Acer Anyware 1100LX Notebook

specs
80386sx processor
5MB ram (1mb onboard + 4 simms)
40 MB IDE hard drive
(Connor peripherals – type 17 in bios = 40 mb)
https://www.computerhope.com/hdd/hdd0048.htm; now that I’m looking this up. I wonder if this was a 120mb hard drive that was formatted/gimped from the factory at 40mb or whether the previous owner did an upgrade as it’s rated at 120 mb capacity.

Floppy drive
8 connectors - serial x2, parallel, floppy, ps2 x2, dedicated modem slot
Keyboard is PS2 and can dock

April 2017

I just picked up one of these machines used. The hard drive is a standard early era IDE drive. Although originally, it came with a 40 mb hard drive. The problem with these machines is that they used a Dallas 1287 Real-time clock with built in battery. The CMOS will report errors and not keep the hard drive information so that when the battery dies, you can only boot from the floppy disk. Even worse, the dallas 1287 chip is soldered onto the motherboard. The fix is to do some dremel grinding and sanding/soldering to get a new battery connected (there are lots of write ups on the internet). This machine is a tank though. Heavy, solidly built with good features for the time period. Unfortunately, there is no real expandability to the modern age. Max ram is 5mb. Screen is ok, but LCD tech. One nice thing is that it will support a modern vga monitor as an output choice

June 2019
So, it's me again in 2019 and I wanted to give an update. The machine is still running well. The floppy drive that came with it started failing... It required a long power up to read (bad caps) and since it's a thinner model than the other internal 3.5" drives I had for desktops, I couldn't just swap in a new drive.

It's a hassle to service as it needs to be completely taken apart.
*Warning* During disassembly, be very careful of the display cable as it is tethered with screws and you can stretch/break it easily by accident.

I ended up getting a Gotek Floppy emulator. It fits but required some dremelling of the ABS plastic/casing of the Floppy emulator.

This was an ideal solution as it provided a way to get data/programs on / off this laptop.

I had tried laplink (parallel cable - but modern pcs don't have parallel ports) and a parallel port Shark Avatar external drive (didn't work as the Avatar requires a 486 and 8mb ram).

The gotek floppy emulator drive cost around $30 off amazon and although you have to dig around online for the software, works quite well.

Next project is to swap out the LOUD and old IDE drive for a modern drive or a compactflash solution.

Also, I wanted to comment on the power brick.... It's an 18v unit; but modern universal chargers that are 19v can power up this computer without problems. I did not test out the voltage of the old adapter; but after 30 years, it may be the next part to go.

Finally, just discovered on Vogons that there is a windows for workgroups bug 3.11 where it hangs due to a keyboard driver error. There was a patch posted in the forums wg0974.exe. I ended up downgrading to win 3.1 non workgroups which seems to work fine and was the OS that came with the system.

Looks like my previous update was deleted

Dec 2020

In December 2020, I took the laptop back out of storage. I’ve tried using it over the years but the old connor hard drive was crazy loud either from bad bears or that they were just THAT loud at the time.
What held me back from a simple swap over the years was that there was a non-standard 3 pin power cable to the hard drive and bios limitations that I wasn’t sure how to overcome. My understanding is that if the hard drive geometry wasn’t recognized, it won’t boot. Finally, the requirement of complete disassembly to change out the hard drive kept me from it.
I tried to use 2 different IDE Compactflash card adapter on the system but they wouldn’t work. I thought it might be my CF card or that I had plugged it in wrong/fried the CF card. In fact, with the CF-IDE adapter inserted, the screen wouldn’t even show up and I would get a 1 long – 3 short bios beep error.

March 2021

FINALLY, got out the voltmeter and checked the 3 lead power cable for the old connor hard drive. Rewired a molex connector and tried a 44 pin cf-ide adapter from syba. STILL won’t work.
In the end, I gave up with the CF-IDE adapters. Instead, I got a 3.5” => 2.5” connector and I’m using a “modern” 20gb IDE hard drive. Ironically, this was the configuration I thought wouldn’t allow boot up. Went into the bios, configured the system to use the 540 mb max size (1024 cyl, 16 head, 63 sectors) and did a fdisk from dos.

Worked perfect. Now with the gotek floppy emulator, I was able to reinstall DOS 6.2… WFW 3.11 crashed( bug described above) but windos 3.11 works.

I still have the Conor peripherals 40 mb drive but I can’t extract the data using a usb-ide adapter as it doesn’t seem to recognize the drive geometry. (Does anyone have suggestions/experience with this).

My understanding is that I’ll have to throw it into my legacy IDE system/desktop to be able to specify the CHS geometry and pull the data off eventually.

This project took far longer than I hoped but I’m proud of the results.

Finally, since the system was stripped down, I replaced the CR2032 battery (measured now at 2.99 v after 4 years) with a bigger CR2450 since I had it around. Should last a good number of years in storage now.

There are still some minor things that bug me about the system (I wanted to put a battery holder for easy replacment of the cmos battery and perhaps reroute it into the old battery bay.

But for now. After 4 years in stasis/rebuild mode. I’m happy to just play around with it for now.