This Vintage Laptop is TRASH. Let's Fix that.

in 1996 Toshiba launched the lto line of subnotebooks and they're trash what did you say well okay more accurately they're often found in the trash or e-w and at a far greater rate than any other vintage laptop or computer at the time this is for two main reasons both we aim to solve in this video first the Plastics as we'll see the choice of plastics used in these notebooks makes them incredibly brittle as they age now I hear what you're saying all Plastics degrade over time and you're right but Plastics on the labretto have become far more brittle far faster than any other vintage line I've experienced second the BIOS lock bios passwords were common in this in many other laptops back in the day but in most other laptops you could simply remove a Coss battery for a while or short a jumper on the system board while booting not this guy it needs a custom Hardware dongle that plugs into the parallel port two problems with that well making a hardware dongle is not difficult for those that have the equipment and the skills it's outside of the reach of most vintage collectors the second is that if you do make one you need a parallel port a port in which the main unit of this laptop does not have you need a dock which are even more difficult to get your hands on than the laptop itself these two factors contribute to this line of laptops getting tossed recycled or perpetually sold on marketplaces until they eventually crumble and make it into the trash anyway so we're going to give this laptop a new lease on life by designing a new user printable case as well as creating a bios key that's cheap to make and requires no custom Hardware to use without giving too much away I want to thank eligo for sending over their brand new centu carbon core XY printer and of course to our Channel sponsor PCB way more on both of them later but for now let's break this thing down well literally the first thing to do is test so we know if it works and what we might need to repair down the line I'm using a variable output power supply which saves me from storing a bunch of different supplies for different laptops essentially all I have to do is find the right adapter after I dial in the voltage and then I'm good to go the good news is that it works the bad news is there's this bios lock we're going to have to deal with later but at least we know the laptop functions so we'll start tearing it down this is my first time tearing down a labretto so I don't know what to expect there's a lot of things you learned when tearing down a laptop for the first time like how many screws and sizes and components and how well it's designed also no matter how careful you are sometimes things break and well unfortunately this is going to be a common theme for this little laptop and because we're planning on modeling this thing and giving it a new shell then we're going to have to keep track of everything even the broken pieces my first impressions here are actually pretty good you can tell that a lot of design considerations were taken into account and what I mean by that is that it's clear that things were actually meant to be serviceable these strain reliefs on the keyboard for example knew that this keyboard was going to be taken off and put back on maybe by a technician or maybe by a user that simply wanted to upgrade the RAM you tend to see these types of design considerations in higher-end laptops of the day where simply removing a keyboard and replacing the ram is relatively straightforward but things get a lot more complex pretty quick after that when this laptop arrived to me it was an actually relatively good condition but as you can see things start to fall apart pretty quick and this is not for lack of me being gentle as we continue we get to the seos battery now usually pulling this out will disable any kind of BIOS password but that is not the case for this model of laptop as I've been going I've started to notice that some pieces are breaking while other pieces aren't and I'm starting to see why the material designator between those two brackets means it's a magnesium alloy specifically 9% aluminum and 1% zinc it's super light and super tough stuff which makes sense why the bottom isn't cracking even though I know I'm making a new case I want to try to preserve things as much as possible in order to remove this screw cover I'm not actually cutting it with my scalpel I'm using it to try to pry things up and let the solvent do the work this is sped up quite a bit and so this takes some time but at the end of that I'm not damaging or scratching the case and I'm not damaging or scratching that screw cover just in case I want to use it or put it back again as I'm going I'm always paying attention on how things come apart so I know how they need to get put back together the smaller and more intricate the electronic components the harder it is in order to try to get things right and back into to a really really tight package I'm also getting the first looks at the insides of the parts in order to see what I'm going to have to remodel what I can change what I can improve and what I'm going to have to stick with I always get nervous around ribbon cables they are one component where if you have to repair or recreate them it can be incredibly difficult if not impossible and it's not necessarily the flat Flex cables it's the actual connectors on the end usually they were custom for this specific run of laptops and you're never going to be able to find them on a supplier website after I'm done it's time for a little inventory I make sure to sort every screw and look at all the little plastic pieces to start figuring out how I'm going to model and print them these projects are usually a months long process for me and so I need to make sure that I have everything organized but with all that behind me it's time for the fun part the ltos weren't really known for for having a bright screen but I did want to make sure that I took the opportunity to go in take a look repair the backlight and quite honestly just see the thing this is the first time I'd ever really torn into a lto before and so I was more Curious than anything and wanted to make sure that while I was in there I made the repairs that needed to be made after I carefully remove this foil shielding I can peel it back and start to see what's inside now all LCD are going to have some type of similar setup inside you can see the column drivers on the top and the bottom and the LCD driver board on the right the trick is figuring out how they're all put together and making sure that we can put them back in the same