First post, by rodrigons
Hello everyone.
I recently acquired a laptop from the late 80's early 90's, the NEC Ultralite 286F. Since it came without a power supply, I have found one in ebay and have ordered it. Since I live in Brazil, it will took some 20 to 30 days to arrive. But I will look for an alternative power supply too. From the back of the laptop it looks like it uses a mini DIN 4 pin (slim) connector.
Since I don't have a power supply yet, and the previous owner couldn't (or wouldn't) tell me if the machine was working, I don't know anything about it yet. I don't know if the screen is working, if the hard drive is working (doubt it) or if it even has a hard drive (I didn't opened the machine yet), if the floppy drive is working etc.
The reason I'm writing is for to try to gather previous information before I start to look inside the machine, since I couldn't find much information online about this specific model. I found a piece of article from Info World in googlebooks comparing this machine with other 286 machines. Aparently it has a 286 clocked at 12MHz and 1MB of RAM, a 9 inch, CGA, 640x400, 16 grayscales graphics and a couple of youtube videos demonstrating the machine, but that don't enter in technical detais.
I've download the mirror from ftp.necam that someone posted here but there was nothing for this machine there. And since I heard that this machine requires a setup file in floppy to enter bios, I chasing if I find this online.
That's it. Has someone ever heard of this machine or has some advice before I started to mess around?
In general, it's a good practice to open it, clean everything, look for bad caps, lubricate the floppy etc all that before trying to turn it on?
This machine cost me about 40 dollars, that's why I took the chances. If I can't manage to get it to working it's a not so expensive paperweight 🤣
Later I can post some pictures.