To those pointing out Acer also makes Extensa laptops: yep, and with good reason! They bought the notebook division from Texas Instruments in 1997.

@kbhasi

4 жыл бұрын

So that's why I saw some Extensa 390 laptops with Texas Instruments logos and some with Acer logos…

@only257

4 жыл бұрын

LGR Blerbs 😈cool

@JonnyInfinite

4 жыл бұрын

I've got an Acer Extensa laptop, was just going to ask this

@EvilishDem0nic8732WhatItDo

4 жыл бұрын

I'm waiting on 8-bit guy for his response but then again,he dont respond to all videos but this is a texas instruments and since hes in texas, I think he'll know more about this machine

@drizztcat1

4 жыл бұрын

Hey man, when are we gonna get some more Clint sammich videos?

I worked at Texas Instruments in the early to mid 90's. They made laptop computers in a small town in Central Texas. The TravelMate brand was fully TI designed and built by TI. By 1995 TI decided to bring in some less expensive models built by Taiwanese manufacturers. The Extensa 550CD was one of those systems and it was built by FIC. I was on the team that brought those in. I got to spend a couple of months at the FIC factory outside of Taipei doing what was called "factory authorization inspections" which was quality inspections on the first production run of the Extensa models. TI also had another Extensa model that was produced by Acer. Clint, if you remove the keyboard you will see the the CPU is a desktop Pentium in a socket. We had a couple of issues with the Extensa 550CD. The sled holding the HDD had a little wiggle room and the HDD would disconnect from the connector board. We had to add a spacer to the front of the tray to keep it tight against the connector board. The bigger issue was that the battery would pop out. We had a lawsuit from an incident in an airplane where the laptop owner was putting the laptop into the overhead luggage compartment and the battery dropped out and into a dude's crotch and did some damage. Fun times.

@LGRBlerbs

4 жыл бұрын

Thanks for all the info, good stuff!

@Merrinen

4 жыл бұрын

Ah so that is what the model number means, 550CD = 550 Crotch Damage...

@luxembourger

4 жыл бұрын

Yeah, poor Linus got a high-pitched voice after this incident.

@tornadotj2059

4 жыл бұрын

Reading this reminds me of all the issues we had with laptops at AST.

@iwanttocomplain

4 жыл бұрын

Was the damage to his crotch extensive?

This blerb and the screen shown here taught me WHY there is an option to make mouse pointer leave trails - before I thought about that option as a random appearance thing.

Water faucet is power management indicator; 1 drip is conservative, 2+ drips is max power. :)

@LGRBlerbs

4 жыл бұрын

Thanks, I had no idea!

@only257

4 жыл бұрын

LGR Blerbs ☺️

@taz3000nice

4 жыл бұрын

I always thought it meant that its "Running" like running water lol

@Lukeno52

4 жыл бұрын

IIRC, Toshiba used a very similar icon on some of their laptops as well.

@phasm42

4 жыл бұрын

@@Lukeno52 yeah it looks like a Toshiba re-badged.

Screens like this remind me again of how thankful I am that active matrix finally became the norm. You paid a good $400+ premium for them back in the day, but the difference was night and day - almost literally.

My grandfather has an Extensa 565 that he still uses. Its only job is to automate opening/closing of his curtains. The screen is so faded he has to use an external monitor.

@kbhasi

4 жыл бұрын

I wonder what kind of curtain rails he had. Probably something custom, or smart home curtains before its time.

@ocg-overwatchconsolegamepl2809

4 жыл бұрын

@@kbhasi LGR showcased lots of old automated stuff on his channel, recommend watching that if you haven't!

@s8wc3

4 жыл бұрын

Your grandfather sounds awesome

@Redhotsmasher

4 жыл бұрын

As the saying goes, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.

@Vegas242

4 жыл бұрын

@@Redhotsmasher Well apparently the monitor is broke

"I don't know what this little water faucet icon is that showed up right there..." Texas Instrument's short lived attempt at merging laptops with tamagotchi. (not really)

$2,799 for this bad boy without the extra RAM, from what I can find. You could also get it with an active matrix display for an additional $800. Unbelievable how expensive laptops used to be if you also consider inflation.