way unlike the initial parts of the laptop these parts are not meant to be serviced at all you can see that there's been some hot glue added for strain relief and that cable right there is the cable to the back light tube that we're looking for and after after a little bit of heat and a little bit of coaxing we can get that cable free and move that column driver board away from the top after taking care of a couple more screws on back and a couple on the front we can remove it from the outer frame so that we can start looking at the inner frame I got to say this thing is pretty complex when it comes to the number of components the frames and how it's all put in together I literally use my own videos that I shoot in order to go back and look at them to make sure that I can put it together correctly the way that it was taken apart but after a couple more screws and a little bit of coaxing we can separate out the backlight and the diffusion layer out of all the components and old vintage laptops ccfl tubes are probably the most used and still widely available today all I have to do is measure the length and the radius and I can order a brand new one super easy and very inexpensive installing them however is a little bit of a different story I cut the leads to match exactly and I just put a little solder on my tip of my iron in order to remove it with just a touch on either side you want to make sure that you're using high heat with as little time as possible to avoid damaging the ribbon cable or wire that connects it to the power when you're installing the new tube take the same care tin the leads and just a touch on that wire should solder it back [Music] once you're comfortable that you've got a solid connection you can push back those rubber stoppers on either end this one was a little bit of origami so make sure that you know how you took them off in order to know how they go back on working on something this small means the tolerances are going to be incredibly tight if something isn't going back together as easily as you think it should pause step back and re-evaluate because of the numbers of layers and components we're talking about issues compound the backlight not being seated correctly could translate to pressure being put on the diffusion layer which in turn could put pressure on the frame which may mean that the LCD wouldn't fit in the case or may make the case not fit together correctly I also like to clean at every part in the process this makes sure there's no Grime or residue or anything that could create long-term problems I'm sealing the back up with a large piece of capton tape I'll be replacing them metal foil shielding before the project is over but for now replacing the original high voltage label means this LCD is good to go when I dive into a new modeling project the first thing I look for are Primitives what I mean by Primitives are circles rectangles those things that give you the basic dimensions of the outside of the overall shape things are going to be a lot more complex than that but they start from Primitives after you identify those you can start adding tapers or bevels or cutouts or more organic features to the part now this case is really complex but it all starts out with rectangles and straight lines just by handling this the case is continuing to deteriorate and I'm starting to see a pattern the bottom of the case is almost crumbling none of the brakes are clean and the material underneath feels almost powder-like and even though the top top of the case is thin and still breaking it's holding up quite a bit better and we soon find out why the material label for the top shows a combination of abs and polycarbonate with glass fiber reinforcement the bottom on the other hand is just polycarbonate with glass fiber no abs without going deep into Material Science the amount of polycarbonate in the Plastics plays a huge role essentially it's incredibly tough when you first create it but it does not age well pure polycarbonate is more suscep able to UV radiation to moisture and is less chemically stable than a polymer alloy or blend with another material like ABS in contrast this is a bezel for a 1995 think pad and it's made out of pure ABS in my experience and under the same conditions ABS fares far better over time including the back panel which is made from carbon fiber reinforced Plastics jumping back to the labretto I've started started to use high resolution scans for the modeling process in order to get good scans the parts need to be flat and in order to make a oddly shaped part flat I've started to use this blue tack I can easily adjust it by putting a little pressure on one side or the other to get a completely flat scan it's soft enough to adjust easily and it's not sticky enough to leave any kind of weird residues on the part I don't use these scans for the outer dimensions that's still old school by using a pair of calipers but once I actually have all of the basic Dimensions dialed in that's when I'll go back to the scans and overlay them on top of the [Music] part this is the back side of the display I'm overlaying the scan directly on the face itself and I'm using the two holes for the mouse buttons as a reference for alignment once I've got it locked in it makes placing the screw holes in the alignment pegs a much easier job as I'm working on this step I've got the part in front of me and my calipers so I can check the alignment and the dimensions in reference to all of the other pieces within the part and at some point there's only so much you can do before you need to print your first reference piece and for this project for both speed and comparison I'm using two separate printers one is my bamboo x1c and the other one is the eligo centor carbon now I'm doing this both so I can iterate faster but also to check out the centor carbon this is elgu's $300 core XY printer that they are putting up pretty much right against the x1c even some of my reference prints can take 6 to 8 hours and so I wanted to know if a $300 printer could help me at faster so I put it to the test side by side if you watch the channel you'll know that I use my 3D printer mainly for making reproduction cases for vintage electronics and so the two most important things to me in a 3D printer are dimensional accuracy when it comes to things like rapid prototyping and finish when it comes to things like printing off an actual part that I plan on sanding and prepping and painting and putting de on as you can see I went through quite a few revisions of each one of these parts in order to get the final ones there were times when I really wanted to do a like