Nerd Stuff

Spyro the Dragon

The Libretto range from Toshiba are a fantastic collection of small vintage laptops. I was very lucky to snag a Libretto 100CT a few years ago on eBay, almost by accident. It was only after I received the device, I learned what a fantastic piece of history I’d acquired.  Thanks for an article at http://www.xodustech.com/guides/libretto-100ct-overclock I learnt how I could fairly easily overclock my stock 100CT from 166MHz to 233MHz by using a magnetic ink pen to bridge the solder points show in the attached image. That’s a 40% increase in performance. I miss those golden days of overclocking :)

A 266MHz overclock is also possible, but is apparently unstable. 

As I wanted to use it as a portable, I purchased a new battery that to my minor surprise worked fairly well. It typically runs for several hours on a fresh charge. However it doesn’t hold a full charge for very long whilst in storage.

In order to improve portable battery life whilst also increasing the speed and durability of the device, I opted to install a CompactFlash card. The only sound the laptop used to make was the hard drive spinning, so it resulted in a completely silent device.

Windows 3.11 - it was the minor incremental enhancement to the first real success in the series of the world changing operating system (that being Windows 3.1)

What's the difference between 3.1 and 3.11?... it's a bit more networky and has some bug fixes. But mainly you want to be rocking the latest version to demonstrate your geek credentials, right?

I decided to treat my 386 to this historically appropriate OS by downloading the files from the wonderfully retro looking kirsle.net website.

This allowed me to use my USB 3.5" drive to write the disk images to actual 1.44MB floppies to use on my ICL 386

Listening to those 3.5" floppies spin and grind away is half the fun! Thankfully all the old hardware played ball and I was able to successfully make my way through the half dozen disks required for the install.

Although I'm UK based, the Silicon Graphics PS/2 mechanical keyboard I use on this PC has a US layout. Thankfully Windows has me covered for this exotic setup.