I always wanted one of these tiny Librettos. When
I saw one listed as untested, with a small amount of physical damage. But going cheap. I knew I
had to take a chance. I spent some of my meagre income and ended up receiving this cool looking
Japanese version of the Toshiba Libretto 50CT. It arrived with no power supply and a very broken
looking dock. I'm pretty happy with the condition of the unit, and it does have several cracks
in the plastic. As is often the case with these old Librettos. Because the plastic becomes so
brittle and one of the worst parts of it is here, where the docking connector screwed into, and
this has obviously had some severe physical damage. But I'm actually pretty happy with
it this. It's not too bad all considered. I did get the docking unit with it
as well, and it's a lot more damaged. I mean the plastic is just so brittle
that it just sort of comes off. It just sort of falls apart. So I'm pretty sure this will still work
electrically. It just cosmetically looks terrible. But the unit itself I'm actually pretty
happy with it. Especially when I open it up it looks pretty immaculate and nice. Built for
Windows 95 it's got a Pentium 75 inside there. I'm keen to find out more about this machine.
I've heard many things about them and it's time to find out what the Libretto is like. I didn't
have the right connector to build a power supply. So I had to wait to find out if it even works.
Eventually I was able to get a connector and I quickly hooked it up to a power supply and fired
it up. I've made a proper power supply. There's the connector I bought and that's looking pretty
good now. The hard drive sounds a bit rough. There are some extra clicks going on. Which sounds to me
like the heads keep resetting. This indicates the drive is probably on its last legs and can fail
at any time, and we can hear the standard clicking of this fairly loud hard drive. But there's a
second click. A louder sort of regular click that's happening. Which I don't think is normal. I
think the heads are constantly returning to their home position, and coming out again. Some sort of
alignment issue, I'm amazed this drive even works. It looks like it still has Windows 95 on it. So
it's probably never been upgraded and the screen looks great. Everything seems to work
so far. I snapped this photo in time for the r/retrobattlestations contest. This is
something I've always been keen to participate in, and I love it when a plan comes
together. That hard drive though. OK we've got the Japanese version of Windows 95 on
here. That hard drive clicking really concerns me. I will have to do something about that. One of
the great things I've learned about Librettos is the hard drive can be easily removed. By
simply taking off this small cover on the side. It even comes with a convenient
handle for quick removal. I really like that. So I should be able to
just take this off and we can have a look. Really nice little design,
where this handle comes out and I can just sort of pull the hard drive out. That looks like the original hard drive that
came with this unit. 815 megabytes. I want to try replacing this drive with a Compact Flash card. I
have previously tried booting from a Compact Flash card on other machines. But not had much luck. The
way Compact Flash works means you might get some varied results. Depending on which card you've
got. Since that first attempt I've collected a few more cards. I'm determined to test them all
and see if I can get one to work. I'm going to use one of these adaptors, and this
will adapt a Compact Flash card over to the same pin
configuration as a hard drive. So I've got to find some way to get that in there.
I've got several Compact Flash cards to try. I need to see which ones of those work
with this adaptor in this computer. I'm going to put this back in and
we'll see what we can come up with. I'm using the Libretto with its dodgy hard drive
to format and prepare the cards, uh-oh ScanDisk. I'm just gonna exit ScanDisk, yeah yeah. Right on cue the system stops booting. I probably
shouldn't have skipped ScanDisk when it wanted to check the hard drive. I don't have a floppy drive
or a CD drive that works with this Libretto. Making booting and installing a new
operating system kind of tricky. So it seems to have frozen trying to boot Windows
95 that time. It is a little bit concerning. Try booting again see what happens. Oh it doesn't seem to be booting anymore. OK well it gives a beep and then
it stops booting Windows 95. Something's gone wrong. Maybe I should have run
ScanDisk. I was able to get ScanDisk started again and this time I'm letting it run right
through and hoping that it sorts the problem out. It takes ages but finally it gets to the end. There were no errors reported. But
after this Windows 95 is booting again. OK, Windows has seemed to have booted OK
that time. So I'm not going to muck around and I'm going to see if I can get a
Compact Flash card to be bootable. So install the card and bring up a command prompt. I'm working my way through each card.
Formatting and installing MS-DOS. OK so that's the first card.
I'm using the MS-DOS SYS command to make each card bootable. It's all in
Japanese but I think I know what I'm doing. Card two and SYS D: That keyboard, I'm still not used to it. Does that work? OK, all right. Card 4 Gigabyte Samsung Extreme. So I've now got these four cards ready to go. But I also have another four cards. These
are all the Compact Flash cards that I own. The capacity on these is a lot
less, 512, 256. A 128 and a 16. But I want to just try them and
see if I can get them to boot. Getting the hang of this now. It does need to
install something for it, no worries. Final card is Alexa 16 megabyte. Not really enough for
Windows 95. But I do want to know if it will boot. OK I've got the four, four gigabyte cards
formatted with DOS on them. We'll see if those boot. I've got the four secondary cards and
while I'd prefer to have one of these working, it would be good to check these and know if they
work. As an added bonus I have two more cards that I want to see if they work. One is a four
gigabyte Microdrive, and even if that boots OK, I'm not really going to use a Microdrive in this
machine. But I'm curious to see if it works. The other card I've got is actually an adaptor.
