The Toshiba T19xx series laptops, lovely 486 machines, but they all suffer from a problem, or will do, eventually!

💾 *-Belt Driven Floppy Drive of Doom-* 💾

Let's explore and see if I can sort this one out, maybe do some other bits as well! 🧵 Current state of play, the floppy belt has either stretched or snapped, meaning you're not going to have much fun, the HDD is not exactly easy to get to.

IBM OS/2 Warp 4 has a floppy install version, it has 40, yes 👉 F-O-R-T-Y Floppy disks 💾.
That's just the install, in total there's 101 floppy disks, including drivers and software.
So, as I'm a nutcase and enjoy doing pointless things, I'm going to install it on my 486 machine. ---Installing OS/2 Warp 4---
--OS/2 Warp is Inviting--
OS/2 Warp has been designed with a user interface that will appeal to you. The carefully designed icons, bitmaps, pointers, and cursors provide an intuitive way for you to interact with your system.

New Thread 🧵
Compaq Contura Aero 4/25 486 laptop (1994).
Cost me £12, it needs repairs to the screen bracket & a clean. Also I have no idea if it will work, additionally it has no PCMCIA floppy drive. BIOS info stored on a hidden partition on the HDD, no floppy = problems
I've used an 18v PSU, we seem to have some life 😁 dudes!

New thread:
Nintendo Gameboy DMG-01 Refurb(s).
GB No1 Left - Works sometimes, no buttons are working (apart from the power switch). Needs a clean and a new screen lens.
GB No2 Right - Screen issues. Needs a clean and a new screen lens. GB No1 - I've confirmed the issue with the buttons, also cleaned the cart slot, that seems to have fixed the inconsistent cart loading. I've opened it up and you can see exactly what's up with the buttons straight away, can you spot the problem?

Easy "anyone can do with minimal effort" Retro-brighting tutorial:
I have been asked many times how I retro-bright things, so I wanted to share the method I used, that's very simple, requires no special tech and gives fantastic results.
(Use relevant PPE, gloves etc.)
Thread: All you need to purchase is:
1️⃣ Cling Flim / Saran Wrap
2️⃣ 12% Hair Blonding Peroxide Cream, I use JEROME RUSSELL Bblonde (40 Vol)
I do this inside my house, so a window sill out of the way that you can leave something on for a while is recommended.

I decided to make my USB media transfer unit a permanent addition to my workshop PC, I've added the middle drive, that has card readers. The floppy drive is a Greaseweazle, 1600k (Acorn) compatible drive.
- DVD and CD-RW
- 3.5" Floppy
- CF/SD/SM/Duo Reader
- Ext 12v & 5v Molex



All working! 👍

I have a new retro computer to check out; I'm happy to report that the packaging was VERY good and has sustained no damage at all.
🍏 Apple Power Macintosh G4 400 (AGP)🍏 Side view:

Next is an Atari adventure, just my kind of Friday night - I'm seeing if I can work out why my Atari 2600 is DoA!
12/24v Trucker portable TV to the rescue!
This is so useful, it has composite and also an analogue TV tuner inside 👌 Well that was a super easy fix, just needed tonnes of contact cleaner: cart slot, power connector and joystick port! All working great, time for a deep clean! 🪥🫧🧼

Mouse Systems Corporation M-1 Mouse (OEM version: Sun Type 4)
This is one of the two first optical mice to be released for sale, back in the early 80's. I'm going to strip it down and deep clean it! Some real quality engineering in here, a very clever use of lenses!

I got another cheapo Gotek from Ali, let's Flash and Mod it! FlashFloppy installed, love it when you see that 'F - F' on the display.

My Sun SPARCstation LX NVRAM / Timekeeper chip is dead, not surprising as they have a life of 11 years and this thing is 32 years old. Let's do something about it!
(x86 fans, these are similar to Dallas time chips, but also have storage for system configurations) The good Guys and Gals at Sun socketed these, they also come in a nice little sled that makes taking it out easier.

Been out of the house all day since the early hours, got back to something special! An imported Japanese - Epson PC-386NOTE A laptop [1990]
Not just any laptop, this has MS-DOS on a ROM chip and it is also fully PC-98 compatible!

#Doscember 286 build lineup:
Case: OPUS PC V Turbo ('87/88)
Motherboard: N286-5
CPU: Harris 286 20Mhz
RAM: 1MB
VID: Realtek 512k
I/O: Western Digital
HDD: MiniScribe 21MB MFM
FLOPPIES : 3.5" & 5.25"
SOUND: PC Speaker & Covox Speech Thing (Custom Internal Install)
Fun, Fun, Fun 🤓

286 #Doscember build is progressing, battery holder sorted, motherboard installed, the MFM is going in..........

Right, let's sort this Acorn A4000 motherboard battery out!
I don't want the battery to be anywhere near the motherboard, even though it will be a friendly NiMH, I also want to be able to disconnect it. I had a male and female fan connector, that clips - seemed to make sense! Battery holder all soldered up and heat-shrink added - all working nicely.

Acorn A4000 mouse repair:
First I had to figure out where the fault actually was, at first I was worried it may be a problem on the motherboard, but as the buttons worked and then after I checked the schematic, it was clear it was the mouse that had an issue. Using my phone (as the image sensor can see IR light, have to ever seen a TV remote flash on your phone camera), I could see that no IR light was emitted by the axis movement IR LED transmitters.

New computer for my collection:
Acorn Archimedes A4000S (1992):
12Mhz ARM250TG CPU
2MB RAM
85 MB IDE HDD
3.5" Floppy
RISC OS 3
*A thread with pictures, before I start cleaning it and getting it fully up and running, this thing is grubby, I can't wait to clean it 🪥🫧* I bought this, after reading about a lot of battery leak disasters, and not knowing much, all I had was this screen, no GUI, but showing me it at least had some life in it and the lovely monitor worked.

Having a go at making my own floppy drive head cleaner, I'm going to try a 3.5" version first to see how I get on. The magnetic disk inside a 3.5" floppy is around 88mm, the filter paper I have is 90mm. So I need to trim it by 2mm so that it fits inside correctly.

Sunday Funday!
Let's go........... Ok, first thing I've found out about the Compaq SLT/286 - when the RTC is dead, it defaults to only working with 720k Floppies. So if you have a Greaseweazel, you can convert a standard dos bootdisk to this size, write it to a disk and use it without the diagnostic floppy.

4x Compact Flash IDE RAID - let's freakin' go.......... All 4 CF's have been detected successfully! 👍

My 1988 OPUS V Turbo PC has arrived, excited and also a little worried about the lack of packaging, fortunately it was a really good courier service, here goes 😬🤞 Well it's in good shape, nothing seems damaged or loose inside, so that's a good thing! It's a yellow beast!

Toshiba T1910CS floppy drive repair mission, had to completely dismantle the whole thing to get the floppy drive out, really not sure why they would design it this way from a servicing perspective, especially as it's a mechanical item. But either way the Citizen floppy is out! Thread: A little tip on repairing laptop floppy drives, so when you have a laptop like this and you need to test the drive out, how do you test it when you have to completely take it all apart? Insider tip: the majority of the 'new' usb floppy drives made in China are actually