Zel's Fleet Blog - BX, Jag XJ-S, Sinclair C5, Mercedes 208D & 230TE, AC Model 70.

[xantia_v6]

It has the hard drive.

I opened it up a few months ago and there has been no physical leakage or damage.

[Zelandeth]

Good good. Should be a pretty simple bit of future proofing to change the caps then. Just double check the mains power supply is actually outputting the right sort of voltage before plugging it in - just seems a smart move if it's not been used in such a long time.

Hard drive may well need a bit of coaxing back into life. Helpfully you can get to the head actuator with the cage removed and the bottom of the motor spindle. The one of the three I had here which was stuck I was able to get the heads free with a bit of gentle wiggling, and then was able to give the spindle motor a bit of a push to initially get it going. Thankfully the one I was actually interested in just started up without trouble. It had been sitting since 2002 though so your one may well just be absolutely fine.

Just wanted to confirm you had the drive given I've got a couple of spare drives and controller cards so would have offered you one of them if you didn't as it's obviously a pretty useful upgrade over the base machine.

[xantia_v6]

I have been following CuriousMarc's fight resurrecting his HP 9825T after an over-voltage event:



I think that I will fit some crowbar circuits before powering up the Toshiba.

The HP 9825 was probably the first programmable electronic device I ever touched (in 1973 I think), but I didn't actually program anything until a couple of years later.

[Dormouse]

Well, two of your vehicles would fit in the garage; the Invacar and the C5!

One of the reasons I was drawn to the Invacar once I learned of their existence! The sliding doors really do make so much sense and save so much space.

Today was the first day that I successfully managed to rescue something from our tip. They're absolutely immovable on the "Once it comes in it never leaves rule" but managed to bag these while depositing a load of other things in the electronic waste bin while nobody was looking.



The 3210 sadly is a write off due to having suffered catastrophic battery leakage. The 5110 though looks more hopeful.



It's at least trying to charge, battery is understandably shot, but it's showing signs of life at least.

I don't specifically collect phones... though by now I have a pretty good show from the present day back to the mid 90s. Probably the two I find most interesting are an NEC e313 and Samsung S8300. Both from that strange no-man's-land between mobile phones being just that and what became the smartphone...but before anyone had really decided what form that would take. They vanished pretty quickly once it became clear that the iPhone-esque design was going to become the norm, so I see them as an interesting time capsule.

Even after all these years though, the Motorola V3 is probably still my favourite bit of kit in that box though. It's just such a wonderful bit of design and engineering.

Guess that's an obvious little addition I could tack on to the vintage technology section of my website now I think about it...

Bit irked the weekend has eaten up every second of time so I've not had a chance to give the brakes on the van a check over. Will just need to drop it off for the garage to sort in the morning. Really hoping it won't turn into a massive epic this time... I've still not quite got over the £600 bill from Egerton's last year when they "fixed" the rear brakes...

If you are desperately keen internals for the 3210 are available. There is a following for 3210's

[Zelandeth]

If you are desperately keen internals for the 3210 are available. There is a following for 3210's

No need really, it was just a thing that was grabbed out of interest really, it's not something that I've really made a thing of collecting, unlike older computing devices and similar. The case isn't really all that tidy or anything anyway, sure just finding a working example would be easier!

-- -- --

Really not much to report, though despite the weather I did manage to get TPA out for a run today when I had to go out and collect a couple of things.

Once more making normal modern cars look comically huge.



I need to take a look at the idle adjustment as it is definitely a little on the high side. Not sure if the throttle cable just needs a little more slack in the adjustment or if the idle screw on the carb actually needs adjusting. It's one of those things that I keep remembering every time I have the car out, but immediately forget to actually get as far as doing when I get back home.

[myglaren]

Accelerate it!

[Zelandeth]

Last week we had the little T1200 in a more or less functional state. There was quite a bit of noise on the screen now and then which I really didn't like, but I was at least able to copy the documents I'd been after off without incident. With the new capacitors in hand though it was time to see if they could improve matters.

So started what was without doubt one of the most annoying repairs that I'd faced for a long while. There were a few contributing factors.

[] The component density on the back of the PCB is such that this is really stretching the limits of how tiny traces I can deal with without a proper magnifier and kit to hold the work piece on the bench.
[] The tip on my soldering iron is absolutely shot...I have finally caved now and ordered a couple of replacements.
[] One leg of several caps is tied to the internal ground plane in the PCB which was acting like a giant heatsink and making it very difficult to desolder those pins - especially with a soldering iron with a stuffed tip.

I eventually opted to snip off the last few caps and just solder the new leads onto the stubs of the old ones...Which would have been far easier if I'd been able to find my good pair of side cutters. Of course I *couldn't* find my good pair of side cutters so had to resort to wobbling the caps back and forth until the leads fatigued and snapped.

The resulting hack job is without exception the most downright horribly ugly repair I've ever done. Though when I go through this job again in future I'll have a better plan going in, will make sure I have the tools on hand and also ensure that I actually have a decent tip on the iron. I reckon I could do a far, far tidier job in about a quarter of the time in future. I'm honestly ashamed enough of this one that I really don't want to show it! If the supply proves reliable I'll go back in and tidy things up a bit and add some support for the caps which are now sitting quite proud of the board.

