Notebook Surgery

I recently bought a used Toshiba Satellite A210-128 (AMD Turion X2 TL-56) with a busted display panel. The replacement was bought from this eBay store and it turned out great. It took me about an hour and a half to disassemble the laptop, replace the panel and put everything back together (the disassembly instructions can be found here). I wasn't sure, if the new panel would work but all my fears vanished as soon as I pushed the power button and the Toshiba logo showed up on screen.

Note: if you happen to be looking for a solid used notebook, I have one for sale ;)

Solved: Unable to install chipset drivers

Download the latest drivers from Intel's website:
- Intel Matrix Storage Manager 32-bit XP Pro
- Intel Chipset Software Installation Utility 32-bit XP Pro

Slipstream the drivers contained within the 'Storage Manager' into the SP3 installation CD using nLite. After Windows installation is complete, you should be able to install Chipset drivers (see above). I believe that the chipset driver provided by Toshiba is either corrupt or incomplete.

After the described procedure, I was able to install the rest of the drivers and finish the installation.

New laptop problems

Two days ago I successfully slipstreamed SP3 and all the available Toshiba drivers onto a Windows XP installation CD with the help of nLite. Unattended installation went by flawlessly, the problem appeared when I tried to install Intel chipset drivers. No matter what I tried, setup would inevitably get stuck in the middle. I tried downgrading BIOS but that didn't help. While googling for the answer I read that you're supposed to install the drivers in a particular order. Wtf? Well, this means another go at slipstreaming just SP3 & SATA drivers and pray that it works. If it doesn't, I might end up having to use Vista whether I like it or not...

Desktop replacement

By a sheer stroke of luck I was offered to buy a new but slightly damaged Toshiba Satellite Pro A200-1NB laptop at 50% off of the original price! I intended to spend about the same amount of money on upgrading my existing 4 year old PC to a Core 2 Duo platform. The specs are quite impressive and the only thing missing is a better graphics card. This makes is an excellent desktop replacement which it's going to become as soon as I manage to exorcise Vista Business edition that came pre-installed with the laptop. Mind you, my old Toshiba Portege M100 is now for sale.