@colombianguy8194

4 жыл бұрын

That's the thing that blows my mind. Laptops in the 90's were very expensive machines, I have a thinkpad 760XL, I don't remember it's price when new, but it was way above $2.500. And I recently won a bid for a Thinkpad 770X from a German guy, I'm still waiting for arrive (Coronavirus shipping issues to Colombia, my home country) That beast cost like $4500 in 1998. 14" TFT, Pentium II and DVD drive, it was the top of the class back then.

@Lurch-Bot1

4 жыл бұрын

I have a couple of old Toshiba Satellite laptops. One of them, my parents bought new in 1998. It has a 486 DX4-100 processor. It cost around $1800 new, probably on clearance. I also have the same model with a Pentium 120 MMX and I think that one was just shy of $3k originally.

@BenState

Жыл бұрын

*but cheap

It doesn't seem like anyone else is going to bring this up, so I will. That flash animation was actually done by John K., of Ren a Stimpy fame. He made a lot of Flash back in the day.

@MalikCarr

4 жыл бұрын

IIRC he contributed quite a bit of work to Sugarqube, which was an early to mid-2000s e-card website. Wayback Machine says they went dark in late 2007 and apparently were absorbed by American Greetings - assumedly without John K.

@U014B

3 жыл бұрын

I just thought whoever made it had been watching a lot of R&S at the time.

This is taking me back to high school, my dad had gotten a really, really out of date laptop for 'cheap' (IDK what he paid for it, but he said 'cheap'). How out of date? It ran windows 3.11 and I graduated in 2004. It was a glorified word doc maker. I confused teachers when handing in reports that were printed from our DOT, MATRIX, PRINTER. Some made fun of the PCs in the library for being bad but they were LIGHT YEARS ahead of our family PC. Our PC before that? . . . DOS.

@vetchb.s.c.1612

4 жыл бұрын

Sounds like my home computing experience i had a commodore 64 in the 90s and when we got an upgrade it was an IBM XT

@bitwize

4 жыл бұрын

My high school's computer lab had a fleet of IBM PCs. As in 5150s. This was the early 90s. Eventually they were upgraded to 386s and 486s, and we all played Wolfenstein/Doom on those.

@MosoKaiser

4 жыл бұрын

Well, if you only needed to type simple documents without much fancy-schmancy stuff, it probably got the job done just fine? Reminds me of that Polish guy running his car repair shop and still using his old Commodore 64, for which he himself had programmed software he needed, like some tire balancing program for instance.

@JayFochs1337

4 жыл бұрын

I used an actual doc maker xD basically a typewriter but for notepad txt files. Nightmares.

@bitwize

4 жыл бұрын

@@JayFochs1337 So, a word processor?

ok Clint, that Gothic game in the background has been teasing me for quite some time now! I'm dying to see your review of it.

@NexXxus86

4 жыл бұрын

Same here man, love this game since its release in march 2001

@billybollockhead5628

4 жыл бұрын

I keep seeing the realms game.. and reminding me that I’d love to see Clint review “realms of the haunting”, one of my favourite “fmv cd” games

@Lykoloo

4 жыл бұрын

It's $2.49 on GoG as of 6/10/20

@rickyrigatoni

4 жыл бұрын

It was so good they made the same game 6 more times.

@Fastwinstondoom

4 жыл бұрын

@@rickyrigatoni Just too bad that they could never make it better than Gothic 2 with Night of the Raven expac...

Clint, stop kink-shaming the power cable

I had this exact model laptop when I was in high school (my mother worked for Texas Instruments and purchased the laptop at cost), it was an absolute tank. An excellent DOS machine but very mundane and slow as a windows pc. I played Doom and Doom II on it constantly, and yeah, that screen was absolutely horrible. Thanks for the nostalgia trip back to the 90s. I'd love to see you upgrade it to the max, if I remember correctly the cpu is socketed and can be replaced with a desktop pentium 133Mhz.

@mistersomaru

4 жыл бұрын

I saw these things when I was in elementary school in the late 90's XD

@andrewdupuis1151

4 жыл бұрын

does Duke3d work on it ?

