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From: zlraa@marlin.jcu.edu.au (Ross Alford)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.laptops
Subject: Re: Toshiba T1000 - Help!
Keywords: toshiba
Message-ID: <1991Apr30.040112.20656@marlin.jcu.edu.au>
Date: 30 Apr 91 04:01:12 GMT
References: <8853@idunno.Princeton.EDU>
Organization: James Cook University
Lines: 48

In <8853@idunno.Princeton.EDU> Joe Studholme writes:

> I just bought myself a T1000 laptop. "Why?", I hear you asking. "$275" I
>answer. However, this bargain price did not include frills like a user manual,
>so I have a few questions...

> Q. What is the battery life on this thing? How long do I need to charge it,
>while it's on/while it's off? I'm taking the precaution of 'burning in' on my
>first charge for 24 hours; hope this doesn't bother the NiCad battery which I
>suspect is inside.

Battery lasts between 2-4 hours, depending on disk use, RS232, how good
the battery is.  Charges for about 14 hours after complete discharge.

> Q. Where is the battery? It doesn't seem to be the type which you can remove.
>Does one plug a spare battery into one of the many cryptic ports in this thing?

The battery is actually a wired-up set of sub-C cells buried in the guts
of the thing.  Requires disassembly to get at it.  Can with a bit of
fiddling be replaced with a set of full-sized C-cell nicads, increasing
battery life to about 12 hours (!).  I haven't done this, but there was
a short article in the last year of Micro Cornucopia on how to do it.

> Q. Where can I find the fabled "768K memory expansion", which I am told is
>must-have accessory (it can act as a RAM disk, I guess - does it have a low
>power mode so that the data survives while the power is off?)

Can't say where to get it.  It does stay on when the machine is off.

> Q. Software. The screen is CGA, right? (well, without the color...<grin>) Is
>there a good, small comm program I can use that will let me dial up my friendly
>neighborhood Unix host and do VT100 with it?

Just the other day I got what must be the champion in this category--on
SIMTEL20, in the MSDOS.MODEM directory, is DGTERM.ARC.  This comm
program is only about 10k in size, loads as a TSR that takes up 24k,
emulates a VT100 quite well (I haven't found any problems yet), and does
xmodem and Ymodem/batch file transfers.  So far, complete magic.  (When
I say no problems, now that I think about it, there does seem to be
one--the arrow keys don't emulate VT100 arrow keys.  I use hjkl in vi
anyway, so this doesn't bother me.)

Ross
-- 
Ross A. Alford
Department of Zoology                      Internet: zlraa@marlin.jcu.edu.au
James Cook University                      Phone:    +61 77 81 4732
Townsville, Qld 4811 Australia