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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 !!!
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.
@@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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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..
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
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.
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 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.
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.
You might already know but the ESS688 supported 16-bit sound in Windows, but was only Soundblaster Pro compatible in DOS. I had one in my first PC. Not a bad card if you could live without Soundblaster 16 support.
I saw the preview and mistakenly thought "it's mid-1990s Toshiba." I worked a helpdesk job with a sales force automation company at that point and the reps either had those or older Compaq 486s with the trackball in the display bezel.
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!
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.
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.
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.
Looks like the inverter for the CCFL backlight (or the backlight itself) might be on its last legs, with how the brightness keeps fluctuating. It might even get brighter with a new part! Not sure where you might even begin to find one, unless it's an outsourced part that other manufacturers also used.
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!
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.
I have a Maxdata Artist "Oxford C" Pentium 120 laptop that looks *suspiciously* similar, except for the little indicator display and the dock connector - certainly from the same OEM manufacturer. There is a NON-rechargeable lithium battery soldered in for the BIOS settings, that apparently lasted about 15-20 years. When it failed, the display defaulted to 0% brightness and 0% contrast and I thought the whole machine was broken. But the battery can be replaced (after a full disassembly) for a couple bucks, and now it's fully working again, except the main NiMH battery pack of course, which was already worn out when I bought it used around 2005. The plastic has become very brittle by now though, and it wasn't a particularly pretty machine to start with.
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.
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.
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.
I had this exact notebook but not TI Extensa, it had another brand. I can tell a few thing about it. The HDD bay is not locked you can pull it out. If you remove the FDD you can open that little thing right from the floppy drive and put in a CD drive or a second battery.
Was any one else looking not at the laptop but rather the Dark Eye game behind it on the shelf? I haven't seen that title in a while and boy do I miss the classics.
The styling and color of that thing looks a lot like the Toshiba laptops from that era, but I can't find one that has a trackpad, all of them that I see had trackpoints.
With the right adapters and some soldering, you could fit a Raspberry Pi in there and do just that. I've seen a few examples of older Thinkpads that were pulled from tech recycling places and rebuilt that way.
I'd think some of the challenge would be getting a modern screen of the right size. The refresh rate on whatever it has as stock is somewhat horrid. Would be fun if done well and kept to the form factor.
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 UA-cam videos Becker UA-cam, so that e-card being saved seems very era correct to me
Clint, I have a hard drive with the factory install from an Extensa 570CD. I can send some of the factory software to you if you'd like. It has a directory with all the installers.
@@Sturmunddrang70 I don't have that hard drive handy right now but drivers should be easy to come by. IIRC the 570CD has a Cirrus Logic CL-GD54xx video chip and an ESS audio chip (but I completely forget the number on that). If the 670CD is the the same basic design you can move two sliders at the top of the keyboard, hinge the keyboard up, and the audio chip will be in plain view on a daughtercard. As these are common chips the drivers should be easy to find online once you know the correct chip numbers.
I recently fished out a Texas Instruments Extensa 515 that used to be owned by my grandparents out of storage and can't find any information on the model other than a few part listings. The screen is melted. Do you think it would be worth finding replacement parts and restoring it back to working condition?
I have a laptop that looks identical, except for the color. I believe it also mentions FCI somewhere, but its name in big letters is Trogon. It originally was with Windows 95, but at some point I upgraded to Windows 98. In my collection of computers, it is the only one that still plays an old CD that contains bird songs, apparently recorded in either 12- or16-bit format. All my newer computers reject that format.
To those pointing out Acer also makes Extensa laptops: yep, and with good reason! They bought the notebook division from Texas Instruments in 1997.
So that's why I saw some Extensa 390 laptops with Texas Instruments logos and some with Acer logos…
LGR Blerbs 😈cool
I've got an Acer Extensa laptop, was just going to ask this
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
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.
Thanks for all the info, good stuff!
Ah so that is what the model number means, 550CD = 550 Crotch Damage...
Yeah, poor Linus got a high-pitched voice after this incident.
Reading this reminds me of all the issues we had with laptops at AST.
Was the damage to his crotch extensive?
Water faucet is power management indicator; 1 drip is conservative, 2+ drips is max power. :)
Thanks, I had no idea!
LGR Blerbs ☺️
I always thought it meant that its "Running" like running water lol
IIRC, Toshiba used a very similar icon on some of their laptops as well.
@@Lukeno52 yeah it looks like a Toshiba re-badged.
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.
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.
I wonder what kind of curtain rails he had. Probably something custom, or smart home curtains before its time.
