[ltp] The dead 600, redux

[Bret Comstock Waldow]

On Fri, 2003-07-18 at 10:14, Kim Hardy wrote:
>  
> Learn your ebay lesson man.

Well, it's worth looking, as IBM sells new stock on ebay.  I bought my
T21 new from IBM on ebay with the full 3 year warranty (they sell
refurbished too with less warranty).

They were even out of the machine I bid on and offered me the same plus
the mini-pci modem/ethernet card.

So, it's worth looking, although I agree and sympathize about the rest.

> 
> I did the same thing last month ... A 770X that wont take any OS except Debian and has a shockingly yellowed screen. I had to buy 128 mb of ram to replace the dodgey sodim installed. The seller said, 'You broke it, it worked fine when I got it etc etc' f** you in other words ...
> 
> I bougtht TP T20 before that which had dead pixels and holes in it.
> 
> And you might have got yours cheap .. but in the UK they still go for top whack. $400 USD approx for a 770X (p2 300).
> 
> Basically buying laptops off ebay is, in my experience a hiding to nothing. Just don't reccommend anyone do it. Its always worth spending the extra for a new one - with a warranty. Always.
> 
> Hope you work things out ...
> 
> All the best. 
> 
> Kimberly.
> 
> On Fri, 18 Jul 2003 21:57:54 -0700
> Ken Restivo <ken@restivo.org> wrote:
> 
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> > Well I ordered that TP600 to replace the TP600E that got doused.
> > 
> > It was on ebay, it was cheap, it was easy. I bought it. It arrived. No hard drive, CD-ROM, and only 32MB of RAM, but I had all those from the old/wet 600E anyway.
> > 
> > I plug in a CDROM drive. The machine powers up! Yippie!
> > 
> > Then I shut it down, take out the CDROM, and plug in a hard drive. BEEP BOOP. Uh oh. No see hard drive. The BIOS is giving me the "feed me" graphic (looks a lot like an old Macintosh, when it does that..). 
> > 
> > I shutdown and plug in a different hard drive. BEEP BOOP. I try the F1, Initialize trick. Nope. Dammit! I try upgrading the BIOS to the latest. Upgrade goes well, but still no hard drive. I try both the CDROM *and* a hard drive. Nope. At this point, I'm flailing helplessly, doing superstitious things. I've no idea what's wrong, but I suspect I bought a boat anchor.
> > 
> > Well at least now I know why the thing was so cheap. That is, maybe disposably cheap to most folks, but I'm impoverished. I spent my last few dollars on this thing. The CD-ROM seems to work fine, but I can't get any known-working hard drives to be recognised by the BIOS. Very, very upsetting. No machine left, no money left, no nothing. Just a bunch of useless junk.
> > 
> > This is a 2645-51U made in 09/98.
> > 
> > Any ideas? 
> > 
> > - -ken
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-- 
bwaldow at alum.mit.edu