• Please review our updated Terms and Rules here

Zenith ZWL-183-93 revival

compaqportableplus

Veteran Member
Joined
Apr 21, 2011
Messages
1,043
Location
USA
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:


IMG_6086.jpgIMG_6087.jpg


Pretty dirty. You can also see my other new toy sitting under it that I will be making a thread about very soon.


When I fired it up, I was greeted with this:


IMG_6088.jpg


Seems to be a VERY common issue with these. I figured the JVC 26-pic hard drive probably had stiction, which it did.


Here is the drive liberated from the Zenith:


IMG_6089.jpg


Heavy as hell! I really can't believe how much this little drive weighs.


So, I got it unstuck, but it wouldn't spin-up when you first powered the computer on, you had to do a ctrl+alt+delete and then it would spin up, weird! It would just spin right back down though, and I would get the drive error again. I spent several hours on it and couldn't figure it out, so right before I went to sleep I was reading a thread on here from someone that had one, saying that the hard drive worked fin until the battery died.


Well, I wasn't going to be able to sleep knowing that, so I got up, connected an ATX PSU to the battery terminals, plugged in the Zenith power supply, and the damn thing booted right up! It was at a prompt that said "Enter Password Attempt 1" or something like that, so I felt pretty good about that and went on to bed.


Today, I decided to make a small and entirely reversible modification to the little power board inside of the laptop. I discovered that removing the little choke coil from that board takes the DC barrel jack completely out of circuit, so I pulled that out, and then just ran wires from the jack straight to the positive and negative points for the battery, allowing me to plug my 12V 2.2A power supply into the side of the machine like normal! No more "low power" light and the hard drive now works as it should! I also wired it for the more traditional center-positive, rather than center-negative like this laptop originally was.


Someday, I will build a proper battery for and probably reverse this, but for now it's working great.


So, if you have one of these and think the HDD is toast, it may not be! It could simply be that the unit isn't getting enough power.


I have found that when it sits for a while the drive does get stuck again sometimes, but I found a firm, flat-handed "smack" over the drive seems to always get it going again! :D Thankfully, the stiction this drive has seems to be pretty mild, for now at least.


I also was having issues with the disk getting stuck in the floppy drive, so I pulled it out and found the offending part of the mechanism, oiled it, and it's working great now! Ejects disks very smoothly. First time I have had that issue on a PC. It's usually Macs that have that problem. Bit of a pain getting the two springs for the pop-up assembly on and off, but it's doable. They're really strong springs.


Here it is all back together and working:


IMG_6092.jpgIMG_6093.jpg


Sure is a cool laptop. VERY big too! Love the way this JVC hard drive sounds also. I was able to get around the "password" thing by just removing a command from the autoexec.bat. :) Still has the original Zenith MS-DOS 3.21 on it! I have already backed that up, along with some other stuff. I will probably format the drive and start fresh with it.


I also found something really funny on this hard drive I will share a little later.


More to come!
 
Last edited:
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 went to the directory and typed "WIN" to be greeted with this:


IMG_6100.jpg


:rofl: I definitely got a kick out of that. It's just a simple batch file. I did save it too so if anyone wants it let me know. I placed it in a directory called "WINDIE." :razz:


Of course, I did put actual Windows on it too:


IMG_6101.jpgIMG_6102.jpg


This is version 1.01. I will be putting 2.03 on it also.


Here's is the CheckIt system report as well as a hard drive benchmark:


IMG_6103.jpgIMG_6104.jpg


About the same performance as a typical MFM hard drive.


I may install an NEC V20 in this laptop as well, as I did on my ZFL-181.
 
Last edited:
As someone who lives less than a mile from the old Zenith HQ/ factory (and a modest Zenith collector), this thread warms my heart. Very nice to see and I enjoyed the humorous "trap".
 
As someone who lives less than a mile from the old Zenith HQ/ factory (and a modest Zenith collector), this thread warms my heart. Very nice to see and I enjoyed the humorous "trap".

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

Glad you enjoyed funny batch file. :)
 
Hey,
I have one of these same laptops, and I get the "low power" and hard drive failing to start up issue too ever since the battery exploded.

Have you built another battery for it yet? Is there any chance you could help me out and build another so I can buy it, or do you have some other easier solution?
 
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 went to the directory and typed "WIN" to be greeted with this:


View attachment 1039761


🤣 I definitely got a kick out of that. It's just a simple batch file. I did save it too so if anyone wants it let me know. I placed it in a directory called "WINDIE." :razz:


Of course, I did put actual Windows on it too:


View attachment 1039762View attachment 1039763


This is version 1.01. I will be putting 2.03 on it also.


Here's is the CheckIt system report as well as a hard drive benchmark:


View attachment 1039764View attachment 1039765


About the same performance as a typical MFM hard drive.


I may install an NEC V20 in this laptop as well, as I did on my ZFL-181.
If you can, go ahead and re-cap the hard drive first chance you get. these have surface mount capacitors on them and they were all leaking or close to leaking on the one in mine. Attached are the pics of all the capacitors that need replaced. After doing this, you're also going to notice that the seek times increase, and it'll be a lot easier for the drive to start spinning as well, a problem I had for a while with the old capacitors. The 16v 22uF was the only real one that showed any leakage, but I swapped out all the rest of the ones pictured as a precaution as if one is going, better to replace all the others.

I'm going to be so glad when someone decides to really dig into the protocol these JVC drives use and make a CF adapter. it's going to make life so much easier.
 

Attachments

  • FeIDlIoXwAIO3hk.jpg
    FeIDlIoXwAIO3hk.jpg
    2.3 MB · Views: 3
  • FeIDlyqXoAAc0QT.jpg
    FeIDlyqXoAAc0QT.jpg
    2.1 MB · Views: 3
  • FeIDmXjWQAQnni6.jpg
    FeIDmXjWQAQnni6.jpg
    2.2 MB · Views: 3
As someone who lives less than a mile from the old Zenith HQ/ factory (and a modest Zenith collector), this thread warms my heart. Very nice to see and I enjoyed the humorous "trap".

I used to work for ZDS from 1990 to 96, when they packed up and shut the doors. I started out at repair depot in Three Oaks, then they moved us back up to Hilltop. Our department was on the other side of the office mezzanine by the cafeteria, then they moved us back to the old SMT area.

Most of what I did in the early days was repair contract work at the field service unit level, then was laid off. I got recalled a couple months later, then I was transferred to component repair. I spent rest of my career there repairing 486 desktops boards. Near the end we were also re-working re-branded Packard Bell boards. Their firmware was sucky, and I spent most of that time replacing Roms.

The thing I hated about the ZWL-183 series was when the charging circuits would burn up, and melt the side of the case. We'd have to gut the machine and replace the entire bottom "tub" of the plastic case. Besides the 20mb JVC drives, I recall them having 10mb ALPS hard drives.
 
Back
Top