up a full system, i'd need the following parts:

Battery (the expensive part. Even most new laptops lack much warranty on the things)
Screen (also expensive, price fluctuates with condition, important to make sure the trackpoint hasn't been abusively pus

Re:Interested

[GMontag]

Guess I misunderstood. Thought some were fully operational.

I already have enough unfinished projects, including my old laptop/usenet surfing machine that only needs a new HDD.

Re:Interested

[intermodal]

nah...some of the boards are fully operational. If some of these systems were fully operational i'd have definitely been proclaiming my joy a little louder than that. I should have been clearer.