Re: Compaq Portable Plus

Posted on 2018-04-13, 12:30

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by eisapc

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

According to the manual the motherboard RAM can be upgraded to 640 Kb. Even by adding DIL chips or by replacing them with higher capacity. There are of course memory expansion boards around, you could use as well. While 1.2 MB drives can read the 360 KB disks just fine, the tracks they write are too …

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Re: Calling any Compaq Armada experts ? (1592DT)

Posted on 2018-04-13, 07:08

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by eisapc

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

So ..what would I need to start over with a larger blank Hard Drive ? ie ...how do I create this utility hidden partition ? The Diagnostics Disk usually contains a utility to create the service partition on the blank HDD. It will ask for the Setup disk(s) to copy their content to the HDD during the …

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Re: What caps are these and where can I get replacements?

Posted on 2018-04-13, 06:44

by

by eisapc

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Considering the time you spend in recapping I allways go for low ESR 105°C caps, usually ones from Panasonic. The difference in price is not worth the risk having to recap a second time. 80W is a good recommendation for solderworks on multi layer PCBs, but a temperature controlled soldering station …

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Re: Compaq Deskpro!

Posted on 2018-04-12, 09:04

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by eisapc

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I got this Deskpro XL 575 today and it seems to have survived a trip over Atlantic by ship. I have been looking for a XL like this for a long time and its a substitute for i didnt save one of two XL 6200 and five XL 5100 years back. The XL 6200 was my first pc at my current work then i started …

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Re: Re: Compaq Deskpro!

Posted on 2018-04-12, 08:46

by

by eisapc

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

The odd AGP form factor were annoying and beside the ATI cards i never saw other that used that except a Matrox card. Beside the ATI shown above and the Matrox mentioned there was the ELSA Synergy II and the Storm pro availiable with this weird bracket. Compaq used it on different machines, like …

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Re: Do all old computers go to Africa ?

Posted on 2018-04-12, 08:19

by

by eisapc

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Some of it end up at resellers, e.g. company laptops and business computers are frequently found on ebay or directly at the resellers. Got all my Thinkpads and some nice graphics workstations from there. If it cant be sold it usually goes to recycling. Due to the costs here in Germany recycling is …

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Re: Anybody ever thought of doing his own SIMMs?

Posted on 2018-04-06, 15:22

by

by eisapc

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

486 boards with 30 pin memory are not optimal anyway. Will be O.K. for me as there are only few EISA boards around with PS/2 slots, most come with 30 pin, probably the same for VL bus boards. You are right if talking about PCI based 486er. 60ns 30 pin SIMM's are more optimal than 70ns 72 pin SIMM's …

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Re: Anybody ever thought of doing his own SIMMs?

Posted on 2018-04-05, 15:58

by

by eisapc

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

4MB 30-pin Simms are readily available for fairly cheap on eBay. Just found only two offers below 10 €/ a piece on ebay.de, thats not cheap in my opinion. Needing 8 of these for a usual 486er makes the situation even worse. Most offers are 4 MB/set. finding suitable DRAMs has turned out to be …

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Anybody ever thought of doing his own SIMMs?

Posted on 2018-04-05, 11:46

by

by eisapc

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I have tons of discarded PS/2 SIMMs of low capacity from 4-8 MB, but only very few 4 MB 30 pin SIMMs. Idea is to order the PCBs from a chinese manufacturer and do the solderwork myself using the chips of the PS/2 SIMMs. Question is if anybody here at vogons tried this before and what are the …

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Re: What Stupid Thing Have You Done Recently with Your Retro Gaming Machine?

Posted on 2018-04-03, 07:01

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by eisapc

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Not recently but allready a while ago I did the following stupid things: First fried a Compaq SMART 2E Raid controller by not fully inserting it to the EISA slot of my testbench. Just after the first one did not work I did the same with a second one. Both show some weird error messages now. Second …

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Re: SD vs Compact (converted from IDE)

Posted on 2018-03-29, 07:30

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by eisapc

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

There's really not a single advantage that SD cards have over CF cards. The only advantage of the SD-cards is they sell much cheaper, as they are used in every smartphone or portable music player nowadays. Even considering the price for the second adapter this might be the only reason to use SD …

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Re: Which Dual S370 Compaq m/b is this?

Posted on 2018-03-29, 07:06

by

by eisapc

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Right, should have known that. These Compaq servers have the basic features integrated on a single card. These usually include VGA, ethernet and SCSI or IDE. This keeps the PCI slots free for other add on cards. Interesting fact is the battery on the add on card, so the add on boards seems to …

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Re: Do you prefer to use the same OS on multiple rigs or a different OS for each rig?

Posted on 2018-03-28, 10:19

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by eisapc

in Milliways

in Milliways

I use quite a number of different OSs, depending on the purpose, CPU and age of the system, or just to check it out. List of OSes currently installed on different machines: x86 OSs MS DOS 3.3 MS Dos 6.22 DR Dos 3.41 PC DOS (dont know the exact version number) Novell DOS Win 3.1 Wfw 3.11 Win 95 OSR2 …

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Re: Which Dual S370 Compaq m/b is this?

Posted on 2018-03-28, 07:11

by

by eisapc

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Search the board for a Compaq partnumber like 123456-001 and feed this number to the hp partsurfer tool at www.partsurfer.hp.com would be the easiest way. I don´t recognize the board myself, but it may be something from the low end Proliant ML line, like the ML350 G2. From what I found on the web …

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Re: Compaq Deskpro 386/20e

Posted on 2018-03-27, 14:46

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by eisapc

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

The Compaq card is indeed a RS232/LPT combo card as you can easily recognise by the silkscreened DIP-settings for LPT and Com ports. Not sure on the other board, the fuses seem to be unusual for an IDE board, so it ist probably something completely different like some data acquisition card. LPT …

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Re: Possible Vintage Graphics Card Repair ?

Posted on 2018-03-27, 12:26

by

by eisapc

in Marvin \ Video

in Marvin \ Video

>>But how do i know which brand of memory has to be replaced? ISSI or Alliance? If you have the scrambled screen under pure dos or just Windows it may be one of the ISSI chips connected to the Alliance GPU, if the scramble only occurs running 3DFX software it may be the alliance chips connected to …

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Re: Compaq Deskpro 386/20e

Posted on 2018-03-27, 11:50

by

by eisapc

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Nice box. These old Compaqs are quite restricted by the list of suitable (mostly Conner) IDE drives in their BIOS. I used a SCSI Controller and drive to overcome this handicap on mine. Drop me a PM if you need the memory upgrade board, I might have one spare. For the cards it would be easiest to …

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Re: SD vs Compact (converted from IDE)

Posted on 2018-03-27, 11:35

by

by eisapc

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I can confirm the Adapter in Adapter solution too. I remember CF-cards being more reliable than SD, due to different wear level management, not sure if there might be any performance issue as well. Some actual CF-cards on sale seem to have problems, if used as a boot device, while Kingston ones seem …

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Re: IBM PS/2? VGA? Missing Pin? What?

Posted on 2018-03-26, 12:37

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by eisapc

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Something else I just stumbled across might be helpful with the HDD: http://www.computercraft.com/docs/55noboot.html As for recapping the floppy drive: There is just a sheet metal cover on top and the circuit board just below. You can desolder the caps and replace them without even turning a single …

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Re: retension modules to install a slotket adapter

Posted on 2018-03-26, 06:22

by

by eisapc

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Seems my slotkets are cheaper than cheap, because they came from different car boot sales or online auctions and none has these plastics. Nevertheless I found pictures of these plastic parts and will start hunting, now after I know what I´m looking for.

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