My good ol trusty 486SL laptop!

[orange400]

Well guess what?? My 486SL laptop is typing this post! This thing just rocks!! I just got netscape navigator 4.08 running on it, and it's pretty dang fast. Look at it go! The forums are a little complex for it, so you have to wait a bit for each page to load, but for most of the web pages out there, this little rig just puts its foot down. I have a collection of DOS games on this beast ... lots of Apogee stuff, prince of persia, tyrian, and I would have God of Thunder on this indefinately if it weren't for the grayscale LCD panel. There's a health and magic meter in the game, and the magic meter must be red and blue or something because I cannot tell how much magic O have left! That kinda kills the game. If you guys wanna know what I'm talking about, go to gemsgames.com and peek around the DOS games. Abondonware rocks!

I take this laptop to school everyday and use it to work on classwork and stuff. It's a major plus. And when you're bored, there's always something to do ... I can even tap around the network and do stuff. But I wanna take the cisco coarse they offer here before I screw around and do something stupid and get busted. I'm not malacious, I just like to get into things so I can be all like "hahaha" and stuff ... and I get around computer lockdowns for my own good. No harm done, as long as its a secret it's fine.

I have been just loading this sucker with lots and lots of upgrades! So far, I have a 20x PCMCIA CD-Rom that's self-powered, battery-powered, or DC transformer-powered, and also acts as a standalone CD player, a 10/100 Netear FA410TX NIC, a brand-new super-rare 4MB RAM expansion (8MB total now), an optional internal modem installed, and a classic zip 100 parallel drive w/ a battery! I'm still working on the hard drive ... riht now I'm running a relatively small 120MB drive cause the 1.4GB I ordered off eBay isn't recognized in my BIOS. So I found a super-nice 800MB Seagate off eBay that I'm watching ... I hope I get it! I'm sure it'll work with my lapper cause I found a site that said it did.

You know MSI's dynamic overclocking technology? *drool* Well, my lapper has something remarkable similar installed! It has throttled CPU usage. So right now as I'm typing text, the CPU is probably running at only 5Mhz compared to the 25Mhz it supplies on full-load. Pretty sweet huh? And windows 95 has three power mode options avalible during the install: advanced power management support, SL power management, and no power monagament. And I have a SL processor! I think that's really cool. It really works out.

I'm sure pretty much any laptop out there can kick this laptop's ***, but hey, I get a kick out of it. This is the nicest-built laptop I've seen! It's super small, measuring at only ~11 inches wide, ~9 long and ~1 inch high. Everything on the laptop is easily accessable and removable. I can pull the hard drive out right now with a pull of its caddy. I can take the mouse ball out of the computer with a paper clip end, and I can even remove the entire trackball unit with the side of the clip. I can open up the expansion bay with just a lift of a panel, which reveals the optional internal modem, my RAM expansion, the BIOS chip, the power button's plug, and the display panel's connectors all in one bay. I also crammed 4500mAh of batteries into it - it'll last a day or two without a charge!

So I'm havin fun. A 25Mhz 8MB laptop browsing an overclocker's forum?! Now that's irony, lol.

 

[Noodles]

Sounds cool. 486 was a fun gaming era. What kind of screen you have on that bad boy?

 

[orange400]

I'm not sure ... looks like a 7" or so. It displays 640x480 maximum and is grayscale. The video card is straight VGA, so it only does 640 x 480 in 16 colors. That holds me back from a lot of great windows games I really wanted to get running on it, such as Myst and The Lost Mind of Dr Brain. That kinda sucks, but whatever.

 

[diddydo75]

cool i remember the first pc in our house, pop got a p120 it was the dogs and cost about £1100.
but 25mhz......thats real power!

 

[Mr.Guvernment]

i know the feeling

got an old toshiba teca 133 maxed out with 144mb of ram and 2mb vid card and a 2g HD - thing rules! was a ICS server / printer server and used for some game slike Call to power

i still have it and now it is a DNS server - works great!

