The 386 model can not power up if the RTC battery is dead. To change that you'll need to take it apart and pull out the systemboard which is in a big aluminium shell.

The top case comes off and upwards by prying some plastic clips around the sides and maybe some screws in back? Not sure, mines in storage right now. It's not easy to do but if you use a plastic pry tool / guitar pick around the seam from the side and pushing upwards the clips should release.
i80386sx is the expert on these - check out his channel: https://www.youtube.com/@i80386sx/videos
And specifically this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hL2myu5qjXQ

Once you've got the top case off then make sure to gently remove the flex cables as they are basically irreplaceable.
Once the keyboard and hard drive and screen are out / off then you can pull the motherboard's aluminium shell out of the lower plastic case.

Since it's the 386 model and not the 486, it's more likely that just the RTC battery being dead is stopping the computer from working. Replacing that should allow the laptop to work again.
Personally I ran wires for the RTC battery with a CR2032 cell holder into the expansion bay so I can replace it / take it out for storage without having to disassemble the machine anymore.

Check whether there's a NIMH cell inside the motherboard shell since that destroyed my 486 'LTE Lite 4/25E' motherboard. I'm not sure the 386 models are so at risk from that, you might be lucky.

Thanks a lot, I'll try to change the RTC battery and see if this helps.

Ok so thanks to this excellent video from i80386sx I was able to bring that little machine back to life !!

The design of the machine is actually quite clever, it's just a pity that to access the coin cell battery man needs to disassemble the whole thing!

It's a slightly beefed up configuration with 6 MB RAM and a Conner 80 MB hard drive.

It even has a licensed copy of McAfee 😀 although the virus definition files are slightly outdated (1997)...

I am amazed to see that Windows 3.1 is able to guess that "24" means 2024...

Nothing really interesting on the disk. Most of the files are dated of 1993/94, and surprisingly a few newer documents dated of 98/99... I am surprised to see that out of the 80 MB there's only 12 MB free, with only Windows 3.1, MS-DOs 6.2, Excel and Word installed and only a bunch of Word and Excel documents.

Anyway I am super happy to have revived that little Compaq, it'd been a while I hadn't played with Windows 3.1 ! A big thank you to Thermalwrong for pointing me in the right direction. All it took was to change the RTC battery.

Btw does someone know where to find the y2k patch for Windows 3.1 in french?

EDIT: Wow it is almost impossible to find. I believe I manage to locate here: http://lavenu.x.free.fr/cours/downloads.htm but I need to test to confirm.

Wow the screen on that one looks great!
I'm glad it was just the RTC battery that was stopping yours from working the same as it now does mine - I got a 4/25E which was a 486 with the active matrix monochrome display, but the only replacement board I could get was the 3/25 so now it's a 386 😀 The active matrix monochrome screens seem to often be suffering from 'tunnel vision' where the corners black out like vignette on a photograph, it doesn't seem like the passive mono/colour LCDs have that problem.
My solution instead of using the original battery was to bodge a CR2032 onto there but I found it ran down pretty quick so now it's got a battery tray in the side and I just install the battery when I want to use the laptop.

One thing I've read as well is that replacing the hard drive with something like a CF card can be hazardous so keep using the original drive.

Interesting, I did not know you could swap the mobo between the two models, the case of the 4/25E looks a bit different from the Lite 25. Does the color screen works with the 386?

I am indeed happy with the screen on mine, it's pretty good and there's no tunnel effect at all. It reminded me of some old Apple Powerbook on which I had to work when I was student, and in fact it's probably the same screen as the Wikipedia page for the LTE Lite indicates.

Honestly the only regret are the cracks on the hinges and case, which are quite bad. A piece at the lower back corner came out during the disassembly.

So 1 year later my power brick unfortunately died. I believe it's due to bad capacitor because before diying I noticed the power brick needed to "warm up" before I could use it.

Is there any tutorial on how to break these power brick open? There are two srews in the back but I believe it is mostly glued?

Thanks for your help.

Neverming I've found exactly what I was looking for. Once again thanks to i80386sx.

mtest001 wrote on 2025-08-24, 14:44:

Neverming I've found exactly what I was looking for. Once again thanks to i80386sx.

Thank you for the update pointing to the fix 😀 I'll have to do that eventually as well I think, it seems like most electrolytic capacitors from the early 90s are failure prone. Thankfully the Compaq LTE Lite doesn't use electrolytics for the mainboard, instead using orange tantalum caps on the ceramic DC-DC board.
It does use electrolytics in the screens though, I've had to recap and thoroughly clean the TFT panel's PCB to get it working, only to find there's a line through the screen 😒
See here: Re: What retro activity did you get up to today?

Hopefully the hinges on your one hold up too, those seem to be the weak point on the ones I get hold of.

edit: oh yeah I also just remembered the other thing I really meant to post - I just found that on my one the serial and parallel ports weren't working, a bit of a problem on a laptop with no PCMCIA slots! It turned out to be because I had taken the motherboard stack out of the aluminium shell without removing the screws for the serial/parallel port board. Because of the stress I put on the board-to-board connector that connects the serial/parallel port to the mainboard, taking it out at an angle, it had caused dry joints on the board-to-board connector and broken serial/parallel functionality.
Once that was resoldered both the ports are working again and in future I'll be removing the serial/parallel board along with the mainboard when taking it out of the aluminium shell.

Thanks for the message I still haven't started fixing my power brick, probably a project for this coming winter. I also need to service the floppy drive that is currently non fonctioning. I presume the belt is gone. I read that these belts are not easy to find so idk what I'm going to to. There are not many options to get files in and out of my LTE since I do not have a network adaper for it I'm kind of stuck.

mtest001 wrote on 2025-08-31, 21:49:

Thanks for the message I still haven't started fixing my power brick, probably a project for this coming winter. I also need to service the floppy drive that is currently non fonctioning. I presume the belt is gone. I read that these belts are not easy to find so idk what I'm going to to. There are not many options to get files in and out of my LTE since I do not have a network adaper for it I'm kind of stuck.

About the floppy drive... I've put considerable time into making an adapter PCB to install a regular laptop floppy drive into the Compaq LTE Lite - since the Citizen VIDA-15B drive is not a standard pinout at all. The adapter board works quite well on the two LTE Lites I've installed it in.
The adapter PCB was made because my original LTE Lite didn't work at all, so I tested it with a regular floppy cable and blew up the original VIDA-15B drive, so when I got a working mainboard I had no floppy drive to hook up to it until I hand-wired an adapter - Re: What retro activity did you get up to today?

Additionally, I've got 3d printed belts to work well in the VIDA-15B so I can service the drives too

I saw your mod and it's truely impressive.

I never thought about 3D printing belt... Does it work well? Do you have the plan?