Used Technology

One of the difficulties of working with older notebooks is that they often sacrificed important ports for portability. Docking stations add more bulk, but make it easy to add extra ports while at home. Many older docking stations are large clunky monsters you wouldn't want to lug around, but if you carry your notebook in a good backpack the docking port for the IBM Thinkpad 560X/385 is small enough to fit in with other items (power cables, external drive, etc.). Our docking port has a product number of 11J8998. The front has a couple of connectors to connect to the bottom of the notebook. There is a release button on the right of the port and a locking button on the top for the 4 pcmcia ports on the back of the station. The back of the station has a surprising amount of ports for its size. There is 1 USB (we assume 1.1) port, a keyboard, a mouse, a midi/joystick, parallel, serial, DSUB VGA, audio in and out, and external floppy connector port on the back.

The ATI All-In-Wonder Rage 128 comes in 16MB and 32MB varieties according to ATI's web site . The model we have has a product number of 1026561900. Unfortunately ATI's site doesn't have any information tied to this product number, but a number of other sites seem to indicate that this is indeed the card. Like the All-In-Wonder 7500 this card has a tuner, Audio/Visual In/Out (not SVideo, but looks like it), and differs in that it uses a Dsub vga , rather than a DVI connector. The Rage 128 has CD in near the top of the board and also has a Line out connection. Again, the AV connector requires a special cable if you want to do component out. Using a couple of hardware testing programs we determined that our card is of the 32MB variety. We're not sure if this means that all Rage 128's with the product ID of 1026561900 are 32MB or not. While the capacitors on this card look like they're good quality, they're smaller than the ones we found on the Wonder 7500. A

The ATI All-In-Wonder (AIW) 7500 seems to come in a few forms, one including a TV tuner, one with 32MB and one with 64MB. The AIW 7500 we have has 64MB and the TV tuner along with Audio/Video in/out and DVI out. At first I thought these were SVideo in and out, but closer examination shows that the connectors are not SVideo. The original boxed set seems to have come with a special ATI purple external connector cable that allows for component audio and video out (we did see on one site SVideo as well). Here's a link to a Vietnamese overclocking site that has a photo of the connector . The product ID number on our card is 1028390502. We list it here because googling the product ID number didn't turn up any results for us, but beside the serial number is the code AIW 7500 64MB DDR (All-In-Wonder 7500). We googled this card and while it seems people are using it under Linux as video-out, there doesn't appear to be good support for the tuner-portion of the card. Searching the