 

[diddydo75]

i still have my slot 1 pIII 500 in the draw(my first pc). upgraded to this athlon. cant seem to part with the dam thing. i just had a look at it again, with the heatsink and all its massive!!
how things move on. had the thunderbird over a year now. its starting to feel tired(starting i hear you say!)no doubt i'll pull it out and stash it away. its been a trusty workhorse.

 

[dorimon81]

Ya, my uncle gave me his old Pentium 90 laptop. I hooked up my highspeed internet connection to it and I can share files between the laptop and my other 2 systems. The thing that amazed me the most was that the thing is pretty fast considering its only 90 mhz, but I managed to install another 32 MB memory stick into it. The only thing I would like to get in the future is a CD-ROM drive and *maybe* overclock it. But ya, great performance for such an old system.

 

[JDXNC]

Damn You! I had to dig out my old 486 laptop and play around with it after reading this! Its a Epson ActionNote 500C, whopping 486 50Mhz CPU, 4MB Ram, 540MB HDD, and a HUGE 8" 256 color LCD! I'm in the process right now of upgrading it from Windows 3.11 to 95

 

[dorimon81]

My screen is pretty big. It's a 10.4".

OLD COMPUTERS ROCK!!!

 

[eab]

I got some old toshibal satalite 486 that I use for some word processing and palying games in car on trips. Warcraft 1 and CIV 1 ROCK! not to mention a ton of side scroolers, DOOM 1 and 2, and Wolfenstien! Its got a floppy, 16mb ram, 500mb hd. Good times....

 

[Lancelot]

I have a 486SL 25Mhz notebook still around somewhere as well, it's got a grayscale LCD, has a huge external 1x(!) CD-ROM drive and Windows 3.1. It must've cost a fortune at the time as well, you'll prolly buy two or three centrino based notebooks for that kinda money today! I use a P4-M 2.3Ghz HP laptop today as add-on for my main desktop system, and I'm amazed about how well these notebooks are built. My HP has three-stage cooling (I can see a copper base inside) and becomes more like a hair-dryer when I run SETI on it, lol! I've never had a BSOD on any of them, while that does happen on non-OCed desktops often...

 

[dorimon81]

I've never had anything wrong with my P90. The only major problem that I had with it was that it wouldn't fileshare between my 2 other desktops which I quickly fixed.

I want to find a CD-ROM drive for this thing. Maybe a PCMCIA one because this thing doesn't have USB ports.

Any suggestions where to get a PCMCIA CD-ROM Drive for my old laptop?

 

[Mr.Guvernment]

haha

what memories - my first PC i built was a pIII 533 / ATi rage 128PRO 32mb 2xAGP / 20G HD and i kept borriwing 128mb sticks of ram from work when i was done as i could not afford ram at the time..lol



now my mom has that systems and works great - i got it overclocked to 645 i beleive from 533

 

[diddydo75]

my word, i got my pIII 500 back in November 1998. I cant imagine what will be available in another 5 years......cant wait to find out though!

 

[orange400]

I've never had anything wrong with my P90. The only major problem that I had with it was that it wouldn't fileshare between my 2 other desktops which I quickly fixed.

I want to find a CD-ROM drive for this thing. Maybe a PCMCIA one because this thing doesn't have USB ports.

Any suggestions where to get a PCMCIA CD-ROM Drive for my old laptop?

I just bought a PCMCIA CD-Rom myself! The best place to hunt these down is in ebay. You can get a really good one there for ~$40. I got mine for $35 + $7 s/h and it just rocks ... 20x, transformer, battery, or PCMCIA powered, low battery light, and get this ... there's a little plug where you can plug a sound module in for sound! I'm still trying to find one. Boy would that rock - 486 arcade games kick ***!

