Restoration of my Compaq Deskpro 386n is now complete. They gave it to me like 20 years ago,had some problems (probably RTC battery was dead and they trashed it entirely).
To be honest, i was going to throw it away into the trash,but i decided to give it a try and restore it .
before.jpg
First of all, case was all rusty and battered, the plastic yellowed by age. Disassembled every board and proceeded to scrape the rust away. Had to paint back the case with a light gray paint, matching closely the original color.
Plastic parts received the retrobrite treatment with good results.
Visual inspection and dust cleaning of all disassembled parts, checking bad caps, bent pins, blown out components. Boards were surprisingly in good shape, capacitors from PSU were all good.
checking for bad stuff.jpg
The first power on after 20 years. The PSU started without problems, correct voltages. RTC chip was obviously dead and needed the coin cell battery mod, as you can see. By the way, to enter BIOS,enable the default jumper on the mobo, and then press f10 at the right time when you power on this Compaq pc.
Testing ram. this Compaq proprietary pc is very picky. Originally had 2 mb ram, but i did find ONE compatible 4mb stick (out of 30 different modules i have)... 4 + 1 megs of ram is more than enough for this 386 sx 16
testing ram and cmos.jpg
This pc came with a 40mb Conner hard disk. Still working. I decided to put a CF card as primary, but i'll keep the original HDD inside powered off. Even the IDE cable is proprietary,so i can't put it as a slave unless i modify the cable, adding a 2nd ide plug (i don't wan't to break it , tho).Cf card is also handy to transfer files from my main core i7 to all older pcs.
Had a SB16 PnP around, but it works well even in non PnP pcs like this one .Well, i can put maximum 2 isa cards here, and the 2nd one is a 3com etherlink 3 (in the pic is covered by the sb16). Both of them PnP and rather new, but as far as i tested, they work, even in windows 3.11, no irq conflicts.
mods addons.jpg
Installed dos 6.22 , windows 3.11, lots of games and kept all the useful drivers in a directory. put the top of the case back, and well wow, good as new. nearly like the other Compaq (at least 10 years younger) that's laying under it
3end.jpg
Specs: 386 sx 16, 5 megs of ram(up to eight),500 mb hdd, SB16 , internal vga card,1.44 floppy drive,network card, ps2 ports, parallel and serial ports. All cramped in this tiny proprietary pc. The only fear is the PSU failing, since is proprietary too, but someone already replaced it with one with the AT standard.