Yay! Dip switches! Two things that made me sad to see disappear from modern computers were dip switches and jumpers. There's something very reassuring about using jumpers to configure something
diamened I know exactly what you mean! All this autoconfiguration and plug and play made stuff easier for sure, but it also takes away this sense of control and authority over your hardware.
Yay just henry just commenting for the sake of just dip switches and jumpers. Yay just henry it feels just secure. Just go and have a coffee just for the sake of just relaxing. Remember just henry so you can just have fun. Good day to you
I managed to stumble onto this video recently. What a journey! It is these videos which permit me to remind why I enjoy computers and technology. Have a good day!
I had problems with the hard drive in my 386SX, so I took the laptop apart and gave the drive some slaps... and the hard drive started to work again. Thanks for the hint, you saved me quite some effort and time!
Mein erster PC war auch auch 286er. Ich habe bei einem Restekauf einfach ein Highscreen 286er gekauft, da war ich noch in Ausbildung. Der Verkäufer sagte, der sei kaputt, es erscheint immer "No Operating System found." oder so ähnlich. Also gekauft und DOS installiert. LOL. Alles funktionierte wunderbar. Seit dem bin ich bis heute PCler. Angefangen jedoch mit einem C128D und dann Amiga 500 :)
Thumbs up for TOPBENCH. :-) If you have trouble seeing the menu, run MODE BW80 before starting and it should come up with a black & white color scheme. If that doesn't work, I can add a command-line switch, just let me know.
TOPBENCH is great! I just didn't know about this command before. So much to learn, so little time :D Thanks for making it, and all the other cool stuff you worked on. What an honour to have you comment on my humble videos :D
@@flashmeback The honor goes to you, sir -- You put in a lot of time making these videos, including how you learned from your mistakes. I hope to be able to do the same someday when I have more free time :-) Keep up the good work.
Great video! just aquired one of these laptops with bad disk. what was the CF card adapter that you used? I've tried several different adapters and cards but each time I fdisk and create a partition, the partition is lost on the next the boot.
Meine erste rechner war auch ein 1Mb 286 mit DOS 5.0. Keep up the good work - I can't believe how tenacious you are! Oh and thank you for the English language videos - Ich komme von Australien und mein Deutsch ist nicht so gut!
WD40 is NOT a lubricant, CRC 5-56 which people see as an equivalent however is a slight lubricant, which is why I think people think WD40 can be used as a lubricant, but it will make things worse over time. But you should really just get some silicon grease instead, that is the stuff used in floppy drives for the moving parts.
@ 30:15 to 31:05 is genius! (Using multiple capacitors joined together to replace one individual capacitor) Not ideal, but still usable when you just don't have the right one and that's all you have.
I have several queued up! Not sure how much work there will be in them, because I really have no idea in what condition most of the machines I have are in. Bought them, put them on the shelf for making a video. Never started them at all :)
Really nice work on this one. Does it still have a battery? Replacing the HDD with a CF card should also considerably increase battery time, especially when rebuilding the battery with new cells.
Next time try use EZ-Drive for the hard disk drive you can put big big HD on this little monster, and remove this rare battery.. if that start to leak you have a horrible problem .. great video !!
Wenn du das nächste Mal eine Festplatte öffnen musst, machs doch einfach in deinem eigenen Reinraum. Heiße Dusche 10 Min bei geschlossener Türe laufen lassen bis die deutlich sichtbare "Sauna" im Bad herrscht. Die Luftfeuchtigkeit bindet Staub auf den Oberflächen und in der Luft vorhandener Staub schlägt sich an den Wänden nieder. Der Festplatte macht das nichts da die eh mit Kondensation zu kämpfen hat wenn man sie im Winter kauft bzw der Laptop im Winter genutzt wurde. So kann man übrigens auch perfekt und ohne Staubeinschlüsse Displayschutzfolien kleben.
I always get water stuck in the small spaces inside the plastics (keys, cases, ...) after washing them, even after waiting for several days for them to dry. I have to use folded paper inside those small spaces to dry them. I think it has to do with capillary effects, they won't let the water leave small spaces.
