Fighting With Computers

Late this afternoon, Lisa and I managed to get into Stayton for groceries. It wasn't a critical need, but with the roads clear and the snow seemingly turned to rain for good now, it seems safe enough. After stocking up, we went to her father's house to do laundry and see if the cloned drive I made would work.

Well, it would, but only with a bunch of additional work. It appears that there might have been a bad sector on either the source or destination disk, and consequently we had to spend a couple of hours rebuilding drives, re-registering them with Microsoft, and cleaning up hosed registry files. Still, it's vaguely better than having to start completely from bare metal. OTOH, only one of the T30 laptops is working completely, and that is the only one with no touchpad. The only pointing device Lisa uses is a touchpad -- no mouse or trackpoint or any other type. So it's back to eBay to start looking for another T30 that (a) has a touchpad, (b) was manufactured in Mexico, not China, (c) has both memory slots working (T30 motherboards have an annoying tendency to have one of their two slots fail), and preferably (d) has a 2 GHz processor.

Yes, Virginia, They Did Build T30s in Mexico

This posting is for the benefit of the eBay seller who doubted that IBM T30 laptop computers were ever built in Mexico. Not only were such machines built, but Lisa has several of them. She likes the T30s, but she doesn't want to buy T30s that were built in China. We don't know the ins and outs of the various production runs, but it seems likely to us that early T30s were built in Mexico before the entire production was shifted to China.

Anyway, here is a picture of the base-plate of one of our T30s:
( You can skip this if you don't care about where IBM built their laptops before their computer business was assimilated by the Chinese )

As you can see, this box was built in Mexico. Again, we don't know the details, and we can't point you to a specific manufacturing plant, but here is the proof that such things exist.