Go here:
http://search.ebay.com/search/searc...m&ht=1&sosortproperty=1&from=R10&BasicSearch=

I highly reccomend this (this is what I have):
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=3447653851&category=3710

And Panasonic CD-ROMs are some of the best ones out there:
http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=3447597435&category=31563


You might not believe it, but my laptop has 25Mhz CPU, 4MB RAM + 4MB RAM expansion (8MB total), and a 120MB hdd, and guess what? Windows 95 runs incredibly smooth on it! It starts up pretty quick for its age, but I double click My Computer and BAM it's on the screen! I click Start and BAM the menu pops up! And even if you click Control Panel - tick tick tiiick (hdd) BAM its up! Windows 95 is so cool, it'll run on ANYthing.

If you need a copy of any abondonware windows or DOS versions, go here: www.windos2000.net ! If you've owned any previous windows OSs that was lost or destroyed, you can replace your copy there. That site's really awesome. I used it to replace my destroyed 5th disk of windows 3.1. I loaded windows 95 with an old CD I have though. It's a treasure - locked away in a paper CD envelope to make sure it won't get dinged on the label.

It's really cool that you guys dig old technology! I didn't really know what to expect from you guys, being on the OC forums and all. 486 power!!

 

[Blueacid]

Well, i can't resist but to talk about my two OLD computers

My laptop is great, even though it's a dell...

Specs are: P150, 32megs ram, 1.4gig hard drive, inbuilt CD-ROM and sound card (really really good quality speakers too), 12.1" TFT screen (top of the range back then, anyone remember DSTN, eww)

It's networked up, and currently serving a very small website with Apache, being used as a CD player every now and again (When tinkering with main rig) and also a DC++ hub.

I tried to get folding@home running, but frame times of 4 hours are stupid, plus it went crazy trying to keep cool lol (it has a fat fan on the processor that came on for the first time ever when I started folding on it lol)


My other old computer is sadly broken, dunno what's wrong, just didn't start up one day...

It's now in the loft, but it is an old PC XT, 4.077Mhz, 640kb of ram (that's plenty then lol), a 20meg hard drive (heck i've got MP3s bigger than that thing), a PSU about the size of a 2litre tub of ice-cream, a CGA graphics card (320x240 and only 4 colours)
It ran IBM Dos 4.0 and not much else heh.

Blueacid

 

[Noodles]

My other old computer is sadly broken, dunno what's wrong, just didn't start up one day...

It's now in the loft, but it is an old PC XT, 4.077Mhz, 640kb of ram (that's plenty then lol), a 20meg hard drive (heck i've got MP3s bigger than that thing), a PSU about the size of a 2litre tub of ice-cream, a CGA graphics card (320x240 and only 4 colours)
It ran IBM Dos 4.0 and not much else heh.

Blueacid

Those XTs are a beast aren't they? I they weigh like a ton too.

My first rig was a tandy 1000. Had a 16 color display, tandy sound card (neither of these was well supported in games...often forcing me to run CGA and PC speaker.) Had a 20GB hard drive and a LD 720K 3.25" floppy drive.

I used to run Qbasic, eye of the beholder, mean streets (this game used the processor to simulate a sound card using the PC speaker. Pretty cool) Ran all kinds of bad shareware games, screwed up DOS more times than I can count. Good times.

The first rig that I build I upgraded all the way and I still have...I can't bear to part with it! k6-233 64MB EDO RAM, dual 850MB drives and a sweet Canopus Pure3D 3dfx graphics card.

 

[pranks7er]

post some pics of the beast in action i like the old systems

 

[DaWiper]

The first real PC I touched(and used) was a Olivetti 286 with 2MB(!) ram and a whopping 20 MB hardisk. It had 16 color(ega) graphicscard. Used to play the old sierra games, a nice vector flightsim and Digger.
Everybody should have grown up with DOS or similar...

 

[donny_paycheck]

post some pics of the beast in action i like the old systems

Yeah, pics of our toys from yesteryear are always fun to look at.

How about this: