Korean Job Discussion Forums

chaz47 · Joined: 11 Sep 2003

I just took my supposedly dead Toshiba Portege to Mr. Kim's Ye Olde AS center alongside my Dell (which received a RAM upgrade). I had been told at the Toshiba AS center in another part of the city that the machine was hashed and I might as well toss it. The motherboard is bad, etc.

Well, Mr. Kim actually get the thing to power up which it hadn't done in at least a year. He said the hard drive had some problems, I informed him it no longer had a hard drive. He looked a bit surprised and then I asked if it could be repaired he smiled and hesitated then went on to say that it would cost a minimum of 70,000 and a maximum of 100,000 something about the CMOS.

I told him that if he could install a small SSD along with the repair I would be pleased. He swore up and down and right and left that an SSD couldn't be installed on an older IDE style motherboard. In the end he told me that in his opinion it wasn't worth repairing.

Now that I got it home again and see that it does indeed power up and get to the Boot Menu I'm thinking that all hope is not lost. Especially considering that you can get SSDs for IDE motherboards and there are also brilliant little things like this out there:

http://www.bixnet.com/81nothardriv.html

Although that seems a bit pricey. Perhaps I can find one in Korea cheaper than the $120 they advertise.

A guy I used to work with also told me that SSDs in Korea are quite cheap.

I eventually want to install Ubuntu on it and use it solely for Renoise.

Is this idea a total waste of time? I have sunk at least $600 total into the machine and would hate to toss it. Another $100 to get it functioning especially with Ubuntu and a single application should be worth it.

With some form of SSD in it the battery life would be pretty awesome too.

Any advice is appreciated.

bassexpander · Joined: 13 Sep 2007 Location: Someplace you'd rather be.

Well, this machine could be a 133 mhz Pentium 1 or a dual-core pentium for all we know....

chaz47 · Joined: 11 Sep 2003

bassexpander · Joined: 13 Sep 2007 Location: Someplace you'd rather be.

Put a cheap used hard drive in it, and if it works, sell it for $100 and get it out of your life.

I_Am_The_Kiwi · Joined: 10 Jun 2008

i wouldnt waste the money on putting a SSD into it....just get an old HDD if your only using it to run one application. The cost factor alone would be huge. You never know when its gonna just break again, then youll have a nice new SSD that you cant use and an old laptop where you started again.