RetroTech Chris Profile picture
Aug 19 12 tweets 5 min read Read on X
My latest acquisition is here! It's a Compaq LTE 5000... with the coveted 640x480 display! It's a little wonky on boot, and had a bad DC to DC inverter, broken battery clip, and a dead HDD, but the most important part is the GOOD SCREEN! I'm excited!


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It's booting now. I think the mobo is stuck in dock mode. But I swapped out for a good board. This system had a 64MB upgrade in it too! Image
Woohoo! I sprayed the other board with a half gallon of contact cleaner and now it is booting!! 🎉🎉 Image
Since MemTest made it "far enough," going to flash the BIOS
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Ok, not really a half gallon, but enough to make a difference 😁
Haha, here we go 😅 Image
Oh yeah, good old version 7.20. It's the best version! Image
All back together now! Doesn't take me long these days! Let's pull the leaking cells out of the battery and tackle the dead HDD Image
Yummy
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I put the battery shell back together, and used it to fill the battery void in the laptop. Laptop is also much lighter now.
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Haha! I gave the hard drive some hits with the end of a screwdriver, and look at that! Image
Simply fantastic!! I'm happy!! Anyway, thanks for following along.

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More from @RetroTechChris

Aug 21
The hard drive in my "new" LTE 5000 has been a little flaky and has needed some percussive maintenance a couple of times thus far. Let's swap it out for another "drive" and set this machine up in a 🧵 here!
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First, removing the hard drives from these machines is a snap! The drives do live in these proprietary caddies (this is Compaq, after all!). This one happens to be an aftermarket "Atom drive"
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Here's the caddy opened up. And now we see the real source of failure: the drive is a Toshiba, and these often tend to fail in these retro times. I am sure they were fine back in the day.

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Read 15 tweets
Aug 21
Let's test some more opticals, shall we? Here we go, time for a 🧵 Image
First up, we have this Sony CDU55E, which is a 2X. It kindof works, well about as well as any Sony 2X optical I have ever used 😂. I did clean the laser, no improvement. If you press "enter" to continue, the drive does continue to copy.


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Next we have this Toshiba XM-5702B. Oh, I already know how this is going to go. About a 99.5% chance of a broken eject mechanism... Image
Read 10 tweets
Aug 18
I'm going to test some more opticals... but going to do it live on a livestream with @dave_vintage for the next 20 mins or so! Come stop by if you are around and would like to see it!
First up, going to test this 8X Samsung!
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Oh dear!
Read 8 tweets
Aug 17
Hey hey! How about we test some opticals out today? I don't think we will be able to make it through all of them, but let's see what we can do! Realtime testing here, so I'll be building the 🧵 as we go. Let's do this!
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Let's start out with this Sony CDU-76E. This is a 4X drive. It seems to be working just fine (an 18 minute copy session just finished). We can find details about it here: stason.org/TULARC/pc/opti…



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Next up, let's get a little Creative. Sadly, this one doesn't want to pop open. Let's tear it apart!
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Read 21 tweets
Aug 15
So, recently I received a bunch of VESA Local Bus controller cards! One SCSI, three EIDE, and one caching EIDE. I spent some time looking at the caching EIDE controller tonight, and, well, I did pretty much everything the wrong way 😂. Let's talk about it in a 🧵 here.
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(sidenote: it took me 3 posts to get this initial top tweet out, I am REALLY doing everything wrong, hah... okay, back to the story)
So, the controller that we are looking at tonight is a Tekram DC-680C. It's a caching controller! Check out the CPU it has on it: an 80C286. And naturally we're testing this out in a 486, how about that 😂.
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Read 20 tweets
Aug 11
Okay, so if you have been following my VESA Local Bus testing fun, it's time to make a decision on which card will live on in the 486DX2/66 PC! Let's talk about the merits of the various cards, it's come down to these four. Maybe you can help me decide? Time for a 🧵
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So, just to get an idea, I decided to run SuperScape Benchmark in DOS. Order below is Cirrus Logic, S3, Trident, and finally Western Digital. Looks like the S3 and Trident scored best (47.6 FPS), and the Western Digital scored worst (40 FPS).


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As far as modes, all cards support 1024x768x256 (except the Trident in Win3.11), but only the Western Digital and Cirrus Logic cards gave us a usable 800x600x64K mode. And the Western Digital had the CLEAREST display!

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Read 8 tweets

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