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 ;)

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.