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Toshiba Portege 3490CT


I bought this in October 2013 on a flea market in Hamburg. It was rainy and cold, as always at this time of year. Despite the weather the market was rather big, and full of weird, cruddy stands full of old and shabby stuff.
One of said stands had a huge crate full of old, battered notebooks standing in the rain. I bought one, even though i was sure it would be dead, because it was cheap and i was frustrated. It came without battery, disk and power supply. I had a Toshiba power supply with the usual large barrel plug, but but the 3490 has a proprietary flat plug.. I macguyvered something out of a pinstrip connector.

Since i never actually got my hands on a stock power supply, i improved my hack into something a bit less daunting:

That white dot on the connector is super glue. Its sanded into a shape roughly resembling the orientation nose of the original plug. Its working fine since today (early 2017).

Features

  • Toshiba Portege 3490CT
    • System
      • Intel Pentium IIIm, 0.8MHz
      • 128MB SDR on board + 128MB SDR module
        • this thing uses uncommon, smaller SODIMMs, hard to get
      • 16gb CF with CF-IDE-Adapter
      • S3 Savage/IX, 8MB
        • acceleration $file, 3D $file
          • acceleration might work with 16bit colour depth (not enough memory otherwise)
    • I/O
      • 12" matte (1024x768) CCFL backlit display
        • brightness $file
      • 1 USB $file
      • Headphone $file, Mic $file, VGA $file, 2 CardBus $file
      • Dock $file
        • I have the larger one with the drive bay, but no drive
    • Power
      • S2R $file, S2D $file
      • Batteries pop up on ebay sometimes, prices are all over the place
        • a clip-under second battery is available
      • very silent

Swag


There are two port extenders available: one with only legacy Ports, USB and Ethernet, the other one with additional VGA, Audio, Cardbus slot and drive bay. As to be expected, the cool one is a bit rare. I got one of those anyway, but without the drive, which is kinda sad since it has a proprietary connector.
I also got a battery in pretty good condition from a otherwise broken 3020CT. Later i even managed to get the snap-under extension Battery. Both are going fine even now in early 2017.

In 2017 i finally found a 128MB Ram module. Thats kinda lucky, the Toshiba uses some obscure half-sized SDR stuff which i never saw before. I have seen some on ebay for ridiculous prices, until i saw this one for a few euros. Mine!

Nice swag, eh? In have some nice PCMCIA cards too.
  • The awesome 3Com Ethernet card with the flat snap-out connector.
  • A Orinoco Wifi Card. Sadly only a silver one, which seems to lack WPA. Good thing i have $file freifunk :)

What do?


I have no idea. Its a bit sad. Its technically powerfull enough for quite a lot, and with the additional ram module it could handle even a decent webkit based browser. But the graphics is kinda troubled. The amount of shared memory is fixed, and fixed at a to low value to use acceleration.

Disposition


Sold in the great freeing-of-space of 2017.
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