I have soft spot for retro laptops. Nice find. Mine is the much newer Armada 1750. I'm fixing it up, not sure if Ill keep it yet because I have other hardware to run those things... Yours is more retro.

Is the screen 640x480?

Have you attempted to remove the floppy and investigate what is wrong with it? Maybe the drive belt needs changing or header needs to be cleaned.

//Joakim

from the pictures that laptop has a very good screen and is overall in good condition. With the CF you can effectively get as many DOS games on it as you want and with a small screen its fine for graphics of that era

great find!

Joakim wrote on 2021-06-22, 16:38:

I have soft spot for retro laptops. Nice find. Mine is the much newer Armada 1750. I'm fixing it up, not sure if Ill keep it ye […]
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I have soft spot for retro laptops. Nice find. Mine is the much newer Armada 1750. I'm fixing it up, not sure if Ill keep it yet because I have other hardware to run those things... Yours is more retro.

Is the screen 640x480?

Have you attempted to remove the floppy and investigate what is wrong with it? Maybe the drive belt needs changing or header needs to be cleaned.

//Joakim

Yup, the screen is 640x480.

I've actually did replace the "drive belt", it was all goo at that point, cleaned it up and put in the new one, but nothing changed, still whirring. I might miss something here.
But I did read that these floppy drives are dying rather commonly in these laptops. I also tried looking for a replacement for this too, but no results.

gerry wrote on 2021-06-22, 16:38:

from the pictures that laptop has a very good screen and is overall in good condition. With the CF you can effectively get as many DOS games on it as you want and with a small screen its fine for graphics of that era

great find!

Definitely a winner combo for DOS gamers! 320x200 games look nice, not CRT quality, but still a really sharp and nice screen. 😀

You might consider making a separate subject on it, some guys here are floppy experts. 😀

Joakim wrote on 2021-06-22, 17:14:

You might consider making a separate subject on it, some guys here are floppy experts. 😀

To be honest at this point I'm not really interested in restoring the drive, I'm happy with the CF adapter I have.
And besides, I have many more PC's with a floppy drive. :]

And I do have a soft spot for Compaq computers, when I was younger, my family used to have a Compaq Deskpro 2000 with a Pentium MMX processor in it, until we changed to an Asus laptop with Windows XP on it, good ol' times. :')

They are very robust. I just picked mine up cause it was cheap, had floppy and cd rom and also internal power supply.

I also like IBM if not for the crappy plastic material they use on the lid that usually ages and becomes sticky. I think the 8bit guy or someone else had a video about the Compaq Vs IBM laptop competition. It was quite interesting.

Edit spelling

Joakim wrote on 2021-06-22, 19:50:

They are very robust. I just picked mine up cause it was cheap, had floppy and cd rom and also internal power supply.

I also like IBM if not for the crappy plastic material they use on the lid that usually ages and becomes sticky. I think the 8bit guy or someone else had a video about the Compaq Vs IBM laptop competition. It was quite interesting.

Edit spelling

Ah yes... IBM Thinkpads. It's on my wish list, but not sure which one to buy yet. Maybe a Pentium II, since I've never used such Processor before.
And also, I kinda want a complete one, even the box and packaging. WIll be a hard thing to do, but I'll keep an eye out on Ebay and other websites.

Replaced the old cooler in my socket 7 build.

Old:

New:

It's a socket 370 Celeron cooler, not entirely era appropiate but it looks SO much better.

That does look better and it'll probably cool better as well.

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2021-06-25, 17:34:

That does look better and it'll probably cool better as well.

Definitely. 😁
And I love how Intel made these sockets compatible in terms of coolers. I mean I wouldn't use a Socket 7 cooler on socket 370 cpu, but using socket 370 cooler on socket 7 cpu's is definitely an awesome thing, might be even good for overclocking too.

I wanted to use this cooler for the Socket A build when I wanted to go with a Pentium 3, but that didn't work out as planned.

I've run a giant socket A cooler on and over clocked K6-2+ @600mhz that thing ran super cool. The heatsink felt room temp to the touch.

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2021-06-25, 17:59:

I've run a giant socket A cooler on and over clocked K6-2+ @600mhz that thing ran super cool. The heatsink felt room temp to the touch.

Nice.

Much better.

I'd like to change cooler on my k6-2+ but it is way to cramped around the CPU. Got one of those startech coolers but need to mod it sadly. If I also want to fit my voodoo 2 I need to get very creative with that Dremel.

Joakim wrote on 2021-06-25, 18:52:

Much better.

I'd like to change cooler on my k6-2+ but it is way to cramped around the CPU. Got one of those startech coolers but need to mod it sadly. If I also want to fit my voodoo 2 I need to get very creative with that Dremel.

Ah yeah, big coolers can be a bit of pain. This one had just enough space to get it installed (it still took me 10 minutes). Its close to my Voodoo1, but not enough to touch the card and do any harm on it fortunately.

Bit of an upgrade on my Compaq laptop, I've finally got my SD to IDE adapter working.

Needed to use another computer to install DOS, but after that it was all smooth sailing.
Copied the Windows 3.1 setup files onto the SD Card, and started installing it.

After that, installing the video and pcmcia drivers was a bit tricky, since the driver itself is an extractor program that extracts and copies all the setup files onto a floppy disk, and since the floppy drive doesn't work on the laptop, i've booted up my Windows 98 pc, put the files onto a floppy disk as intended, and then copied them onto the SD card. It's a bit complicated this way, but without a floppy drive this is how you can do it the fast way. And thank god for having a Setup.exe for every drivers, no need to hunt down the .inf files.
One thing I did not set up yet is the driver for the CF to PCMCIA adapter, it shouldn't be hard to find one online.

Finally, I've got this laptop future proofed in terms of storage, and also got 1,2gb more space, since I'm using a 2gb card, the hdd was only 800mb.
I've just need to copy all my programs and games back, good thing I've archived the hdd.

Nice I like SD2ide too but I believe it is maybe too slow for my taste for desktop computers. I use it in my SS7 rig. Its handy to change OS by switching cards and they are dirt cheap.

For laptops it's probably fine. Not sure why I didn't consider it for my armada.

Joakim wrote on 2021-07-05, 19:08:

Nice I like SD2ide too but I believe it is maybe too slow for my taste for desktop computers. I use it in my SS7 rig. Its handy to change OS by switching cards and they are dirt cheap.

For laptops it's probably fine. Not sure why I didn't consider it for my armada.

Well, this was my first take on these adapters, and it took me almost 2 weeks to figure out how to set it to be able to boot from. Tried setting the flags in Gparted, but no luck there, thankfully, a post here (SD to IDE not booting - any experience?) helped me solve the problem.
I'll definitely use this method for any computer that's a 486 or older. It really makes things a lot more easier.

Got a power supply for the Socket 7 pc, one thing I didn't realize was it had no header for floppy drives, so i've ordered an adapter thru ebay. Oh well, at least the Voodoo1 works perfectly now, but a reinstall is needed since the old psu had some marks on poor Windows 98, but I'm gonna go with 95 this time since P1 is more fitting for that. Finding the drivers will be "fun", oh boy.