Which adapts an SD card to Compact Flash. I have no idea if something like this
would work. But I do want to test it. I don't know what sort of
circuitry is inside this thing. OK I now have all 10 test cards
ready with DOS installed on them, to see which ones if any can boot on this machine. Now it's way too hard for me to install this. So I'm going to have to take the bottom
off. I'll get out the protector mat. Right first up that's the battery. And we've got some screws here around the
place. I'll pop those out. Let's see what we've got inside. Now I'm gonna have to be extra
careful. Because this plastic is so brittle that it can so easily break. So we've got the insides, Compact Flash
(actuallty PCMCIA) slot and hard drive. Now this is keyed. With the one of the pins
there is blocked and one of the pins is missing on this connector. So it only goes in one way. It's so much quieter now. Because this this
computer doesn't have a fan at all for the CPU. So the only sound comes from the hard
drive. So the compact flash uh . . . First time! That's awesome! OK I wasn't expecting it to work just straight off
the bat like that. Because compact flash cards often have so many compatibility issues
with these old computers. That's awesome! OK well that's a bit broken. So I'll just
take that out for now and keep testing. OK that one's a no, it doesn't work. So if I've got two good ones
and two that don't boot. Next is the Sandisk 512. All right that's a yes. OK the tests are all done and out of the 10 cards that I've tested, seven cards
didn't boot at all. But these three did. That really tells you that if you want to
boot from Compact Flash on these old machines, it doesn't seem to be any consistency as to why
some cards work and some don't. You just have to try them and find the ones that do. So these are
my three that I'll set aside. I'll use this one in this machine and these. I'll keep knowing that
I can boot DOS and Windows 95 and 98 from them. I can now copy the Windows installer files onto
the Compact Flash card using another computer. I put the Windows 95 install
files onto this Compact Flash card using this USB to Compact Flash adaptor.
Very handy. Let's get the card in there. I'm pretty sure this is going to work. So I
will reassemble now. Yeah, how did it go again? Yep, it fell out, uh all
right well let's see if I can get this together. I do have to be extra careful. All screws are in. Pop the battery back in. I haven't tested the battery so I
don't know if it holds any charge at all. Let's power it up and see what happens. Yep, we're booting. OK Now I've put the files that I need on here,
some drivers, Windows 95 and I think if I just type Setup, it should start the process.
Yep sure I can now boot directly into MS-DOS and from there start the Windows installation
process. Using the Setup command. All right thank you for that.
Yes I'm happy to have Windows 95. Uh no, we don't want a startup disk. Because
no floppy drive, that's not gonna help. All right preparing to copy
files, let's let it go. It's been a long time since I've
installed or even used Windows 95. I'm kind of mesmerized seeing this. Fantastic. We've got a new install of Windows 95. Now, all right, we'll shut down for now. The
Brian Eno Windows 95 startup sound is magical. Yes the same Brian Eno. Famous for
composing long-form ambient music. I really like his description of the
process of creating this startup sound. Where he says. "I thought this was
so funny and an amazing thought, to actually try and make a little piece of
music. It's like making a tiny little jewel" This Libretto is also like a tiny little
jewel. With Windows 95 it looks amazing. It's like being transported away into a
world of possibilities and imagination. It's even telling you that it all starts here.
During this whole process I also realized this particular Libretto has 32 megabytes of RAM.
These Librettos only shipped with 16 megabytes. But there was a memory expansion board available,
and it looks like this Libretto was expanded at some point in the past, and from what I understand
they're actually quite rare now. That's a score! Now the other thing I want to do is have
a look at the expanded memory module. I've had a look at the instructions and
I have to lift up the keyboard first. Let's carefully lift up this. There we go.
This plastic bar, it comes off pretty easily, revealing a hidden screw right here. It should just be a case of lifting
up this keyboard very carefully. OK All right that's the memory module here. Uh, and next so I'm just gonna very
carefully lift out this memory module. There we go. There's the memory expansion and that
looks like the original Toshiba memory expansion. Because there were third-party ones available. That could have cost quite a bit back
in the day, when buying this Libretto. But it's really nice to have 32 megabytes
in this machine. Especially with Windows 95. So screw back in and then just
carefully fold that keyboard. The other thing I like about
these early versions of Windows is that you can go back even further in time. You
can exit Windows and just have the computer run on an MS-DOS command prompt. Now one of the cool
things about DOS based Windows is that you can set it to simply start up in DOS mode. There it
goes and that's very useful if you just want to go straight into some DOS games. So there
is a DOS game that I've installed, Descent. This game is from 1995. It's got a nice sci-fi intro. Which is actually
kind of long. So I'm just going to skip through it. This game out came out at the time when
Doom was the biggest game in the world. All right, controls. right, right, OK let's go. Whoa, well, Oh, there's something behind me. Where are you, here we go, ah, I'm just going to fly away. I'm having a blast with this Libretto.
This tiny little jewel of a machine. I'm so pleased to have Windows 95 back in my life. If you enjoy this leave a like or a comment.
Let's see where we go next. Thanks for watching.
