Old laptop

[kojak61]

I recently came across a old IBM 380XD laptop. I was wondering if anyone knows if I could mod to use more up to date hardware. The case itself is huge and has a cd and floppy in it already. Wonder if one of those small sony motherboards and power supplies could fit? I figure they are soon going to toss it, and I can get it for free.

 

[BigBadBiologist]

Well, as a general rule you can never put one motherboard from one laptop into another (there are some exceptions like HP and Dell were using the same OEMs for a while and a lot of the newer laptops share OEMs, so it's theoretically possible although there would be no reason to do so). The 380XD was generally a P166MMX or faster (some were actually PII233 or 266). I think they only had one RAM slot and may have only supported 80megs of RAM (possibly 160megs-- yeah, these numbers sound weird for RAM, but the laptops came with 16 or 32megs on board). The processors on these models were soldered onto the motherboard so they are almost impossible to upgrade. The good news is that these things were built like tanks and seem to run forever.