@erebostd

4 жыл бұрын

@@andrewdupuis1151 obviously 😉

@UltimateAlgorithm

4 жыл бұрын

What is the water faucet icon means?

Man...I remember these. When my department, back in '98, was depreciating old equipment to give away to employees, one of these was turned in by the hardware engineering dept. so they could upgrade to a shiny new Compaq. Anyway, I'd made everything else ready for the giveaway, and this was one of the few stragglers. I could NOT get the Ti video or sound drivers to work. They'd install and let me put the display at 8 or 16 bit color (it's been a while, don't recall) and play audio but as soon as I rebooted the laptop, it would default back to the previous settings, and from there on it wouldn't acknowledge the changes. Ended up going to the recycle bin.

This is the laptop I had in highschool and college. I loved it so much, and I miss the heck out of it. if any manufacturer can make something like this again, I would buy it immediately.

I love these videos. Perfect for to watch with a coffee during a cloudy, rainy day. I was born in ‘97 but I get nostalgic for this kind of old hardware.

I've a feeling that the backup battery is leaking, hence the corrosion in the PC Card slots, so I recommend you try to get it apart and remove it! Hopefully it can run without that backup battery. (Edit: I think there may be leaking capacitors that are causing the audio output to be quiet) 5:45 Power management mode! Compaq used the same icon back then.

@dedr4m

4 жыл бұрын

A leaky CMOS/BIOS battery is what killed the GPU on the one I picked up (Had the Toshiba branded varient, can't remember the video-chip, but it were BGA and failing due to battery leakage) Yep, I tried replacing the VRAM and trace testing, defo the GPU.

Gaming on a passive matrix display, wew! Wouldn't wish that eye ache on anyone lol

How good is the calculator application on that?

@josephabbott07

4 жыл бұрын

😂😂😂😂

@MisterRorschach90

4 жыл бұрын

It better be able to spell boobies.

@AerinRavage

4 жыл бұрын

Hopefully good enough to play Doom!

@Hat-

4 жыл бұрын

Probably decent enough

@KiteAndKeyProductions

4 жыл бұрын

Because tech is so weird sometimes, it's probably shite lololol

I think what's most notable about this thing is how little you can find about it online. I'd like to see it play SimCity.

@aarongreenfield9038

4 жыл бұрын

Question is, would it even run SIM city?

@redherring5532

4 жыл бұрын

This comment reminded me of Sim Tower, loved that game

@jansenart0

4 жыл бұрын

@@redherring5532 I remember trying to figure out how to change the lobby size only to be told I was SOL.

I just picked up a mint Toshiba 430cdt P120 machine. Has a fresh restore from 2004 with only one user created document. Screen is really nice on it too. Battery even still holds a charge. I like that the PSU is internal.

@Henchman1977

4 жыл бұрын

For $10cnd I might add....

That boot up sound is so amazing.

You always made my day... Thank you . Had a bad day today. But your videos always cheers me up !!! Keep up the good work mate.... Gnite from down under !!!

I really like his enthusiasm in every video. Adds a nice touch to the content he provides. Keep up the awesome work! :D

that valentine's day animation brings back memories.. as SOON as I saw the "Enter name" screen I knew what it was... trust me Clint, get it going on the woodgrain and witness it in all it's glory, it's awful.

I was 9mins in the joys of being in Australia. Thank you LGR love your reviews

Man, that Valentines Dance exe makes me miss the early Internet. We used to send those things around all the time at school, heh. The IT guy wrote a script to get rid of sheep.exe which he called mintsauce. xD

Oh wow! My dad used to have one back in the day! I don't remember getting to use it much myself, but I forever associate early/mid-90s laptops with that bulky grey casing.

Windows 95 start up sound... That is how nostalgia sounds.

I see TI managed to fit a second screen on a laptop without removing the function keys... i wonder why apple couldnt figure it out 25years later...

@alhuno1

4 жыл бұрын

Because Apple. @Louis Rossmann is the best example of this.

@MultiTelan

4 жыл бұрын

Form over function. In fact...form over literally anything else.

@alhuno1

4 жыл бұрын

@@MultiTelan to the point of computers that thermal throttle the second you put a load on the CPU just because they want their computers to be quiet.

