Score! - Fieldworks FW7633P Military Spec laptop

[paul.brett]

Hello all,

I picked this item up from a local radio rally, and I was assured that the hard drive had been removed to protect military secrets.

After an initial period, where it would not boot at all (but I could hear a hard drive in there) I found that all the memory had been removed. I managed to scrape together a matched pair of 8MB SIMMs and booted the beast.

It goes straight into a boot menu for either DOS or Windows NT. Nice!

DOS is 6.22 with Windows for Workgroups 3.11.

The NT is a version 4 Workstation. I bypassed the logon security, and had a good browse around the *fully populated* hard disk drive.

Anybody know the maximum amount of memory I can get into this thing? I have seen them advertised with 64MB (which I assume is made of 4 x 16MB SIMMs) but I would prefer to go 128MB if that is possible.

Does anybody have any suitable *matched* SIMMs around?

Thank-you.

Paul.

 

[paul.brett]

Found this:

http://windowsitpro.com/windows/fieldworks-fw7600

says - "Memory is not as expandable as on a standard desktop computer, but the FW7600 can support more than most portables, with up to 64MB using standard SIMMs."

So, it is 16MB SIMMs I need. Can you have a root around, and see what you can find?

Thank-you.

 

[paul.brett]

I've been sent and installed a pair of 64MB SIMMs, and now have this beast up to 128MB, which is perfectly adequate for Windows NT 4.

I took out the DDC data capture card, and placed a 3Com Etherlink III in there, for which the drivers were readily available. It joined my network using TCP/IP in both Windows for Workgroups and in Windows NT without any problems. I'm not going to go browsing around the Internet with IE 4.0, as I'm sure I'll get infected with something nasty quite quickly.

This is going to be my new field computer of choice though. In actual fields too!

 

[paul.brett]

I've used all 4 of the SIMMs I was given, and now have the memory up to 192MB, made up of 2 x 64MB and 2 x 32MB SIMMs. Getting them in there was a real tight squeeze, and I had to snip off a small piece of the connector block for the CPU fan power supply.

 

[Engineer of Computer Past]

I happen to acquire the same computer although unfortunately it doesn't have the hard drive. I think I have an older model (fieldworks FW7600) since this pc only has ISA compatible slots. I was wondering if you would be able to tell me the type of hard drive I would need to get this thing operational. I've counted the pins and it adds up to 50, though since I don't have the drive sled, I cannot confirm if this is the correct pin number. This is the only forum post I've seen of a computer remotely close to mine, all my other info comes from a Russian article from 1996.

Regards, The Engineer