486 Laptop

                A friend of mine was throwing out an old laptop which used to belong to her father. It didn't work anymore and she had it poised over the bin when she thought, " I wonder if Joe can make use of it?".

                A DIGITAL, 486 DX2 50 MHz, 8MB of RAM, 350 MB HDD, 12" TFT display and a detachable FDD. The vintage was 1994.

                DIGITAL became DEC which was taken over by COMPAQ which later merged with HP. Therefore tracking down a manual on-line did not prove easy. Nor was it wonderfully informative when I did find one.

                Cleaned the fluff out of the trackerball and tried powering up. "CHECKSUM ERROR" appeared as expected, the CMOS battery was dead. "Press Fn+F3 to enter SETUP" it also displayed. Did this, entered "Factory Defaults", saved, entered F1 to continue when prompted and I was in. The time and date needs setting manually when booting without a CMOS battery in this way.

                Windows 3.11 and DOS 6.22 complete with a 16 bit version of Lotus SmartSuite. The word processor, Ami Pro quite adequate for writing documents. Copy to a floppy for printing etc, saving docs as Rich Text Format (.rft) would ensure compatibility with any other word processor the main desktop PC might have.

On the Downside

                No CD-ROM Drive
                Dead Li Ion Battery
                Small HDD

No CD-ROM Drive fit a ZIP Drive.

                My solution was to buy a used parallel port Iomega ZIP 100 MB drive. Picked one up from eBay complete with 5 disks. All for the price of one new 100MB ZIP disk. Drivers for DOS, Win3.1, Win98 to XP available from www.iomega.com . With the higher capacity ZIP drives now available (not to mention CDR/W and DVDR/W etc.), the 100MB drive can be had very cheaply.

                I now have a device which is both compatible with my old laptop and a modern PC. I can transfer 100MB chunks of data, back up the laptop's HDD and supplement its  meager 350MB capacity by running application directly from the ZIP drive (If 100MB isn't enough I can use another disk).

                The downside is that the zip driver takes a largish chunk out of the 640Kb of DOS Base Memory ( see MEMMAKER), causing some applications not to run. This can be overcome by setting up the DOS Multiboot option (which came with version 6 onwards) to boot either into "Normal" (default) mode or "ZIP Drive" mode.

  Dead Li Ion Battery. Chuck It.

                 The battery will not hold a charge. Not even enough to confirm the polarity using a Multimeter. The cost of a new battery is far more than the laptop is worth. So as most people plug their laptops into the mains most of the time the simplest solution is to throw it away as dead weight.

 Small HDD. Compress It.

                 I was soon down to my last 30MB whist still wanting to install more "Core" applications. DRIVESPACE ( see article) came to the rescue. I now have another 250MB.

Operating System 

                Windows 3.11 and DOS 6.22 with a 50 MHz 486DX2, 8MB RAM and no CD-ROM drive. Even if I could get Windows 95 or higher installed, it would not run so much as crawl.

I installed COUNTERPOINT (see article) as a GUI for DOS applications and CALMIRA ( see article) to give Windows 3.11 a Windows 95 look and feel.

 Conclusion

                 I finally replaced the CMOS battery so I no longer need to:-

                                Press Fn + F3 (at the right moment)
                                Load Factory Defaults
                                Save
                                Press F1
                and         Type in time and date every time I boot-up.

                 The laptop is now a useful member of my fleet of PCs. My wife does not see eye to eye with me on this one but then to be fair, I didn't get excited about the new curtains either.