Taking a look at the display backlight inverter board I don't think leaves us with any question as to why that was fading out over the course of a few minutes...



I think that this one falls under the "caught it just in time" category given it was still functioning. With a thorough clean and a new set of caps I reckon this will be fine as a spare. Thankfully the inverter board in the spares monitor was mounted the opposite way up (no idea why!), so the leakage there hadn't touched the board, just left a stain on the inside of the case. So I stuck a new set of caps in that board and swapped them over.

Somewhat to my surprise when powered back up I had all the correct voltages present on the output terminals of the board (the -22V rail was actually showing a far better value too, it was only showing around -18V before, which I reckon is why the screen was struggling), and when hooked back up...



Given what a messy job I'd done of it I was honestly quite surprised that it just worked properly. It was immediately obvious that the display was a lot happier too, I'm guessing the -22V rail struggling before was upsetting the bias voltage for the LCD.

It's quite interesting comparing the new capacitors being installed to those which came out, the fact that insulation technology has come on a fair bit since 1987 really does show in how much smaller some of the new caps are than those they replaced. In the photo below the new caps are to the left of those they replaced.



I had mistakenly thought this machine had failed just before I finished secondary school, but the contents of the documents folder suggests that it made it into the first couple of months of my time at university too. Though reading some of the notes I'd taken there did a good job of breaking my brain a little - it doesn't feel like more than a year or two back that I was taking them...Definitely not 19 years ago!

I wanted to keep the machine up and running for a few hours as a stability test...Not hard when I discovered that all my Sim City saves had indeed survived.



Well there went a couple of hours no problem! Probably looks a bit strange to people being in inverted blue on grey...but given how many hours I spent playing it like this seeing it in colour looks odd to my brain.

Back when I was using this machine as my "daily driver" I didn't have all that much DOS based software to hand. It was pretty much just VDE as the text editor, Sim City for when I got bored, and for reasons I can't quite fathom I had an image viewer on there as well...which on a mono inverted LCD screen is about as much use as a chocolate teapot...My guess is it ended up on there purely because I apparently got it in my head one day that I wanted to create a customised graphical welcome screen to show when the machine started up. Beyond that it was just a bog standard OEM MS-DOS 3.30 install - only interesting add-on I'd found was the program for setting the BIOS options...all eleven of them! Useful though as without this there's no way to enable the hard-RAM and suspend features, which I made plenty of use of back in the day.



While this did everything I needed it to at the time, something I was acutely aware of being absent was anything whatsoever in the way of software to keep tabs on the health of my hardware. Something I was easily able to rectify today though. I've always had good luck with the Norton Utilities suite, so chucked that on there. This was obviously the result we were hoping for from the hard drive health check.



Glad to see the surface test come back clean despite the 19 year hibernation.

Also meant I could interrogate the system with the information tools to see what they had to say.



Not exactly a speed demon...but with a 9.81MHz 80C86 you're not really looking for performance!



Might be interesting to do an actual performance comparison at some point between this and the Amstrad PPC512...

I've only got one other hard drive which uses a stepper motor based head actuator, and it's a good deal slower than the one in the T1200, especially where seek times are concerned.



Though this result only really counts when the drive is "awake." After about five seconds of idle time this drive automatically parks the heads - which given how fragile drives of this era were, and with this being a portable machine is honestly a very sensible design choice I think. The downside however is that it takes a good half second for the head mechanism to unlock and get the drive back into read/write mode. Realistically, do you notice? No. Absolutely worth a bit of a performance hit...I'm pretty sure this design choice is one of the main reasons that this drive has so few bad sectors on it - about 20K's worth, which is an order of magnitude less than the other few drives I've got from this era. Latency was never going to be a huge strong point of this drive anyway given it only runs at 2650 rpm.

Given the relatively slow seek performance of it being a stepper motor rather than voice coil actuated head in the drive, defragmentation can (and does) really help with performance.

Here's some audio that should be a blast from the past for folks who used machines like these back in the day - that drive getting a good old workout while being defragmented.



I remembered something quite abruptly a couple of days back when backing up my old files...That file management from the DOS prompt is downright painful. Easily solved with Microsoft MS-DOS File Manager...which I'm not quite sure why wasn't just bundled with DOS back then as it makes things so much more usable.



It's basically the DOS Executive from Windows 1 & 2 sans some of the graphics - even has a dedicated menu you can save shortcuts to commonly used programs/commands in.



It's basic, but does what I need, and is all of 70K...so far I've not come across anything it won't run on.

With the machine having been running all evening it had been absolutely stable. The power supply was barely even warm - so the running conditions have definitely improved as it used to get really quite obviously toasty after half an hour or so.

Need to have a dig around and see if I can find anything else interesting to run on it...though to be honest I've got everything I actually need for it to do what I want it to now.