for like comparison and print the exact same part on the bamboo x1c and the centory carbon other times I just wanted to use the efficiency of having two printers so I could work on one set of pieces and be printing another piece at the same time so what exactly I'm looking for is over a large span say 150 to 200 mm I'm looking to be able to correct tolerances within the realm of about2 mm now of course this depends on the orientation the part is printed in so some I've printed on the base like this directly onto the build plate and others I've printed vertically now both scenarios I can say that these parts have been pretty identical to that which I've been able to get on the bamboo x1c now let's talk about surface finish and accuracy this is where the x1c continues to outperform now when I want to make a reproduction part I'm not looking for the part to be perfect right out of the printer but I do want to minimize post-processing times so having to do a few less passes of sandable primer or not have to use putty is a big win for me while I have gotten some great finishes with the centory carbon the word I would use would be inconsistent you can always correct for issues like under or ere Extrusion in the printer settings but you can't correct for inconsistency now this isn't a huge problem for me it may just mean that I need to do a few more pass of sanding and priming than I would if I would have gotten the part straight out of the x1c overall I want to say I'm really happy with the centory carbon as a no frills Workhorse of a printer now the cost of this at launch is going to be around $300 so obviously you're not going to expect some Frills like you have on the x1c you won't find things like automatic flow calibration or AI failure detection or even an AMS yet however the centuri does come with some more advanced features that you'll find on more advanced core XY printers things like automatic bed leveling input shaping it also has a camera for you to monitor your prints and you can print directly to it from Wi-Fi without the need of a cloud account now one of my favorite things about the centuri is that it comes in an enclosed chamber and supports more high temperature filaments that require a lot higher heat and consistent heat as well so I am comfortable saying that this printer today is great value for the money is it going to replace my x1c no it's not but I am more than happy to add this into my workflow so I want to thank eligo again for sending this over for me to evaluate and with that let's get back to the labretto iterating on the design and getting the dimensions just right is probably the thing that takes the longest every time I do a new print I try to be as thorough as possible in checking all of the dimensions I checked to see if the previous adjustments lined up I checked to make sure that those adjustments didn't affect any other areas that I overlooked and I checked to make sure that there weren't any new things that I missed some of these parts can get pretty intricate so I spend a lot of time removing supports and cleaning things up and just when I think that I've got things set big things happen like you know the keyboard doesn't fit the whole thing is a balancing act you don't want to put too much time into designing up front because you know things are going to change you don't want to change too many things between prints because that can cause other issues you're also trying to optimize the print and find finding the best orientation to print in for consistency and every time you change orientation your tolerances change because you're printing with thermoplastics and thermoplastics shrink in different dimensions when printed it's an iterative process of small half a millimet tweaks here and there until finally you've got something you can use now normally my final print would be the pristine print the one that I'm going to go go sand and finish and paint and apply decals to but I'm going to go in a different direction this time I'm going to have this professionally printed by our friends at PCB way in a process called slm or selective layer melting the material is going to be Nylon 12 or pa2 the quality of the prints that come out of this process are incredibly tough and after what this little labretto has been through I think it deserves it and while in the past I've recreated and applied my own logos onto the parts using a dry transfer process PCB way has the ability to print directly onto the piece using a silk screen process so that's what we're going to do this time so while I would have usually spent a little bit more time trying to get the best finish on these pieces I think they turned out really well and before we send the final model off to production we'll do one last test to make sure it all comes [Music] together it always feels really good at this point when you first start out a process like this you don't know what you don't know when you first start a tear down on a new laptop you've never worked on before you start to understand how things are put together but you don't really understand why when you you get into the modeling process you start to question the decisions that were made some of those decisions you find out were purely due to the manufacturing process the limitations of injection molding in the materials at the time other features aren't so obvious and so you change them during the modeling process and it's not until you start putting it together where you realize oh that's why they did it that way [Music] I can't tell you how many times that I thought that I'd come up with a better way to do something in a model or remove some material I thought was excess or added some material I thought would be good for structural support only to realize when I went to put it all together exactly why they did it that way and don't get me wrong part of my process is to go back and make these things more easily printable and take advantage of the fact that we're not dealing with injection molding we're dealing with fdm or resin printers but when it comes to preservation my entire goal is to make sure that these models are as true to the original is possible because we don't know what kind of manufacturing processes are going to be widely available in the future as our little labretto takes shape we can start to see one of the modifications that I made in order to accommodate the fact that we're printing this this case used to have small plastic Clips along the edges that I've replaced with these pressfit tabs while they would have been easy to model those clips would have been a nightmare when it comes to 3D printing the