@MultiTelan

4 жыл бұрын

@@alhuno1 that's why I love my G3 15. Yeah it's a lower end system build wise, but she games with the best of them and stays cool because the internals were designed properly.

@NigelDraycott

4 жыл бұрын

¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Dude you make my days happy, Keep it up... I have some stories about woirking in a e-waste recycling center that would make all of us cry.

Gotta love them chonky old school laptops

Love ur relaxing intro cutscene as always

Haha, great, I had this one back in the days. Loved that thing, great to see it again 😁

There simply can't be too many LGR Blerbs! I love these!

LGR / Clint, you should talk more about this channel on your main. I've watched all your primary channel videos a few times and had no idea this channel existed. Glad I have more to watch.

That flash animation is the high quality content we come here for !

I cannot be the only one who wants to see that Flash Valentine's animation And your voice is SO soothing

That's so cool, a laptop from like 25 years ago with all it's components working (more or less).

My stepmother had one of these, and I got it as a hand-me-down. Not surprised it's still working. It's a real workhorse computer.

I liked seeing that boxed copy of Gothic in the background. The first 2 games are some of my favorite RPGs

lol that Valentine's day flash animation brought back so many memories.

You skipped over the most important connectivity option, IrDA! That little black window on the back looked like IR and old ads confirm that it is.

@tornadotj2059

4 жыл бұрын

For transferring data to another laptop. Oh, the memories.

@KarlBaron

4 жыл бұрын

@@tornadotj2059 Or to sync your Palm! Or to go online at exorbitant rates using your GSM cell phone...

@Beany2007FTW

4 жыл бұрын

@@KarlBaron I recall doing that with an XDA and a toshiba tecra laptop. Early 00s as I recall. Such strange times thinking back!

@sa_exploder

4 жыл бұрын

Yeah! IrDA would make a good Tech Tales or Oddware episode. Cool stuff.

@RyanRiopel

4 жыл бұрын

I once used IrDA to transfer an MP3 from my iPaq PDA to a friend's laptop. I think it took over 5 minutes!

Would be interesting to see it running on an external monitor, keyboard, mouse, and especially speakers :) It was always cool to see how close some of these could perform desktop replacement duties.

I really like this video format!

Yet another fan of TI calculators, and I f'n love this machine 🥰

This is the laptop the senate gave me when I was on campaign against Hannibal.

If you get really bored, I found the full manual. You were spot on about the floppy and CD drive being modular.

Frickin' love Cosmo. Loved most of Apogee's games, simpler times with humble gaming, really pleasant graphics, I always felt there was a real art to making games when limited in pixels and colours, Apogee always did great artwork. Nice laptop too, especially the IBM :) droooool droooool!

I used this exact model to take notes in college starting in 2003. Better laptops were available, but this one was free. The hinge was falling apart, the battery didn't work, and it was super slow. I ran DOS 6.22 on it and a simple text editor since all I needed to do was type notes. I kinda wish I still had it so I could follow along at home.

I had one of these. It was actually the first windows based computer I ever bought. Mine didnt originally include a cd player but at some point my windows install became corrupted and I had to write the driver for DOS to get it running again. it was really amazing for a guy that never really worked in DOS before

I find it to be a very useful laptop as a go-between for older PCs and newer ones

Had know idea that Texas Instruments made laptops. Learns something new everyday.

I just love these Blerbs!

this valentin.exe brought me right back to 2000 man. never thought i will ever see this again

The Texas Instruments THICCCCBOI

@GroteB

4 жыл бұрын

Everything is bigger in Texas (Instruments).

@Uncleharkinian

4 жыл бұрын

Texas Instruments Texas toast

Texas Instruments, the kind of hardware that comes with so many quirks and features for the professional spreadsheet gurus!

That Valentine dance is mesmerizing

I once owned a similar model, played Daggerfall on it for a few years, before upgrading to a Compaq K6 both used and found near the base while serving in the navy.

