The Toshiba Libretto is a mini Laptop. It is smaller than the size of a VHS tape (shown to the right) and it is a Pentium75 with 770 Mb Hard drive, and 16Mb of ram, and a nice as hell Active matrix 6" (diag) screen. Almost all of the more recent Libretto Pentium75s come with a P120 chip underclocked to run at 75. Intel stopped production on the 75 before toshiba was done with the Pentium75 model. Once I heard about this, I researched on how to overclock this little puppy. Over clocking a desktop by changing a jumper is one thing, but soldering to things smaller than fleas on a mini-laptop is another thing! After about an hour though, I was done.

The picture to the left is the inside of the libretto. You can see the hard drive to the left of the board, and the pencil was just included for scale (it is a full length pencil) Instead of running at 75, or even clocking it at 120Mhz, It now runs at 166. If I made it run at 120, it wouldn't even be overclocked, so I pushed it all the way to 166 and it runs great. After I did this, I put it in my car to play MP3s. In case you don't already know, mp3s are compressed music files. One minute of music takes up less than 1 Mb of storage space and it is near CD quality. I currently have about 2000 Mp3s in my collection. So naturally, I wanted to play them in my car. Burning them to CD-R audio CDs was a big pain. So I put the Libretto in the car. Once it was in the car, I needed more space as the HD is only 770 Mb.

There were 2 ways to accomplish more space. An Easy expensive way of buying an external HDD and PCMCIA controller card, or a cheap, harder (more fun) way of running a 'file server' in the trunk. Naturally, I went with the harder, cheaper way. I added an old 486 with about 16 GB of storage space in the back. I had all the parts to build this up and running, except about 50 bucks for misc stuff. I ran a x-over network line from the 486 to a PCMCIA ethernet card in the libretto. So in effect, I had a LAN in my car :-)