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Found a weird laptop

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Reply 20 of 20, by bjwil1991

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Stojke wrote:
An update for those in need of additional information and resources about this laptop. […]
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An update for those in need of additional information and resources about this laptop.

I have replaced the dead drum battery with an new drum battery, only it is 80mAh instead of 60mAh, cost me around $3.00 , works as it should right from the start.
BIOS does not have an Y2K bug as it keeps time properly for the current year.

WP_20170705_020.jpg

I have updated the system memory with some IBM made RAM I found lying around and ran a System Speed Test run, nothing special nor extraordinary, these are the results:

SSTIMG01.png
WP_20170716_001.jpg

CPU is in V86 mode: No
Processor : Intel Pentium(r) 133 MHz
CPUID (TFMS) : 052C Codename: P54C (0.35um)
Feature : 000001BFh MMX(tm):No, IA SSE:No, IA SSE2:No
Frequency via TSC : 132.72 MHz
CPU speed index : 98.46

Total memory size : 32 MB
Memory speed index: 109.90

PCI Video : Chips & Technologies F65550 HiQV32 GUI Accelerator

VESA OEM String : CHIPS 65550 Super VGA
VESA video memory : 2048 KB (10099 KB/s)

Hard drive 0 : 1024C 256H 0S 0 MB

Mainboard chipset : SiS 85C501
BIOS vendor : American Megatrends, Inc. (07/15/95)
OS version : MS-DOS 7.10

[00-00-0]
VEN_1039, DEV_0406, REV_00, SUBSYS_00000000
SiS 85C501/2 Chipset, CPU to PCI Bridge
[00-01-0]
VEN_1039, DEV_0008, REV_01, SUBSYS_00000000
SiS SiS85C503/5513 PCI to ISA Bridge (LPC Bridge)
[00-01-1]
VEN_1039, DEV_0601, REV_01, SUBSYS_00000000
SiS 83C601 EIDE Controller
[00-15-0]
VEN_102C, DEV_00E0, REV_05, SUBSYS_00000000
Chips & Technologies F65550 HiQV32 GUI Accelerator (2MB VRAM)

Super Scape 3D Bench 2 : 68.5 FPS
The board accepts both FPM and EDO RAM. I believe it would accept up to 64MB of memory but the slots are obscured by design so only half length memory modules can fit.

I have took the time to make an image of the DC connectors pinout as well:

pwrcnn.jpg

Pins 1 and 2 on the image (first row on the left when looking at it from the front of the connector) are DC power + polarity, and they are connected to two separate coils, one for each pin, pin 3 is connected directly to ground and pin 4 is from all I could find only connected to an single SMD capacitor and that's it (Maybe its going somewhere else as well since its a multi layer board, but I didn't bother much as it works any way with only pins 1, 2 and 3 in the game).
I have made my home made power connector by using an 24V 3.6A adapter from some medical equipment (I think) and two cables from classic PC front panel connectors, since pins in this power connector are the same girth as jumper pins.

And last but not least, the BIOS ROM dump:

M28F101-150K1 128KByte MCD-4000.zip

Its an American Megatrends Inc. BIOS version 7.2.3 from 02/04/1997.
BIOS imposes an Hard Disk size limit of 8GB (8455MB?) so larger disks are not fully usable. Still haven't obtained an smaller disk and tested Windows on it, gonna happen soon I believe.

AMI's BIOS was Y2K compliant, unlike the Award BIOS, which was later on, a lawsuit against Award, and everyone was purchasing a Y2K compliance card for their systems that have the bug. I had a 486 that had that buggy BIOS chip, and the other 486 board I had from mid to late 2012 had the famous AMI WinBIOS, Y2K compliant. Even my 486 Packard Bell has the Phoenix BIOS from 1993, and it's Y2K compliant.

Discord: https://discord.gg/U5dJw7x
Systems from the Compaq Portable 1 to Ryzen 9 5950X
Twitch: https://twitch.tv/retropcuser