Solid State Storage On An Early 90's 486 Laptop
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- čas přidán 17. 07. 2024
- Thanks to PCBWay for supporting this channel. www.pcbway.com. In this part of The Eric Experiment we will try to repair a late 80s/early 90s laptop I found on eBay for a very decent price. The laptop has a dead CMOS battery and it doesn't boot anymore.
0:00 - Intro
0:30 - Background
1:13 - Battery
1:33 - Disassembly
4:11 - Removing the CMOS battery
4:33 - What to do about the CMOS battery?
5:33 - Reassembly
6:31 - Modifying the hard drive power cable
7:10 - Testing the cable
8:16 - New plan for the power cable
8:43 - 3d printing a bracket
9:02 - Sponsor
9:44 - Finish reassembling laptop
11:01 - Dynamic Drive Overlay attempt
11:50 - Original Plan
12:09 - Install Windows 95
13:39 - Install DOS 6.22 instead
14:11 - Hardware info
14:38 - Windows 3.11 install
15:21 - Windows 3.11 demo
16:17 - Games
18:37 - Outro
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Wow, it's been over 2 months without any videos. I've been working on multiple projects and also been very sick in the last few weeks but now things seem to be settling so I can hopefully pick up the pace again.
I have this exact model, sitting behind me on a desk in fact.
It's the 486DX version like yours, and it came with a functional IDE HDD. I managed to save the drive contents, including a program called FMA3500.EXE which appears to be some fancy laptop power management software for DOS. I'll need to upload that somewhere...
Anyway, I also have part of the 386 version of this laptop. When I was a kid, a school friend gave me the 386 machine. I used it for a bit, but what I found really interesting was the fact the motherboard was basically a standard desktop PC, just rearranged. In fact, the graphics card on both the 386 and 486 models are exactly the same, and the IDC connector they connect to is essentially an 8 bit ISA slot.
Also, if you want video to be output from the VGA port all the time, just solder over the three small solder pads near the VGA port on the graphics card. Basically, the VGA port always outputs sync signals, but will only output colour signals if the appropriate keyboard shortcut is pressed. Alternatively, shorting these three (R, G, B) pads redirects these signals to the VGA port directly.
Heck, the 386 motherboard fits perfectly inside the 486 case, that is how generic these machines are.
Great little machine and excellent video demonstrating it!
P.S. Forgot to mention, the RAM sticks are SIPP memory sticks. They are SIMM sticks, but with fancy pins soldered to them. In fact, this was the original design of SIMM sticks as Wang designed it. Only later did they lose their pins and instead used the pads on the PCB itself...
That's great info about the ram, thanks!
Yeah, I feel like this laptop is the Framework laptop before the Framework laptop.
It's super modular and easy to disassemble, and the fact it uses standard pc parts makes it super easy to repair.
OMG You have not only a 3D Printer but a sponsor! You're Awesome man!
He is like: "I need something, let's find a model on internet and print it."
Me from 2005: WHAAAAT?????
Just happened upon your channel and it's a real gem! Can't wait for the next vids!
Thank you for the support, I'm working on the next one! =)
This is a kewl little bugger, a great find in my eyes! Love your vids!
Thank you!
They're really good videos on your channel Eric. Really interesting stuff. I've subscribed.
Thank you! I'm glad you enjoyed it!
Nice laptop, got me all inspired to fix my Toshiba 486 Laptop now! Great video
Do it, and make a video about it!
Best CZcams ad ever!
Wild seeing SIPP RAM again
Just 4k followers? No way, super underrated
Ah yes...the good ole NanTan Notebook FMA3500 486. I used to have one of those back in the 2000s. NanTan is pretty underrated.
Oh! That's great info. Next time this laptop is featured I'll mention that. Thank you!
I'm rather impressed by the fabricobbling that went into making this.
Yeeeyyyy, finally! Congrats on the sponsor!
2:11 wait? what? Full size HDD inside? That is wild!
Yeah! It's pretty crazy!
Crazy how much normal-size stuff they fit in a typical-size-of-the-time laptop case So Many SIPPs, 3.5in(?!) HD, and the power supply and graphics card ain't too tiny, either!
I kinda dig it, actually... so much easier to open/repair!
I saved an Asus L3800C 21-year laptop it got floppy and DVD-drive lol really surprised in good condition no scratches on the body
have the same laptop but with an isa addon. your able to install another video card. it will disable the built in card, forcing you to use an external display. it also uses 5v desktop cpu's got mine going with a dx2 and 16mb of ram.
68 views? Damn this is underrated. That’s sad. :(
edit: we are near 2k
Usually the BIOS post is a good guess about how old the computer is, as BIOS wasn't usually updated (the oldest one). 1991 seems reasonable considering the size of the hard drive.
And I always replace hard drives for SD when they die, and I know yours wasn't working or blanking, but shootout to not do this by default:
-SD cards doesn't give the soothing and cool sounds of hard drives
-A lot of times unique and unarchived software/documents/etc are lost when they format old drives. I think it is the responsable thing to at least go trough it and save all that is possible. Hard drives are also time capsules, giving really interesting insights about the past, so they should always be saved and imaged when possible!
