Compaq Contura 4/25C

[QuantumII]

Hi,

I just finally found myself a Contura 4/25C. Nothing special maybe, but to me this is one cool machine.

The first PC I ever touched was a Contura 3/25 (Which I still have), and this machine is identical, except it is a 486 and it has a color LCD.
It's pretty cool to see colors on a machine where I am used to black and white VGA.

It is running Win 3.11 with a Compaq brand, and is in pristine condition,except from a hinge I needed to repair. The LCD is passive, but it's one of the better ones, so games run pretty well on it.

I remember on the BW model, it ghosted very much, but games were still playable unless there were millions of moving things at the same time.

A nice addition to the collection

 

[retrobits]

My first laptop was the Contura 4/25, the monochrome version. It was a very nice machine and lasted a long time. Used it with an outboard clip-on mouse (Logitech, I believe) and a Xircom parallel to Ethernet adapter. Good times.

Congrats on the find!

- Earl

 

[pearce_jj]

I had a contura aero 4/25 mono, which was great. 6 hours battery I seem to recall with the extended run-time battery. Basically what would be called a net book today.

 

[billdeg]

Yup...a classic 486 laptop. I remember using them when they were new. I have one too, useful for 486 type stuff. Still works great.

 

[QuantumII]

It's a great little machine

The 3/25 that was the first PC I used, was originally one of two (I think) laptops which was used at the Norwegian Saab office for loan, if an employee had to do work over the weekend, or if they needed to do car diagnostics in the field (It had a software version of the TEC car diag system)

My father used to borrow it in weekends sometimes, and did documents and such on it. I rememer playing minesweeper on it, and making stupid drawings in Paintbrush. It stayed in our home longer and longer each time during the years, until it eventually became permanent. Amazingly, it works just perfect still, except from the battery which is dead.

Calling the 4/25 areo a netbook is not quite right, because laptop and desktop performance was much more equal back then. The aero was just as powerful as the average home PC.

Netbooks are crap comparing to a normal desktop these days (No offence to netbooks) but back in the day laptops and desktops were more or less equal

 

[pearce_jj]

Calling the 4/25 areo a netbook is not quite right, because laptop and desktop performance was much more equal back then.

I was expecting to be picked up on the lack of NIC But it was less, 486sx/25 CPU, 80MB HDD, 12MB RAM max. Whereas Dell desktops were already dx2/66, 500MB, 16MB RAM by then.

That said, desktops weren't so fast when the electric meter in our student house had run out of credit yet again