After working for Acer for several years (some time ago now), I can't believe I only just found out where the Extensa and TravelMate brands came from

I used to do technology displays for the Royal National Institute for the Blind and we would demonstrate screen magnification and large print software. Sometimes I'd have a van full of kit and we'd have to unload the laptops first and leave them near a heater before setting them up otherwise the screen contrast was zero. Even the early TFT screens weren't much better if they'd been left overnight in a cold van.

What a weird choice of background, every time I see it I think "oh windows isn't finished setting up yet".

@wibblehx

4 жыл бұрын

Its the classic, user looks for wallpaper but there isn't any on the computer so they just select the install bmp in c:\windows

@manuell3505

4 жыл бұрын

Wasn't that 1 of the few fullscreen images where the rest were tile-based? You have to make something with paint or get your 56K online...

@mattelder1971

4 жыл бұрын

When Windows 95 first came out there were sometimes issues where the setup wallpaper would get "stuck" during setup and be carried over to the install once it was completed.

@agy234

4 жыл бұрын

Matt Elder thought I was the only one that had that! Did they ever find what caused it?

I just found a TI travelmate 3000 last week. Awesome timing!

Hmm, Realms of Arkania: Star Trail in background, Amiga 1200 memories. Keep LGR blerbs coming, especially LGR plays ;)

@LoftySkinner

4 жыл бұрын

Played Realms on my old Olivetti 486 back in the day. Probably the first RPG I beat.

Ohh, the nostalgia, that old Flash player icon :)

What a wonderful e-card. My aunts and parent's friend's loved those when I was a kid. I meanwhile had downloaded what was essentially a browser extension (but on Internet Explorer) with goofy animated emojis you could send in emails, and I also sent the extension to some friends and we used them extensively! Plus, my dad had a folder called funny video where he'd save what were essentially KZread videos Becker KZread, so that e-card being saved seems very era correct to me

Wow Cosmic! I totally forgot about this game. I played the shareware-version a lot as a kid.

Really enjoying this blerbs content 👍🏻

Sweet, get to start the work day watching LGR.

I love this old notebook

5:44 The water faucet has to with the power management settings... The more drips appear the more power/battery power the laptop is using. That indicator was pretty common on lower end laptops of the day..

@doramilitiakatiemelody1875

3 жыл бұрын

Yep

This laptop is VERY similar to my NEC Versa 2400 from 1996. Same ports on the back, same water faucet indicator, came crappy display, same bios. it even has the same power supply, which split apart just like yours, so I had to tape it back together. It does have a slightly different design though.

Many moons ago used a Clevo-rebadged laptop of possibly a couple years later (it had one USB port). Also had an ESS audio chip. Odd thing is it had wavetable on port 330 as well. Not documented anywhere. But even the win95 install it came with was set to use the FM synth by default. Only found by accident. If esscfg and essvol are on the HDD somewhere, one configures the ESS chip for pure DOS use, the other allows setting the volume. Became less and less reliable before randomly shutting down, and then the hinges crumbled, and that was that.

The Extensa was also sold as an Acer. That display is definitely DSTN. The water faucet icon indicates the power management mode. A lot of laptops in the 90s correlated a faucet icon with power management. A full stream means full power and a trickle means power saving (slow) mode. With those mouse buttons, one click is probably an actual button click and the other is something buckling. Also, PM me if you need any help with those 760s you unboxed in the last vid. I used to rebuild them, repair them and resell them when I was in high school in the 2000s. I've even built a few from scratch and know every centimeter of those things. Sadly, those ELs you have have DSTN displays but those can be really easily swapped with a 12" TFT.

@eDoc2020

4 жыл бұрын

Actually with the mouse buttons, one click is the actual click and the other is the same click. There are two switch elements in parallel under each external mouse button, presumably for more consistent activation.

I used to work in a PC Superstore that sold these. Not a proper TI machine - those were the Travelmate range - Acer had bought the brand recently and this was an OEM rebadge of some sort.. The internal drive bay would take either the 3.5" drive or an included CD-ROM drive. The funky connector on the back that you suggested was for a dock would plug into an external caddy that you could slot the 3.5" drive in if you needed to use both. CD-ROM didn't work externally. So yeah, the CD-ROM and the floppy caddy appear to be missing.

