Retro laptop

  • Thread starter Grayfox
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Grayfox

Grayfox

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Australia
Australia
I_Grayson_Fox_I
I was getting my tax done by my aunt today and she gave me her old laptop which no longer works cause she knows i may fix it and get it to work.


The laptop seems to be circa 1995 or so.
Think it is a Veridata Optilite 486S/33(never heard of it, can't even find it on google)
It has 4MB of memory(think it is SRAM but i am not sure)
It sports a 120MB Quantum IDE drive.
It has a mono screen(takes me back when i used to play on these old macs at school).
It has a 4 button mouse with trackball
It has a standard 3.5" floppy drive, RS232 Port, LPT1, what looks like a 9 pin din(holes are square rather the circle).
Clock speed of the CPU is 33Mhz(don't know what kind of CPU but it is some kind of 486).

Faults:
Hard drive or hard drive controller
Possible memory(1long 3short post code)
CGA adapter fault(1long 3short post code)
Mouse not being detected

If i can get these faults fixed in some way, this thing could be worth something.


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Looks good!

This is probably a really tough task, but it would be really cool if you could replace all the internals with a modern laptop.
 
Ooh I love retro laptops, I have two which are from the monochrome screen era. The reason why you can't get much info about it is because in those days there were many more manufacturers particularly with laptops that have disappeared years ago and seeing as the internet was in its infancy back then many where not documented and as such don't seem to exist.

The hard drive provided its not the controller should be easy to fix because it should be a 2.5" HDD but you need one from the same era. If you go to old computer hardware junk shops you can often find generic parts like that. Same with the memory. Is it running Windows 3.1?
 

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