Toshiba Tecra 740CDT

Intro

The Tecra is a Pentium 166Mhz/MMX based Laptop, at the top of the range released in 1996. This was really quite a high-end unit for its time with a very large HDD and RAM. It’s quite heavy and strong and would have needed frequent replenishing of its battery. As laptop technology was moving fast, this would have been superseded and ended up being an expensive boondoggle within a couple of years, it represents the last gasp of an older era of mobile computing.

Specifications

• Pentium 166
• 66Mhz bus speed over a 64bit-wide bus
• chipset Chips&Technologies HIQV32 CT65554
• The bus is a PCI/ISA hybrid, card slots, the graphics controller and the expansion bus connect to the PCI bus, everything else connects to the ISA bus.
• This laptop has 48MB Ram (VERY large for a laptop of this era)
• Has detachable and exchangeable floppy and cdrom drives. This technically means you could have the floppy drive in the laptop and the cdrom drive in the external caddy or vice-versa. The system works best with the floppy drive in the external caddy at present.
• built-in 3com 10/100 ethernet PCIC adapter but I bought a second one with a long cable which is really useful and very hard to find.
• built-in IrDA
• CDROM XM-1502B CD-ROM, CD-DA, CD-ROM XA, CD-BRIDGE, CD-I, CD-G. Multisession. This will not read CD-RW discs, which is very annoying.
• 3GB removable toshiba HDD Rare and an advanced option for its time.
• internal modem 28.8/14.4 seems to be a generic fax/modem
• sound chipsets: Crystal Semiconductor CS4232, Yamaha OPL3 (YMF262)
• The PC Cardbus slot can take 2x5mm type II cards or 1 10.5mm type III card.

Notes

The machine was given to me by a friend I met during a work for the dole program, she had no use for it. It had a win98 install and had been part of a corporate domain. I’ve upgraded it to win98se and have tried to get it to talk ntlmv1/ntlmv2 to netstor but so far it hasn’t worked. I can use http and Putty sftp to get files across the network because of the issue with the cdrom (other than just burning cdroms). I thought it would useful as a way of creating floppy disks for retro boxes like the Valuepoint but the drive is faulty although the external enclosure is fine. It’s hard to find replacements and they are not cheap of course. Speaking of replacements, it has a dead battery and must be run from AC power. Very unlikely to find a replacement for that.

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