Chinese IntelligENSE: Toshiba R40?
In DevicesI really felt I should share this with you. Recently, my friend’s relative had a visit to China, and on his return, he bought a nice sleek Toshiba R40 laptop for an unbelievable price.
The specs of the laptop are:
Intel Core 2 Duo 2.66GHz | 1GB RAM | 320GB HDD | ATI Powered Graphics | Price: approx. USD150!
Originally it had a Designed for Vista label and the OS was Vista too. He approached me asking me to change the OS language completely to English as few parts displayed Chinese, and even the keyboard had Chinese characters on it.
I got my hands on it, more and more I used it, I realized it was Windows XP with Windows Vista looks. System properties showed the same configuration as said above apart from the Intel Core inside and ATI stickers beside the touch pad.
I tried all options to change the language, nothing happened, it was still the same, then I decided to re-install the Windows system. I rebooted the machine into BIOS, to setup boot order. There! I was shocked! It was some old BIOS extracted from a Toshiba laptop itself. Quickly I checked Google Images for Toshiba R40, voila, it looked completely different! I got back into BIOS and checked the System Summary, the following specs amazed me:
Intel Celeron 1GHz | 256MB RAM | 40GB HDD
We were like laughing for about 5minutes and I proceeded again, connected an USB powered CD drive to install Windows XP, to our dissatisfaction, the CD didn’t boot at all, apparently no support for USB CD drives, but wait, Windows 98 setup started from no where!
I was presented with 2 options, one to Install image and other to exit, when I selected option 1, Windows XP setup started out of nowhere, following the black loading screen, Norton’s Ghost started, then it was clear to me, that the system has built-in backup system in the form of Ghost image, which is restored using Windows 98 DOS.
I was truly amazed by this system, planned brilliantly, in built OS and all. Furthermore I tried to take out the hard drive to install it externally, I was surprised to see a old iPod’s Toshiba HDD used inside! Since the size of this HDD was 1.8″ and the slot was bigger, they had used newspaper bits to cover up, and yea when I took the paper out, it was some Chinese newspaper! This was hilarious.
Later, we disassembled the lapop and found that it was an assembled one, but a job nicely done.