That game is so old!! used to play it a lot as a young child (first level, didn't know how to read English yet)

Sometimes these cheap old things are the best finds because they hold so many weird surprises.

I'd love to know more about the secondary LCD strip!!

Hey, Duke boi! TWEAK DAT DOS MEM! :) Truth be told, it was about as much fun to tweak Castle Wolfenstein's mem usage as it was to play it, for me!

When I think of all the old laptops we got rid of at my old workplace.

"PCMCIA" slot in a laptop. holy wow. I haven't heard that word for 17 years and this is probably the last I will hear about it ever again.

@MozTS

4 жыл бұрын

Fun fact: f/a-18 super hornets still use them as a data cart for mission planning

@anticommunist1607

3 жыл бұрын

JMPS still runs on Windows 98 machines.

Nice Gothic box back there. We're gonna need a good old style LGR for that .

This is a cool piece of old tec

Oh man, Cosmo! Haven't played that since the '90s... Completely forgot about it... Now I have to go looking for the disks... ;-)

The water faucet shows how fast it is currently draining the battery (or overall power consumption) - the same system was used on Panasonic Toughbook CF-62.

I know that Valentine flash animation! I used to have it on some of the burned CD-Rs with a collection of random stuff from the internet back in the 00s. You should definitely watch till the end, it'll be hilarious!

@presidentkiller

2 жыл бұрын

He should watch it somewhere else, though. That computer struggles like it's about to catch on fire. 😅

The ESS chips have awesome soundblaster support!

I remember that Valentine's flash animation!

That fan is dry for sure & making some noise, cleaning it out with some degreaser & sewing machine oil afterwards. That oil is a bit on the thicker side but should have it work nicely my r9 280's fans have been working great daily for 1.5 years now since i added some sewing machine oil into them after they started making similar grindy bad noises.

Possibly failing caps is your problem with the sound and maybe also the brightness. Would love to see a bit of a tear down and refurb for this old laptop. Despite its weak screen still would make for a good DOS rig. The ESS audio chipset isn't bad for soundblaster compatibility. If you don't fancy repairing it, I'd be more than happy to do so.

Jesus those Ultima boxes in the background just wow wow wow wow

Holy shit this was the first laptop I bought at a flea market in ~2005. Was coffee damaged! Held onto it for years but never tried to boot it from a 100 percent match power supply. Never thought i'd be watching a video on the same one haha

i had a 355 back in the day... it was a great laptop!

Something tells me that it would be really cool if Clint did a video on all the ThinkPads during the IBM era, those computers had so many distinctive features it would be cool to take a look and see what IBM was smoking every year.

The ghosting on that screen makes my blood pressure rise.

@doramilitiakatiemelody1875

3 жыл бұрын

Its a passive matrix screen try playing doom on that kind of screen

gotta love passive matrix screens. its amazing anyone every thought "yep, this will do" and continued with lcd technology.

@PierreCarrier

4 жыл бұрын

Sounds like you haven’t tried carrying a 10”+ CRT around. Tubes are empty but take a lot of space, and their casing is really heavy. Full colour matrix displays with those densities at those weights? Life changing. And they display Word, Excel, business forms, etc. just fine indoors.

Watching this video and seeing the box to the right brings up memories from a distant past: Realms of Arkania: Star Trail (a.k.a. as "Das Schwarze Auge: Sternenschweif" here in Germany, the direct translation would be "The Black Eye: Star Trail") was an adaption of the famous german Pen&Paper roleplaying game. It is actually the second part of the series. Part one ist Blade of Destiny and part three is Shadows over Riva (not to be confused with Gerald of Rivia). These were somehow open-world games like the first Might&Magic oder Eye of the Beholder games but with less dungeon crawling and much more traveling on the original pen & paper map. One of the best features was that you can bring your party from part one to the part two and three. Therefore you have to do the character generation only once, which is a great benefit, because of its high complexity. Everyone who likes old school rpg games should give Realms of Arkania a shot, especially if you want to try something else than the usual Dungeon&Dragons based games.

This thing is sweet AF

Wow. That is chunky. I have a Toshiba 460CDT and I thought that was a brick. I love it though. Lol

I didn't expect the Blerbs to be this substantial