lachrym0se wh0?

the lapt0p: mpc transport t2200.

the year: 2004?

the pcmag review: not optimistic.

the price: $2.

i've started collecting old computers like an emo furry billionaire collects orphans. it's going to be an issue later but it's probably not an issue now. this fine specimen of mediocre notebook destined to die out in the 2008 crash was completely wiped when I bought it - no OS, no data, no hard drive. i brought it home and plugged it in and was met with some BIOS screens that confirmed my suspicions. its name is lachrymose. (all my PCs have names.)

although somewhat familiar with computers, i'm not an expert. and although expert guides are objectively the best, they're intimidating for someone like me. see something, say something. i'm not writing a guide, per se, but i'm going to document my progress on restoring/phenagaling with this laptop. it will be either encouraging or entertaining. either way, i win.

right: the little guy itself.

the wh0le n0 hard drive thing

  • 7/12/23: i bought lachrymose at a college property management sale, and given the state of the computers there, i assume it's been somewhat gutted. there's a message in BIOS if you put it on verbose where the only drive it's detecting is the DVD/CD-ROM drive, so i'm thinking it may not actually have a hard drive. there's very little information about this company or this machine on the internet, but this mildly shady forum post claims it has (had?) an 80GB hard drive. there's a housing on the side for the hard drive, but i'll need to get a little screwdriver and pop it out to check if it's really there. i sense a microcenter trip in my future.
  • 7/23/23: got a screwdriver. hard drive housing is empty. my partner had a slim HDD sitting on his desk so i thought i'd see if it would fit. dimensionally, it's fine, but lach has a parallel-ATA connector and the drive is a SATA. they don't make PATAs anymore, and all the googling i've done has just given me converters, not actual drives. i'm not sure microcenter will even be able to save me. i may just need to cannibalize another broken notebook.
  • 8/2/23: i love cannibalism. one of the people i work with put me in touch with another person who runs a university's tech graveyard, so to speak. (he does a lot more than that too.) i have two notebook PATA hard drives and two desktop PATA hard drives. bingo! lach and harby will be getting drives as soon as i move into my new apartment.

the wh0le n0 0S thing

there's a sticker on the deck that says "Designed for Microsoft® Windows®XP". i feel the reasonable thing to do is to throw XP on it and see what it does. to do that, i'll need a bootable USB, which is a thumb drive with an image of an operating system on it. you can plug the thumb drive into the computer, which gives it something to boot from, and then install the OS from there.

i sourced a .iso image of Windows XP Professional from this handy Internet Archived site, which was pleasantly and conveniently on the first page of ddg. i've used etcher to flash Linux Mint in past, but etcher doesn't recommend itself for Windows. (a good sign.) so i'll be on the lookout for something else.

currently...

8/19/23: made it to new apartment in one piece. my new roommate said "wow you have a lot of computers", so i'm doing something right.