rest of the case is held together by M2 screws and I've used these heat set threaded inserts in order to give them a really good connection those inserts will work on both this print and the nylon one that I'm getting from PCB [Music] way everything is fitting together really nicely so I'm going to finish up by putting back in the ram the keyboard and finally the hard drive and the [Music] battery seeing how well this thing is coming together is getting me really excited for the nylon prints [Music] but as we wait for those parts there's still one more important thing to take care of this pesky [Music] password I've experienced a few different types of BIOS locks before but I really wanted to take a look at the labretto and see for myself if there was another way in in the 9s there were a number of ways Hardware manufacturers were able to reset a BIOS password typically removing the seos battery would clear the password as it was stored in volatile memory for laptops that were a bit more secure the passwords were stored in a security chip so when removing the battery didn't work I went on the hunt I did identify one chip on the board that looked like it could be a security chip but probing the pins and watching how it acted on boot ruled that one out quickly so with no jumpers and no security chip to be found the password is likely stored here in a dedicated flash memory chip and after doing a bit of research it seemed like Toshiba had a custom Hardware dongle that when plugged into to the parallel port would reset the password now the good news is is that I was able to find one page on how to create this dongle the bad news I didn't have a parallel port see the lettos didn't have a parallel port on the main unit but instead relied on a dock but if you don't have the dock which a lot of people don't these days what do you do improvise if you look at the dock connector itself it has all the pins that connect to all parts of the dock including the parallel port so the first thing I did was look up the pin out for the dock connector and then figure out which pins mapped to that parallel port next I needed a way to connect to the dock connector I looked everywhere for 132 pin micro or duub connector and came up with nothing even if I had it would have been preventatively expensive plus we're trying to make this doable for anyone then I had an idea the Gap inside is just over 1 mm and the connector wires sit just proud of the walls meaning I might be able to fit a 1 mm circuit board in there and get some good connectivity on either side kind of like an edge connector or how a graphics card fits into a slot it was worth a shot so I got to work creating a custom PCB that had all of the proper wires and pins already connected together so there wasn't anything else to do when the the first round came back the 1 mm width was perfect and it felt like it was making really good contact on both sides the length that was off as were the pin placements you can see the pins don't align to the contacts on the PCB so I tried another round I sent it off to our friends at PCB way and then a week later I had this now the only thing left to do was plug it in and try it out now before actually doing that I wanted to take a look under the microscope and while it's not perfect you can see that the pins are making the connections on the right wires so with all the work that I did mapping the dock connector to the parallel connector and then wiring the pins together if all that was a success this laptop should just turn on with no password and unfortunately it still didn't work now luckily I was able able to find a friend that had a dock connector they let me borrow in order to do some troubleshooting I was fairly confident the pins were making connections with the PCB so the only other thing it could be is my wiring there have been multiple instances when working on Vintage computers the online documentation or even the service manuals themselves are just wrong so now the only thing to do was to go pin by pin and make sure that every pin on the parallel connector mapped to the one that I expected on the dock and to my surprise they were correct which only means that somewhere in the mapping I had made the mistake which to be honest is not that uncommon it's just really frustrating at this point I had found that I had wired four pairs of wires in correctly in order to create the hardware key but I wanted to be certain this was the only problem I didn't want to do another round of PCB design and get those back only to find out that there was another issue so I got out my microscope and soldering iron got some incredibly thin enamel wire cut some traces and got to work one of the things I had going for me is that there wasn't a lot of risk here there are 5f pins coming out of that dock connector that could do some pretty serious damage if wired in the wrong way but fortunately those were pretty far away from the area I was working on so after all that work I plugged it in powered on the computer and I got this not only did the key bypass the BIOS but it actually did it in a way that preserved the Sleep State this computer was coming out out of hibernation from who knows how long and just to confirm I shut down the computer took out the key opened the BIOS and the password was gone it is Bittersweet to end the video here but it's honest after working with the team to get the nylon case printed and accepting the risks it just became clear that it's just not the right material and it's not the right process while you can get really good clean detailed Parts like this button set for the display for example the thickness and geometry of the case made this specific method not really viable but for this video I absolutely accomplished what I set out to do which was to create a viable printable model that can be made on a consumer grade printer thus preserving the ability for others to create reproduction cases and actually use these old computers without fear of them just Crum in their hands and so the model along with creating the Liberty key to remove the BIOS passwords will hopefully help keep these out of E-Waste for long time to come I want to thank you so much for watching and if you enjoy my videos please like and comment and subscribe you wouldn't believe how much it actually helps this channel to reach a wider audience I also want to thank eligo for sending over their new centory carbon and of course to our Channel sponsor PCB Way for their continued support now if you don't mind I'm going to get some Doom going on this thing

2025-03-15 14:07

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