I exaggerate. But hey, it almost is.

Once upon a time, a week before the Asian Crisis set in, I bought a black, Singapore-made IPC laptop. It was a pretty good unit for its time, save for the fact that the plastic casing seemed flimsy. It was a Pentium unit with 32MB of RAM, 4GB of hard disk space, an RCA Video Out port (a novelty, even today), and Windows 95.

After a couple of years of usefulness, the unit got stashed away in some dark nook. Unfortunately, it turns out that it was a rather humid nook. Almost a decade later, I uncovered the laptop and, to my horror, was faced with crumbling plastic and a moisture-savaged LCD screen.

I had this poor thing revived at SST Laptop n PC Shop at the Cyberzone of SM Megamall, and they did what they can to salvage the thing. Including replacing the dead LCD lid with one from a Toshiba Satellite. A dull gray one. It was the closest fit, I suppose.

That, plus the putty-work that was done to salvage the disintegrating plastic, led to the monstrosity seen here. Note how the lid is much larger than the body.

But amazingly, it works! My old Windows 95 booted up without a hitch, and memories flooded back as I saw old files and programs come to life.

The shop did its best to make the unit look a tad presentable, eventually covering the horridly drab lid in black tape. Total cost: just a thousand pesos, which was a steal considering that they patiently puttied the thing together and gave me a replacement lid.

After ten minutes playing with my Frankenstein laptop, however, I shut it down, tucked it away in lots of silica gel, and forgot about it. There simply isn’t much that one can do on a computer that ran Windows 95, had no USB ports, and only had a floppy drive to let you extract its files.

I know, I know, there’s Linux. I’ll get to it sometime…