Last thing I wanted to look into was the battery situation. I've got two packs which appear to be taking a charge - but they're obviously not going to have much capacity left. I did have one that was as dead as a door nail though...An ideal candidate to be sacrificed to find out if they can be rebuilt.



These packs are 7.2V NiMH units rated at 2200mAh. Annoyingly they're sonic welded shut...However I have a Dremel so that took all of a minute to get around.



Chunky cells! Looking at them though, no surprise this one isn't charging.



A bit of investigation revealed that they're bog standard C size cells.



Well isn't that convenient? A quick look at Google seems to suggest that the going rate for NiMH C-Cells these days is 4000-5000mAh - so with modern cells in here we should be able to more than double the original battery capacity. Let's just remember...I was getting through a full day on the original batteries back in 2002 when they were 14 years old...We should be able to comfortably get 10+ hours on a battery out of this thing. Not bad for a 33 year old laptop.

Probably won't see a huge amount more of this thing now it's been officially revived (unless you want to and/or have anything you'd like me to try with it).

[xantia_v6]

Did you consider re-capping the mains power brick?

Have you tried the video output to a VGA monitor? I remember it being problematic with a colour monitor, I think because the video frequency was a bit off, causing the colour convergence to be noticeably bad.

[Zelandeth]

Did you consider re-capping the mains power brick?

Have you tried the video output to a VGA monitor? I remember it being problematic with a colour monitor, I think because the video frequency was a bit off, causing the colour convergence to be noticeably bad.

I don't actually have the original mains adaptor for this, it's been running off a PC power supply during testing. Would you believe that in the box of cables where there must be a couple of dozen adaptors that I couldn't find a single 12V one which could provide a couple of amps?

External display is a bit trickier as it requires an EGA/CGA monitor rather than a standard VGA one, and that's something I simply don't have access to.

[xantia_v6]

Of course it is CGA...

[Zelandeth]

Remembered the keyboard shortcut to get to the "fuel gauge" for the battery - function + sys req.



Also figured that this might be an interesting experiment.



Windows 3.0 is the last version that would run on an 8086/8088, albeit looking a bit strange on an inverted monochrome LCD with a bit of an oddball (640*200) resolution.

Runs a lot better than I expected to be honest. Bit sluggish when waiting for disc access but that's expected really.









To be honest I'm not really likely to use Windows for much...the MS-DOS Manager does a decent job of file management and all of the software I really need is DOS based anyway. I was mainly just curious to see how it ran on an 8086 machine.

Think the display really does show how it was really designed with text based applications in mind. It's not at it's best when dealing with graphics - but does a surprisingly good job of text. To be honest it's a lot more pleasant to use than the DSTN panel on the mid 90s ThinkPad I've got. Which is just utterly "meh" whether displaying text or graphics.

Replacement tips finally arrived today for the soldering iron so hopefully future work requiring it will be somewhat less frustrating...I really hadn't realised how knackered the old one was until I started doing delicate work with it!

Few folks have asked me what iron I use elsewhere, same one I've had for about fifteen years now.



Iroda Solderpro 120, little gas unit. It's not as precise as an electronic one where you can dial in an exact temperature but you can very the power from virtually nothing through to about 100W, which has done everything I've asked of it so far. Using an electric iron with a cable in the way always feels really cumbersome once you're used to a gas iron.

Speaking of tools, I finally stopped procrastinating about it today and picked up a new lawn mower.





Initial impressions are that it feels well made. Quite a bit bigger than our old mower, will be curious to see how well it works - given that the old one was a kerbside find that cost me all of about £3 to get running it owes me nothing. It could be repaired - but has just got to the point that enough things need doing that it's just not worth it when there's something I really can't fully resolve - and that's that the grass collection box is missing. I've tried half a dozen times now to buy a new one but just haven't been able to get hold of one - so given it needs new rear wheels, replaced wheel bearing on one of the fronts, a couple of missing bolts replaced, ideally a new drive belt and a couple of cracks in the deck that are starting by the handle base repaired...it's just not worth it. Nothing wrong with the engine though...so I need to see if I can come up with something to do with it...current thought is "I wonder if I could find a suitable pressure washer pump head to hook up to it..."

Given the weather forecast over the next few days goodness only knows when I'll get to do the first test!

[myglaren]

Is it easy to start?

[Zelandeth]

We'll find out soon enough...if it starts as easy as the old one I'll be staggered!

Well my package of new batteries for the laptop arrived today. Or rather the package which *should* have contained them arrived.

Instead I've got a flimsy plastic bag with several holes in, full of fresh air.

Guess we'll see if the seller is going to play ball with a refund or if this is going to turn into a headache.

[Zelandeth]

Despite the weather I managed to get TPA out for a run today.



Contrary to what it looks like in this photo there were very ominous looking storm clouds just out of frame to both sides and behind me.

Never ceases to put a smile on my face this little car, really does drive far better than she has any right to.

Still not quite how I managed to dodge all the worst of the weather...it was all around me pretty much the whole time.

[Gibbo2286]

Zel "Still not quite how I managed to dodge all the worst of the weather...it was all around me pretty much the whole time."

Maybe because we had it all here.