@@kbhasi LGR showcased lots of old automated stuff on his channel, recommend watching that if you haven't!
Your grandfather sounds awesome
As the saying goes, if it ain't broke, don't fix it.
@@Redhotsmasher Well apparently the monitor is broke
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.
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.
I just thought whoever made it had been watching a lot of R&S at the time.
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.
Same here man, love this game since its release in march 2001
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
It's $2.49 on GoG as of 6/10/20
It was so good they made the same game 6 more times.
@@rickyrigatoni Just too bad that they could never make it better than Gothic 2 with Night of the Raven expac...
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 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.
I saw these things when I was in elementary school in the late 90's XD
does Duke3d work on it ?
@@andrewdupuis1151 obviously 😉
What is the water faucet icon means?
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.
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
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.
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.
I used an actual doc maker xD basically a typewriter but for notepad txt files. Nightmares.
@@JayFochs1337 So, a word processor?
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
*but cheap
How good is the calculator application on that?
😂😂😂😂
It better be able to spell boobies.
Hopefully good enough to play Doom!
Probably decent enough
Because tech is so weird sometimes, it's probably shite lololol
That boot up sound is so amazing.
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.
For $10cnd I might add....
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.
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.
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.
Question is, would it even run SIM city?
This comment reminded me of Sim Tower, loved that game
@@redherring5532 I remember trying to figure out how to change the lobby size only to be told I was SOL.
Gotta love them chonky old school laptops
I really like his enthusiasm in every video. Adds a nice touch to the content he provides.
Keep up the awesome work! :D
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.
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.
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.
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 !!!
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.
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.
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 was 9mins in the joys of being in Australia. Thank you LGR love your reviews
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...
Because Apple. @Louis Rossmann is the best example of this.
Form over function. In fact...form over literally anything else.
@@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.
@@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.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I cannot be the only one who wants to see that Flash Valentine's animation
And your voice is SO soothing
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.
lol that Valentine's day flash animation brought back so many memories.
That's so cool, a laptop from like 25 years ago with all it's components working (more or less).
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.
That flash animation is the high quality content we come here for !
Clint, stop kink-shaming the power cable
I liked seeing that boxed copy of Gothic in the background. The first 2 games are some of my favorite RPGs
If you get really bored, I found the full manual. You were spot on about the floppy and CD drive being modular.
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
Texas Instruments, the kind of hardware that comes with so many quirks and features for the professional spreadsheet gurus!
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.
I'd love to know more about the secondary LCD strip!!
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..
Yep
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
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.
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 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.
Gaming on a passive matrix display, wew!
Wouldn't wish that eye ache on anyone lol
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
Windows 95 start up sound... That is how nostalgia sounds.
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.
For transferring data to another laptop. Oh, the memories.
@@tornadotj2059 Or to sync your Palm! Or to go online at exorbitant rates using your GSM cell phone...
@@KarlBaron I recall doing that with an XDA and a toshiba tecra laptop. Early 00s as I recall.
Such strange times thinking back!
Yeah! IrDA would make a good Tech Tales or Oddware episode. Cool stuff.
I once used IrDA to transfer an MP3 from my iPaq PDA to a friend's laptop. I think it took over 5 minutes!
There simply can't be too many LGR Blerbs! I love these!
Haha, great, I had this one back in the days. Loved that thing, great to see it again 😁
The water faucet on the LCD screen is the turbo mode.
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.
The small LCD above the keyboard and the latch mechanism makes it look a lot like a Compaq.
You might already know but the ESS688 supported 16-bit sound in Windows, but was only Soundblaster Pro compatible in DOS. I had one in my first PC. Not a bad card if you could live without Soundblaster 16 support.
I saw the preview and mistakenly thought "it's mid-1990s Toshiba." I worked a helpdesk job with a sales force automation company at that point and the reps either had those or older Compaq 486s with the trackball in the display bezel.
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!
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.
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.
I find it to be a very useful laptop as a go-between for older PCs and newer ones
check the bios for speaker volume. some laptops ive used over the years had the volume turned down in the bios
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.
this valentin.exe brought me right back to 2000 man. never thought i will ever see this again
Had know idea that Texas Instruments made laptops. Learns something new everyday.
Sometimes these cheap old things are the best finds because they hold so many weird surprises.
Love ur relaxing intro cutscene as always
Looks like the inverter for the CCFL backlight (or the backlight itself) might be on its last legs, with how the brightness keeps fluctuating. It might even get brighter with a new part! Not sure where you might even begin to find one, unless it's an outsourced part that other manufacturers also used.