Btw, there was this program called "hacha" to split zip files into equal sizes, with a convenient 1.44mb size option. Not sure there was a DOS/Win16 version, but you might want to try if looking to fit that 2mb ROM on it :D
I found a pentium II in the street once with a whole installation that belonged to the original owner.
The hard drive died when I went to create an image of it, it was so sad.
4:07 Literally the first time I’ve seen a precursor to SODIMM.
You will soon succeed with your channel 👍
Thank you!
12:10 - I bought new pack of diskettes few years ago together with USB floppy drive and I was surprised that it works and it's realiable, I was flashing motherboard bioses and GPU bioses with that on few old computers and it never failed. So maybe that "floppy is not realiable" thing is more about you are trying some 30 years old ones, but new ones work, but obviously, it's so slow that it's really annoying to install OS from that, even flash GPU bios takes many seconds from floppy while it's like 1 second from USB drive. Some motherboards could flash bios from CD drive when bios was corrupted, so I corrupted it on purpose, then just inserted CD with bios and motherboard did everything instead of me, but that was much later HW from like 2004.
Brand new floppies are fine, but I find that even brand new ones can go bad very easily.
@@TheEricExperiment Maybe, I used them only few times and it was really expensive compared to how much it cost like 15-20 years ago.
I just tried everything. Cant get CF card 2 IDE adapter to work in my laptop. BIOS doesn't see new hard drive. Tried few CF cards (256Mb - 4Gb), allways getting error "hard drive controller diagnostics error". Going back to buzzy IBM 3.5" hard drive 😔 Oh.. and my BIOS version have HDD DETECT FEATURE, but it doesn't help much....
My bios doesn't have auto detection. I have to select the closest setting and hope for the best.
Please, does this laptop has sound card installed? Mine in silent as graveyard
It doesn't, but apparently there is an attachment or something that you can use to connect pci cards.
im sure theres an emulator that would run faster and prob support opening zipped roms. may allow squeezing onto one floppy.
Hey i have an idea why don’t you get an old crt monitor or a very old macintosh then take everything out of the case and replace it with current pc specs so basically modernize an old piece of tech while making sure it is still all in one
That sounds like a cool idea, I'd just have to find a broken crt or imac to use as donors. I don't really want to do that to my working ones.
HI - Those things are expensive even if broken, best to get a replica macintosh modern case, then a new lcd screen and rapsbery pi or small form factor x64 machine, i bought a few of those 5 years old mini windows 10 pc's that is about the size of 2 mobile phones ( a bit smaller than a modern nuc but mass produced chinese unit that you connect to monitor or plug into a tv )
I am also in Australia and there is basically zero second hand / charity stores that sell tv or computers - anything with a power cord has to be certified by electrician and tagged
Sometimes i find similar machines for cheap at a local second hand market in my city
Lucky! where do you live? I wish I could find those like that.
@@TheEricExperiment I live in the campania region of italy, there are at least 3 used market i know sell this kind of stuff, 4 if you also count the trade and sell event hosted at my local conference center twice per year
the driver may provide windows acceleration. maybe worth a try.
Cool ad.
hey man will you remember me when you get lotsa subs some day (maybe a million)
i found this channel 5 months ago from 125 subs to 450 subs that doesn’t seem like much but for a small channel that is a lot
Yeah man! I will, keep commenting!
This beginning the growth is so slow, 125 subs feels like it was a looooong time ago. I'm glad you're sticking around!
It'd be great to have a million subs but don't really need to be that huge, I'd love to have a couple thousand subs like you, a strong core audience who likes following my stuff and I can chat with.
At that point I'd probably have a discord server or more preferably an IRC channel! haha
@@TheEricExperiment well why not make a discord server now?
@@PotatoBlaster64 I don't think there would be enough people there.
I bet the laptop is a lot lighter, without that HDD or battery.
I have exactly same laptop its a generic taiwanese FMA 3500 laptop.
damn yo......battle chess. 😮
But will it run Crysis?
hahahaha yeah definitely!
Have you watched my Voodoo 5 video?
I ve the same Laptop😀... and the same booting problems😶🌫️
=) it's a lovely machine.
🎊💪
You should do another episode for this machine and upgrade the LCD screen with a brand new color one
Sauntered over from the oh so bad but so good web site. (Oldnet ring) My first work laptop was 486x33 IBM eraser pointer hand me down from a marketeer. Mostly used for terminal stuff. It barely ran win95.
Those old Thinkpads were lovely.
You could use an old phone or Bluetooth speaker battery that has a built in protection circuit (so overcharging or over discharging the battery isn't an issue), the highest voltage it would see would be around 5V which should be within the limits of the protection circuit. I do this all the time and I've had no issues, and being a rechargeable battery, its charged when the system is on..
That's a great idea! I never thought of that!
@@TheEricExperiment just be sure the battery has a protection circuit built in, I'd look like a little circuit board. Otherwise you'd be sending around 5v into a battery that's 4.2V fully charged lol