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<\/a><\/p>\nIt was quite a nice machine, but it suffered from multiple issues. On the one hand, the ULV Core2Duo and internal 1 GB of DDR2 memory are nothing to write home about - but the biggest problem in my opinion - is the used mass memory, a 1.8' 5400 rpm harddrive. And no, you read correctly - 1.8'. What's that? Thats basically the size and model of HDDs used in Apples iPods: They are awfully slow and even more prone to break.<\/p>\n
Actually, I used this laptop quite a lot during my masters studies - and I had it breaking 2 drives in a short amount of time. I used it during a space campaign later, but after that it started to develop Read\/Write Errors again and I shelved it - until now.<\/p>\n The easiest thing to "solve" is the memory issue, solve - however - is a big word. You can extend the memory to a total of 3 GB by plugging in another SO-DIMM DDR2 667 MHz module, but sadly thats it. The CPU can address a maximum of 4 GB of RAM, but as 1 GB of RAM is already soldered to the mainboard - well, it ends with that upgrade, sadly. I had really hoped someone would have tinkered around with the BIOS and found out how to extend the memory by accepting 4 GB modules or such, but I have not found anything on the web - if you got something, please let me know :).<\/p>\n Being that old, (2008-03-26) the CMOS battery has long been dead. Sadly, the usual issue arrives - the laptop quickly turns on - then shuts off and does not boot. The first thing to do is to remove the keyboard bezel and keyboard - to be able to remove the battery altogether to allow the system to boot again. Removing the battery reveals that it has three connector pins: 2 GND and 1 VCC pin. Removing the shrink wrap shows its just an ordinary Panasonic CR2025 cell:<\/p>\n So, creating a new battery is very easy. As I did not have another CR2025 at hand with solder tabs, I just took a new CR2032, put the soldering iron to 420 Degrees Celsius and quickly soldered the connectors directly to the battery. But be careful, you need to be very quick to not damage the coin cell.<\/p>\n In the end I put it in shrink wrap...<\/p>\n ... but I found out that the battery got too thick to be inserted beneath the keyboard. So I ended up in soldering ground directly to the GND terminal of the battery and the positive terminal to the side of the battery case - and keeping the solder as low profile as possible. As the shrink wrap also added too much height I put it into kapton tape.<\/p>\n Good thing - it worked out in the end :).<\/p>\n Getting a new harddrive for the ZIF PATA socket would be quite expensive - and the 1.8' drives will be slow and fail anyway after some time. So I looked for alternatives. There are ZIF Sdcard connectors, but they are also expensive and while Sdcards can be faster, they are still not a good memory media for hosting the OS of an Desktop computer. There are also ZIF SSD drives, but - again - very expensive. But the last thing I found was interesting: An ZIF to mSATA adapter for some bucks on one big online shop.<\/p>\n The most important parts of this adapter was that the ZIF socket did not correctly fit the original adapter cable from the Latitude XT and my mSATA SSDs passive components collided a bit with the adapter board, so the first thing I did was to use some kapton tape to make sure we will not create any short-circuit:<\/p>\n Then I lined up the original connector cable with the board, as shown, metal contacts up:<\/p>\n As written already, the original connector cable was "too thin" to be correctly grabbed by the ZIF socket, so I applied two strips of kapton tape to the backside of the connector to make it a bit thicker - this worked like a charm:<\/p>\n The last issue was that the drive was floating around the case - only dangling by the delicate ribbon cable. So I printed a little baseplate which would fit into the slot neatly:<\/p>\n Upon this baseplate I alligned the overall construct and made some notes so I could apply some doublesided tape...<\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n1.) RAM<\/h2>\n
2.) CMOS battery<\/h2>\n
<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n3.) Harddrive replacement<\/h2>\n
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