Deepslate

Acer TravelMate 508DX | Owned during 2025

Deepslate was one of my "vintage" laptops running Windows 98 SE. It was recent enough to have USB support (granted there was only one USB port) but old enough to sport a floppy drive!

Deepslate suffered from some issues, both age-related and due to being stored incorrectly, and has some issues with potential corrosion as well as broken plastic rattling around inside (combined with screws that clearly aren't screwing into a post) and cracks on the exterior plastic housing.

Deepslate was in effectively perfect working order: the LCD has dead lines and was intermittent but otherwise Deepslate worked fine.

This machine was my oldest machine having been manufactured somewhere during the turn of the millenium with it having shipped with 98SE and instruction manuals for the TravelMate 505 series (to which this laptop belongs) having been written in 1999. Deepslate originally shipped with a 5GB IBM Travelstar drive, it has since been replaced with a 20GB Hitachi Travelstar drive.

I eventually got rid of it due to repairs being hard to perform on this machine due to brittle plastic.

• CPU: Mobile Intel Celeron 500 MHz (Coppermine)

• GPU: NeoMagic MagicGraph128XD

• Memory: 32MB

• Storage: 20GB IDE HDD

• Screen: 800x600 LCD

• OS: Windows 98 SE