Discovery One: hope Thrillhouse went ahead with the external power supply purchase, since the charge doesn't hold too well past a week. I can borrow a unit from work again, though, under the worst conditions; that may not be necessary due to various positive developments, though.

Discovery Two: the connection dongle (a hardware adapter) that I borrowed from somebody at the users' group (that's COMPUTER users) was constructed for ordinary ATA's, not laptop hard drives, so another dongle will have to be located, borrowed, or ideally purchased since I think I could use one for future laptop surgery.

Discovery Three: One of my Phillips bits for the ratchet driver was small enough to fit the screws on the HD retainer, so access was gained to that subassembly.

Bottom Line - the location of a suitable dongle adapter is the only thing standing in the way (barring the obtaining of an AC power supply) to being able to use a conventional desktop to dongle into the removed laptop HD, wipe ME off of it and install damn near anything (although we, darn it, agreed on an updated load of plain old 98, which would not rag out the processor too badly). It would be so nice to see if Bell Labs Plan 9 would work on this video arrangement, but maybe some other time (and in my experience it probably wouldn't work).

So progress is afoot; I should be able to identify the right adapter and a purchase source at the computer meet tonight.

ISN'T HARDWARE WONDERFUL??