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Great to see you found the issue!


I always get excited when I hear PrairieTek! Those were the very first 2.5” hard drives ever made. I’ve never actually ran across one, unfortunately.

As...

Nice!



Here's a screenshot of a CheckIt benchmark of the Deskpro. About twice as fast as an XT. Pretty nice.


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It’s worth noting that the NEC V40 is a V20 compatible chip, so it’s in the 8088 class, not the 8086/V30 class.

Those appear to be the exact same drives used in the Tandy 1400LT laptop.

Nice machine, I have one myself and it’s a well-built computer. IMO, $130 was quite high for an untested unit, but I’m glad to see it ended up working. I think I got mine for around $60 total or so...

Yeah, a different layout can be odd until you adjust. I remember when I got my first IBM model F how completely lost I felt using it, but now I can type really fast on it!

Yeah, I saw those. That person has been trying to sell them for ages, which tells me they probably aren’t open to reasonable offers.

Yes, that is the keyboard the early Deskpro 286s came with. It...

1ST1,

Thanks! I did benchmark this machine in CheckIt and got a pic of the results. I’ll upload it a little later.


TH2002,

Thank you! Yeah, these old 808x systems are really a lot of fun...

Thank you! :)

I've finally gotten another one of my "holy grail" systems, the original Compaq Deskpro 8086. This thread will be documenting the Deskpro as I build it up to how I want it to be.


As some of you...

98 percent of the drives I’ve repaired still work fine. For example, my Miniscribe 3650 that has no bad sectors, which didn’t work at all when I got it, just needed some oil in the stepper motor....

Is the stepper motor stuck? I know that’s a common issue with those, and it could be causing it to shut off when it tries to seek.

I think it’s well worth the effort to try and revive an old...

A CR2032 is not enough juice. I’ve found in both my T5200 and T3100e when using a 2032, the time drifts when the unit is unplugged, almost like the time stops progressing when the machine is powered...

Thanks! That’s really cool that you live close to the old Zenith headquarters.

Glad you enjoyed funny batch file. :)

That’s exactly how I fixed my ST-412 about six or seven years ago. Still works fine to this day with no bad sectors. Mine too sounded horrible when it first spun up, but now it’s so quiet you can...

Merry Christmas from my Compaq SLT/286!


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:xmas:

Okay, so here's something hilarious I found on the hard drive. I saw that it had a C:\WINDOWS directory and got excited, as I have never found Windows already installed on a computer this old. So I...

No problem. I agree.

Yep, I believe we discussed that in my thread mentioned above where I reviewed the ZFL-181-93. :) They are cool drives for sure. Seem pretty robust too. The drive in the...

I finally got me a Zenith ZWL-183 laptop, the -93 variant to be exact, so it has a 20MB hard drive versus the 10MB the -92 has.


Here was how it look when I first got it out of the box:

...

Since a particular person in this thread told me I was "imagining things" when I said that the Zenith ZLF-181 and ZWL-183 were completely different machines, despite the fact that they look similar,...

A DeskPro has been obtained! Consider this thread closed.

Have you made any more progress on this machine?

Does the screen look washed-out? It’s an extremely common issue on the 486c and some other old active matrix color displays. It is caused by failing SMD capacitors on the LCD display itself....

Greedy bastards... "we aren't rich enough!" Excessive advertising has really made the internet far, far worse.

Absolutely!

I have not read that yet, but I did see it a few weeks ago. I plan on reading it eventually! I have watched Silicon Cowboys though, great documentary. I’ll probably rewatch it soon.