I thought I'd take some time today and "assemble" the new additions to my Compaq LTE 5000 series fleet! Each machine got a battery, hard drive, and either a floppy or CD-ROM drive. Let's talk about it briefly in a 🧵 here!
First, I started with the batteries. The cells have been removed, so we just have plastic shells. They all needed a cleaning, but this one was THE WORST. Some Goo Gone took care of it, and some elbow grease. Also, I was one battery short, so I pulled one from my spares!
One of the laptops had a screw that wasn't tight and blocked the battery, so I had to take it apart and tighten it. I also replaced the CPU cover on this laptop since it was in bad shape.. this is the laptop where we discovered previously that Goof Off is bad for plastics.
Sometimes curiosity gets the best of us, and that happened when I saw this Xircom Parallel Port Multiplexor III for sale. What does it do? It lets you use a printer and Xircom parallel port Ethernet adapter at the same time. Does it do it "well"? Let's find out! 🧵 time!
As you might have seen from the intro pic, I'm going to use my AST Premium Exec 386SX/25 to test this out. This machine doesn't have any PCMCIA slots, so I do use a Xircom Pocket Ethernet III to get it online!
I've got these two cute little Compaq LTE Elite 4/75 systems. I'm just about done setting up one of them.. how about we set up the other one here, in real time! Time for a 🧵
So, first off, we are going to have a minor complication. These laptops have a near 100% failure of their floppy drives, the dreaded Citizen W1D drive. Fortunately, I've installed an OpenFlops W1D to replace it.. basically a Gotek replacement for the Citizen W1D!
The very first thing we need install is the diagnostics partition. We will also need other software for Windows for Workgroups 3.11. So I went online and grabbed the needed Compaq SoftPaqs for diagnostic setup, as well as video, PCMCIA drivers, and a few other odds and ends!
It's been a little while since we have had the Dell Precision 220 Workstation on the desk. I've had several requests to install Haiku on this Dual Pentium III beast. Let's get it done! Time for a 🧵
So, first, this PC already has a lot of OSes! We'll create a 4GB BeOS partition to install Haiku, and add it to the list of OSes to boot!
I downloaded the latest stable version, which appears to be R1/beta5, and burned it to a DVD!
Let's test this Microchannel 3Com network card that I picked up for my IBM PS/2 Model 70 386 (with a 486 upgrade). Time for a quick 🧵
So, this card is a 3Com EtherLink/MC TP. As per usual, the Ardent Tool of Capitalism has a nice writeup on the card, as well as drivers! Looking at the drivers disk, it appears we have LAN Manager, NDIS, and Netware drivers. Pretty limited, but this is an older card.
Time to get this installed. And of course, this is Microchannel, so, on powerup, the PS/2 is immediately angry. I did copy the "adapter configuration file" to my PS/2 Reference disk. Running auto configure, the card gets detected, and we can see the settings. Nice!