First post, by gladders
Hi everyone,
A few years ago I grabbed the above vintage laptop and after some trial and error got it working. The clock battery and the sleep battery I removed without replacing and haven't missed them. I put in a 2GB compact flash. The only thing I couldn't get working was the trackpoint, which has never worked. Nor has a PS/2 mouse, for that matter, although PS/2 keyboards were fine. I got by with a serial mouse. I was very happy with this excellent laptop.
Then about 6 months ago some weird behaviour started happening. First, one time I booted, the screen was showing weird colours and intense flickering, and the keyboard would not respond. After about 10-15 minutes though, it booted fine, and the weird flickering and colour stuff hasn't happened again.
However the keyboard hasn't been the same since. You press a button and absolutely random garbage appears at the DOS prompt. Like pressing 'w' produces '^~v' or somesuch.
The few occasions I got Windows 3.11 loaded, I discovered that sound was also no longer working, and that the mouse is completely unresponsive. It's like systems are gradually breaking.
So what could this be? I'm wondering if I need to do a clean install of DOS and Windows although I doubt it's the issue, and I can't because of my other issue. The external floppy drive that came with it has broken. I put an old floppy disk in there which let out a piercing SCREECH and since then it doesn't read any disks. Should I get a drive cleaner for that?
TLDR: keyboard not working right, sound gone, mouse gone, floppy drive busted. Help?