Welcoem to posts!!
in the future - u will be able to do some more stuff here,,,!! like pat catgirl- i mean um yeah... for now u can only see others's posts :c
Havenāt posted anything in quite awhile! Iāve been messing around with some classic Macs over the past few months.
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Compaqās first color notebook, the 386SL based Compaq LTE Lite/25C, was released on June 15, 1992, exactly 32 years ago today! Happy birthday! šš
I really should do a video on this one sometime!
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This is the newest addition to my Compaq SLT collection. Itās an SLT/286 made in the 43rd week of 1989.
I recently bought 4 āparts or repairā SLT/286s from eBay and this was one of them. Didnāt need anything major, just the usual Dallas chip mod and the Conner 40MB hard drive needed to be rebuilt. The most major thing wrong with it was some broken plastic on the right side of the lower case, but I was able to melt it back together and that worked out great.
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Upgraded my trusty Toshiba T3200SX to "T3200SX/120" spec yesterday by swapping in the BIOS chip and Conner 120MB drive from a parts machine. The 40MB Conner drive still works great, but it filled up very fast with Windows 3.1 and all of the other stuff I want to have on here.
Now that I have some extra space I will probably upgrade to Windows for Workgroups and install a network card! I really like this machine a lot, I should do a video on it soon. I got it around mid 2022 so it's long overdue!
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The floppy drive completely failed in the Portable II a couple weeks ago! Couldn't for the life of me figure out what was wrong with it either. I was pretty upset about this, as the Portable II uses a 1/3 height floppy drive that isn't exactly easy to find replacements for. I'm happy to say I did find this replacement drive though, and while it is a slightly later version with a different styled faceplate, it fits and works great! The color of it also isn't exactly the same, but I actually don't hate it at all! I thinks it look quite good actually. This is also a high-density 1.2MB drive, so that's an upgrade from the 360KB-only drive it originally had.
And for anyone wondering, the drive is a Canon MD 5501. The original drive in this Portable II was a Canon MD 5201, which is the 360KB version of the same drive.
Very happy to have the Portable II back in one piece and working again! And yes, the rebuilt Miniscribe 3425 hard drive is still going strong!
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Hereās an oldie! This is a pic of my Compaq SLT 386s/20 I on took on my Sony Cybershot DSC-W80 back in April of 2011! This pic is almost 13 years old!
I got this SLT for around $30 off of eBay at the time (the prices sure have changed since then!).
Iām pleased to say I still have this SLT and it is still in good working condition to this very day! The Compaq SLT was and still is one of my absolute favorite vintage laptops. Extremely well designed and reliable machines.
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Hereās something really awesome I found at Goodwill a while back (tap the pictures to see the whole thing). Itās a JCPenney VHS Movie 5335 VHS camcorder from 1986! It caught my eye because I immediately recognized it as a rebadged Panasonic OmniMovie, which is exactly what it is! It seems to be equivalent to the Panasonic PV-210 (which I also have).
What makes it so unique are the metallic brown colored sides! On the Panasonic PV-210 they are silver. Really like the looks of it.
And being a clone of the PV-210, it also uses a Newvicon tube! So it has that classic trailing effect on motion.
I got all of the cables and the manual with it. It works absolutely fine. The VCR mechanism was a little āsqueakyā at first, but letting it play for awhile seems to have cleared that up. My PV-210 did the exact same thing when I first got it.
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The platter-swapped Miniscribe 8425 in the Portable II is holding up perfectly so far! No more stiction issues!
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*This is a long read!*
Spent all day yesterday getting a Miniscribe 8425 hard drive to a functional and reliable state for my Compaq Portable II I just got. Iām extremely pleased to say not only did I get one working, but I got TWO working! They both are fully functional and spin-up reliably every time now.
The drive on the left had severe stiction and had to be manually turned by hand every time to get it to start. It also would not format no matter what I tried. Turns out the heads were faulty, so I swapped in another set from a different drive.
That worked out fine, but how did I cure the stiction? I took an electrically-broken Maxtor 7120AT drive I had, extracted the platters from it and transplanted them into the 8425! Now the heads no longer stick to the platter and the stiction is no longer an issue! And the drive formatted absolutely fine in the end.
It seems that the platters from most 90s IDE drives will probably work fine in these Miniscribes, which is really good to know.
The second drive (on the right) is the original one to this Compaq Portable II. It had mild stiction but otherwise worked fine. It was still bad enough that the drive would stick if it sat for more than a day or so, so once again, I swapped the platters! This time the platters came from another 8425 (SCSI version) that did not have stiction. So that drive is also now working great with absolutely zero stiction issues whatsoever! Since itās original, itās the one I ended putting back the Portable, and the other will be a spare.
This was SO MUCH work and was extremely tedious and frustrating at times, but Iām so glad I didnāt give up. This gives me confidence to repair more of these drives in the future!
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Hereās a machine I got recently that needed a LOT of work to get it back up and running. Itās another early Rev. A IBM 5150! This one is even older than the one I got back in late 2022 (which is still running great by the way). Looks to have been built around January of 1982 as far as I can tell.
This one has the early ābronzeā colored power supply, which I actually had to completely rebuild with new insides. The A: floppy drive is the original single-sided unit! This drive had to be completely torn apart, re-lubricated and realigned. It took hours of tedious work to get that done, but itās 100% now! So Iāll have to keep a 180k DOS 2.1 disk handy for booting this machine!
And for anyone wondering, yes, I do have the top cover! It has quite a bit of rust and peeling paint though (you can actually see it sitting mostly out of frame to the very left). I found a Rustoleum spray paint thatās really close and I will be repainting it eventually.
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