Wow Cosmic!
I totally forgot about this game.
I played the shareware-version a lot as a kid.
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!
He should watch it somewhere else, though. That computer struggles like it's about to catch on fire. 😅
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.
The tap indicator is a turbo indicator. I don't know if it's on or off though.
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!
The ESS chips have awesome soundblaster support!
I have a Maxdata Artist "Oxford C" Pentium 120 laptop that looks *suspiciously* similar, except for the little indicator display and the dock connector - certainly from the same OEM manufacturer. There is a NON-rechargeable lithium battery soldered in for the BIOS settings, that apparently lasted about 15-20 years. When it failed, the display defaulted to 0% brightness and 0% contrast and I thought the whole machine was broken. But the battery can be replaced (after a full disassembly) for a couple bucks, and now it's fully working again, except the main NiMH battery pack of course, which was already worn out when I bought it used around 2005.
The plastic has become very brittle by now though, and it wasn't a particularly pretty machine to start with.
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.
What a weird choice of background, every time I see it I think "oh windows isn't finished setting up yet".
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
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...
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.
Matt Elder thought I was the only one that had that! Did they ever find what caused it?
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.
I hoped to see you cleaning the parts, hope you make a video.
Nice Gothic box back there.
We're gonna need a good old style LGR for that .
I had this exact notebook but not TI Extensa, it had another brand. I can tell a few thing about it. The HDD bay is not locked you can pull it out. If you remove the FDD you can open that little thing right from the floppy drive and put in a CD drive or a second battery.
I have an NEC laptop that is a pentium 1, it looks a lot like that and it too only had it’s floppy drive, but it also talks about having a cd module.
This is the laptop the senate gave me when I was on campaign against Hannibal.
Was any one else looking not at the laptop but rather the Dark Eye game behind it on the shelf?
I haven't seen that title in a while and boy do I miss the classics.
When I think of all the old laptops we got rid of at my old workplace.
The styling and color of that thing looks a lot like the Toshiba laptops from that era, but I can't find one that has a trackpad, all of them that I see had trackpoints.
Hmm, Realms of Arkania: Star Trail in background, Amiga 1200 memories. Keep LGR blerbs coming, especially LGR plays ;)
Played Realms on my old Olivetti 486 back in the day. Probably the first RPG I beat.
Why do I want to see a chonkers 90s laptop gutted and rebuilt with modern internals?
With the right adapters and some soldering, you could fit a Raspberry Pi in there and do just that. I've seen a few examples of older Thinkpads that were pulled from tech recycling places and rebuilt that way.
Sleeper build laptop
I'd think some of the challenge would be getting a modern screen of the right size. The refresh rate on whatever it has as stock is somewhat horrid. Would be fun if done well and kept to the form factor.
I really like this video format!
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)
I just found a TI travelmate 3000 last week. Awesome timing!
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 UA-cam videos Becker UA-cam, so that e-card being saved seems very era correct to me
Clint, I have a hard drive with the factory install from an Extensa 570CD. I can send some of the factory software to you if you'd like. It has a directory with all the installers.
That'd be great! Feel free to email me clint@lazygamereviews.com
I am looking for drivers for a similar model: Texas Instrument Extensa 670CD, where can I download them?
@@Sturmunddrang70 I don't have that hard drive handy right now but drivers should be easy to come by. IIRC the 570CD has a Cirrus Logic CL-GD54xx video chip and an ESS audio chip (but I completely forget the number on that). If the 670CD is the the same basic design you can move two sliders at the top of the keyboard, hinge the keyboard up, and the audio chip will be in plain view on a daughtercard.
As these are common chips the drivers should be easy to find online once you know the correct chip numbers.
I recently fished out a Texas Instruments Extensa 515 that used to be owned by my grandparents out of storage and can't find any information on the model other than a few part listings. The screen is melted. Do you think it would be worth finding replacement parts and restoring it back to working condition?
The Texas Instruments THICCCCBOI
Everything is bigger in Texas (Instruments).
Texas Instruments Texas toast
My friend got one of these from a CashConverters (Australian Pawn shop) in 2003 and we weren't that inspired by it then. It's very budget.
I have a laptop that looks identical, except for the color. I believe it also mentions FCI somewhere, but its name in big letters is Trogon. It originally was with Windows 95, but at some point I upgraded to Windows 98. In my collection of computers, it is the only one that still plays an old CD that contains bird songs, apparently recorded in either 12- or16-bit format. All my newer computers reject that format.
I'm guessing the water faucet icon is a heat indicator. Better guess than none.