Boredom does make one creative. These past few months, I've been cooking and painting. Then, I started looking into making YouTube videos. Since then, I've been making videos during my spare time.

Almost 15 years ago, back when I was in college, I took it upon myself to fix our family laptop, which my brother had broken years prior. It was a Toshiba Portege 3110CT, which at the time my dad was considering buying, I was against, but had grown fond of since then. It was incredibly thin and light, and I had become impressed by its compactness and beautiful form factor. Also, it was expensive, at $2k. That was back in 2001 when my dad bought it.

By the time I wanted to fix it, it was 2006 or 2007. First, I tried to disassemble the laptop. That was itself a mighty task. I ended up searching online, and found the maintenance manual. This was also back in the heyday of eBay. This was an old laptop, but was in a sweet spot where it could be bought for a cheap price, but was still common on eBay. I bought an old used version on eBay, took the screen off, and replaced the broken one on my dad's laptop. Thus, the laptop was once again functional. Except, it wasn't very useful, because the hard drive had gone bad since, and would no longer boot into Windows.

Thus began my journey, which would turn into a long-term hobby. I researched and experimented with various ways of loading Windows onto the laptop. The Toshiba Portege line of laptops were special at the time; they were so thin and slim because they did not have any optical drives built in. While this made them impressively thin, it also made installing Windows somewhat difficult.

After $30 spent on a PCMCIA cd drive from eBay, and countless hours searching for a way online, I was finally able to get the laptop to recognize the cd drive, and I could install Windows. I had beat the boss. Or did I?

I turned to my dad's even older Toshiba Portege 620CT to try to work my magic, but was unsuccessful. I eventually gave up, deciding to finish this battle at a later date.

Having been exposed to eBay, I was shocked by how cheaply I could buy laptops, which a few years ago, had costed thousands of dollars. At a time when laptops still regularly costed a thousand or more, I started buying up laptops that were less than $200. As I was now armed with a way to install Windows, and also had experience disassembling laptops, I now saw these laptops being sold on eBay as treasure.

Thus, I turned a Toshiba Portege 3480CT and 3490CT functional, and used that during college. Later, when I went to the full-time training in Anaheim, I switched to a Dell Latitude X300. Then, when I started working, I bought a Lenovo Thinkpad X60T. These were all used from eBay, and I would fix them up and use them.

Now, since I started working, laptop vendors started making it easier to install Windows, and this hobby of mine sort of became unnecessary.

Recently, when I decided to start making YouTube videos, I thought, wouldn't it be great if I showed this little bit of esoteric knowledge of mine to the world? It would also be quite nostalgic.

Toshiba had finally caved and spun off their laptop business. So, I wanted to put together some videos of my fond memories of their laptops. Also, wouldn't it be a show of quality if a laptop they made 25 years ago still worked?

Thus, after relearning the process again, except this time, I found a shortcut, I now have these videos on my channel:

My first video - comparing 4th Gen smartwatches from Fossil with the OG Moto 360

My unfinished battle - Windows 95 on a Toshiba Portege 620CT

The original that started it all - Windows 95 on a Toshiba Portege 3110CT

The slope is slippery - Windows 2000 on a Toshiba Portege 2000