@@flashmeback I end up loosing double time because I have to stick folded paper inside screw holes, keys and all other tight spaces :( Everything else seems to dry quick enough. Another problem I have is my tap water has a lot of minerals, so after evaporating it gives me a lot of water marks, but I just need to use a moist cloth to remove them.
Perhaps you didn't actually need to match that close the capacitance if it's just a low pass filter. But anyway, interesting video. Really glad UA-cam recommended your video to me, sometimes it actually works :-) And man, that GP Circuit music brings some childhood memories. Loved Accolade racing games when I was like 5.
I don't really know much about analog electronics, I just looked up the schematics and formulas and saw that this seems to be a high pass filter. Using one third of the capacitance would have meant three times the cut off frequency, if I understand that stuff correctly. Didn't want to risk only getting even thinner sound out of this than I already do :-)
To completely get around the disk problems, I'd recommend looking into XTIDE, a project that was developed to create an IDE bios extension - you can either get an ISA card for the machine, or repurpose an old ISA NIC card with a bios chip on it. I think there's also a bootloader installer, if that's more your kind of thing.
akspa0 I'll look into that for a later project. For this one I am okay with how it worked out. EZ-Drive uses some RAM, but not terribly much. I assume XTIDE would also map its BIOS extension somewhere in the HMA, thus making some of the RAM unusable.
Hi, thanks for sharing your great work in fixing this beautiful machine! I've restored the same laptop model but I'm missing the original software. Unfortunally without its software some useful functions, like enabling the external VGA port, are not available at all. Can you help me in some way? Do you still own the software provided back in the day with this laptop? Thanks!
Had problems getting my CF card in my Siemens Nixdorf 486 DX4/75 Laptop to work properly too. MS DOS 6.22 didn't seem to like the CF being mounted under modern Windows either. Now I'm using FreeDOS and the full 8GB as one partition without problems, thanks too EZ-Drive and VirtualPC as my floppy drive is in need of a new belt (crappy Citizen drive). My 486 Laptop really feels highly integrated compared to this 286 one, which comes with it's own problems like trying to fix bad sound output. Btw nice Vobis Highscreen PC. Owned one of these too, but they sold it as a DX2/66 even though it got an AMD DX2/80 inside. Damn, do I regret getting rid of it after getting newer systems.
No boot sector on hard disk - STRIKE F1 TO RETRY....I blame this message for a multitude of broken keyboards I had as a kid Not quite as good as the classic "No keyboard detected, press F1 to continue"
Good work, congratulations. İs it possible for this 80286 amstrad laptop PC, to upgrade its' main memory and cache memory? There could be other upgrades depending on the mainboard of this PC, your available time and so on. May be a CPU upgrade,a VGA card upgrade(May be 1 OR 2 MB, you could have output resolution of up to 1024x768 svga depending to the mainboard featured with a 14" / 15"CRT monitor Thanks for the informative video.1 MB of memory means 1280*1024 resolution and top number of colours. 2MB is much better.But as you have experience, you have information.May be CPU upgrade is the key with memory upgrade to these screen resolutions and number of colours.
Great video and work! I don' t know where you found all this patience, but I would have destroyed the whole project with a sledgehammer, a lot earlier...
I've the Alt-286, i bought in a Little bazar but isn't working When i Power on , i have black screen monitor and the HDD FDD led Is permanently on...how can i solve It?
Maybe off-topic but was that a Atari ST on the shelf behind you? My first computer was a 1040ste,had a stfm too.. Later came the modded Amiga 500. My first 'real' pc was a pentium 100 Packard Bell... I really feel the need to buy one(st) and restore it. Emulators can only take you so far..
W D 40 - Water Displacer/Penetrating Agent, it's a solvent for water, but, you're not wrong, it strips every bit of lube out and leaves a coating of silicone which IS a lubricant. Just a really fine one that does not protect metal bearing surfaces as you suggest. It's a hard one to pin down, like me you're suggesting that some kind of 'real' lube needs to be used ;0)
I'm from Germany. You can always sell stuff on eBay and honestly, you'll probably get a better price there any anywhere else. But if you want to do the retro community a favor, you'll look for a local club, hacker space or web forum about retro computing. People there will probably not be willing to pay as much, but they will care for your hardware a lot better.
Do you have a service manual for this laptop? I was in the process of replacing the drive on this laptop, but now i have a blank screen (laptop does still go through the other boot up routines - leds, floppy) even after putting the original drive back.
Dan Selvey Sorry, I don't have any documentation for the computer. I remember having some problems with the Video card after reassembling everything. The slot for it is placed a bit problematically and even applying some pressure on plastic below the expansion slot or routing one of the cables that go underneath it slightly differently would cause the screen to stop working.
See my channel for some clues to this... I can't remember off hand but one of the voltage rails from the PSU is required for the screen... I think it was something weird like -24v or something... the capacitors on these PSU die a horrendous leaky death and this is what caused my screen failure.
Ich frage mich warum du nicht einfach ein Promise Drive Max benutzt hast, das ist eine 8Bit ISA Karte mit einem Option ROM welches es ermöglicht Festplatten größer als 137GB an alten Computern zu nutzen, da du ja ein ISA Slot frei hast
1. Weil ich es nicht kenne. 2. Weil es eine 8 Bit Karte ist, während ich so eine 16 Bit Anbindung habe. 3. EZ-Drive belegt nur ein paar KiB konventionellen Speicher. 4. Der Plattenplatz ist mehr als genug :-p
@@flashmeback it's also possible they just changed the CPU after they produced a few of those laptops. I think the 386SX was made as a direct replacement.
I guess it's for EMC. So it makes sense because otherwise they wouldn't have gotten it certified. But they could have added a non-conductive coating on top.
Yay! Dip switches!
Two things that made me sad to see disappear from modern computers were dip switches and jumpers. There's something very reassuring about using jumpers to configure something
diamened I know exactly what you mean! All this autoconfiguration and plug and play made stuff easier for sure, but it also takes away this sense of control and authority over your hardware.
Dip switches are still very common in industrial automation luckily :)
Yay just henry just commenting for the sake of just dip switches and jumpers. Yay just henry it feels just secure. Just go and have a coffee just for the sake of just relaxing. Remember just henry so you can just have fun. Good day to you
I managed to stumble onto this video recently. What a journey! It is these videos which permit me to remind why I enjoy computers and technology. Have a good day!
You should have replaced that CMOS Battery. In my ALT-286 the battery leaked and nearly killed the motherboard
I had problems with the hard drive in my 386SX, so I took the laptop apart and gave the drive some slaps... and the hard drive started to work again. Thanks for the hint, you saved me quite some effort and time!
ich liebe diese alten laptops und pc's. weckt immer erinnerungen :) immer weiter so alter
Mein erster PC war auch auch 286er. Ich habe bei einem Restekauf einfach ein Highscreen 286er gekauft, da war ich noch in Ausbildung. Der Verkäufer sagte, der sei kaputt, es erscheint immer "No Operating System found." oder so ähnlich. Also gekauft und DOS installiert. LOL. Alles funktionierte wunderbar. Seit dem bin ich bis heute PCler. Angefangen jedoch mit einem C128D und dann Amiga 500 :)
Really enjoyed watching this during my breakfast this morning. thanks for taking the time to make it.
Thanks for watching it :-)
Thumbs up for TOPBENCH. :-) If you have trouble seeing the menu, run MODE BW80 before starting and it should come up with a black & white color scheme. If that doesn't work, I can add a command-line switch, just let me know.
TOPBENCH is great! I just didn't know about this command before. So much to learn, so little time :D
Thanks for making it, and all the other cool stuff you worked on. What an honour to have you comment on my humble videos :D
@@flashmeback The honor goes to you, sir -- You put in a lot of time making these videos, including how you learned from your mistakes. I hope to be able to do the same someday when I have more free time :-) Keep up the good work.
Great video! just aquired one of these laptops with bad disk. what was the CF card adapter that you used? I've tried several different adapters and cards but each time I fdisk and create a partition, the partition is lost on the next the boot.
Meine erste rechner war auch ein 1Mb 286 mit DOS 5.0. Keep up the good work - I can't believe how tenacious you are! Oh and thank you for the English language videos - Ich komme von Australien und mein Deutsch ist nicht so gut!
The German you wrote here is almost perfect, I bet you could understand German videos with some practice!
WD40 is NOT a lubricant, CRC 5-56 which people see as an equivalent however is a slight lubricant, which is why I think people think WD40 can be used as a lubricant, but it will make things worse over time. But you should really just get some silicon grease instead, that is the stuff used in floppy drives for the moving parts.
Yes, I got that quite a while ago. This video is not the newest anymore ;-)
@@flashmeback I did not notice its age, I should have checked your other newer videos first. 😁
@ 30:15 to 31:05 is genius! (Using multiple capacitors joined together to replace one individual capacitor) Not ideal, but still usable when you just don't have the right one and that's all you have.
I used to work as a tech for an Amstrad dealer in about 1990, and these shipped with MSDOS 4.0.
I really want an Amstrad PC. They are rare to get complete though.
Excellent work! I am excited to see your future hardware project videos! Thank you for sharing!
I have several queued up! Not sure how much work there will be in them, because I really have no idea in what condition most of the machines I have are in. Bought them, put them on the shelf for making a video. Never started them at all :)
Gained a subscriber, amazing video man !
Thanks, welcome! :-)
Great video, thanks for uploading. BTW - my old Dell 386SX allowed you to get to the BIOS from the DOS prompt
leakyzinc Yeah, this one does the same. There's a keyboard combo to enter BIOS setup from everywhere :-)
Really nice work on this one.
Does it still have a battery? Replacing the HDD with a CF card should also considerably increase battery time, especially when rebuilding the battery with new cells.
Next time try use EZ-Drive for the hard disk drive you can put big big HD on this little monster, and remove this rare battery.. if that start to leak you have a horrible problem .. great video !!
Wenn du das nächste Mal eine Festplatte öffnen musst, machs doch einfach in deinem eigenen Reinraum. Heiße Dusche 10 Min bei geschlossener Türe laufen lassen bis die deutlich sichtbare "Sauna" im Bad herrscht. Die Luftfeuchtigkeit bindet Staub auf den Oberflächen und in der Luft vorhandener Staub schlägt sich an den Wänden nieder. Der Festplatte macht das nichts da die eh mit Kondensation zu kämpfen hat wenn man sie im Winter kauft bzw der Laptop im Winter genutzt wurde.
So kann man übrigens auch perfekt und ohne Staubeinschlüsse Displayschutzfolien kleben.
That screen is beautiful
Nice work!! lovely PC!
Getting the screen cable routed looks like a nightmare.
I always get water stuck in the small spaces inside the plastics (keys, cases, ...) after washing them, even after waiting for several days for them to dry. I have to use folded paper inside those small spaces to dry them. I think it has to do with capillary effects, they won't let the water leave small spaces.
@@flashmeback I end up loosing double time because I have to stick folded paper inside screw holes, keys and all other tight spaces :( Everything else seems to dry quick enough. Another problem I have is my tap water has a lot of minerals, so after evaporating it gives me a lot of water marks, but I just need to use a moist cloth to remove them.
Perhaps you didn't actually need to match that close the capacitance if it's just a low pass filter. But anyway, interesting video. Really glad UA-cam recommended your video to me, sometimes it actually works :-)
And man, that GP Circuit music brings some childhood memories. Loved Accolade racing games when I was like 5.
I don't really know much about analog electronics, I just looked up the schematics and formulas and saw that this seems to be a high pass filter. Using one third of the capacitance would have meant three times the cut off frequency, if I understand that stuff correctly. Didn't want to risk only getting even thinner sound out of this than I already do :-)
To completely get around the disk problems, I'd recommend looking into XTIDE, a project that was developed to create an IDE bios extension - you can either get an ISA card for the machine, or repurpose an old ISA NIC card with a bios chip on it. I think there's also a bootloader installer, if that's more your kind of thing.
akspa0 I'll look into that for a later project. For this one I am okay with how it worked out. EZ-Drive uses some RAM, but not terribly much. I assume XTIDE would also map its BIOS extension somewhere in the HMA, thus making some of the RAM unusable.
Hi, thanks for sharing your great work in fixing this beautiful machine! I've restored the same laptop model but I'm missing the original software. Unfortunally without its software some useful functions, like enabling the external VGA port, are not available at all. Can you help me in some way? Do you still own the software provided back in the day with this laptop?
Thanks!
Had problems getting my CF card in my Siemens Nixdorf 486 DX4/75 Laptop to work properly too. MS DOS 6.22 didn't seem to like the CF being mounted under modern Windows either. Now I'm using FreeDOS and the full 8GB as one partition without problems, thanks too EZ-Drive and VirtualPC as my floppy drive is in need of a new belt (crappy Citizen drive). My 486 Laptop really feels highly integrated compared to this 286 one, which comes with it's own problems like trying to fix bad sound output.
Btw nice Vobis Highscreen PC. Owned one of these too, but they sold it as a DX2/66 even though it got an AMD DX2/80 inside. Damn, do I regret getting rid of it after getting newer systems.
Yeah, I had to by almost all of my retro machines again after getting rid of them 15 years ago or so. Very sad :-(
Vielen Dank für das sehr unterhaltsame Video ,es hat mir sehr gefallenen,Güsse aus Germany Hamburg 👍👍👍👍👍❤️❤️❤️
No boot sector on hard disk -
STRIKE F1 TO RETRY....I blame this message for a multitude of broken keyboards I had as a kid
Not quite as good as the classic "No keyboard detected, press F1 to continue"
Good work, congratulations.
İs it possible for this 80286 amstrad laptop PC, to upgrade its' main memory and cache memory?
There could be other upgrades depending on the mainboard of this PC, your available time and so on.
May be a CPU upgrade,a VGA card upgrade(May be 1 OR 2 MB, you could have output resolution of up to 1024x768 svga depending to the mainboard featured with a 14" / 15"CRT monitor
Thanks for the informative video.1 MB of memory means 1280*1024 resolution and top number of colours.
2MB is much better.But as you have experience, you have information.May be CPU upgrade is the key with memory upgrade to these screen resolutions and number of colours.
Hallo from England 👍🏻, really enjoying your channel.
Hi and welcome!
I hope you stick around, I'm not going to stop any time soon!
Great video and work!
I don' t know where you found all this patience, but I would have destroyed the whole project with a sledgehammer, a lot earlier...
Haha. Please. Don't.
Hi, do you know where I can find the BIOS dump for Amstrad ALT286? Mine had it corrupt. Thanks
you're a hero!!! :)
I've the Alt-286, i bought in a Little bazar but isn't working
When i Power on , i have black screen monitor and the HDD FDD led Is permanently on...how can i solve It?
I love this shit. Keep making them
have to say your english is very good.....excellent video....
Nice job
Omg he swore im shaking and crying right now
holy fuck man. such an awesome idea for a video :) gj
Baun Denmark Glad you like it. There'll be more for sure :-)
Maybe off-topic but was that a Atari ST on the shelf behind you?
My first computer was a 1040ste,had a stfm too..
Later came the modded Amiga 500.
My first 'real' pc was a pentium 100 Packard Bell...
I really feel the need to buy one(st) and restore it.
Emulators can only take you so far..
Yep, I also made a video about the ST!
To access the bios press Ctrl-Alt and S from the dos prompt
Yeah, I found that out after I made the video :-)
small tip: wd40 is not a lubricant, its a cleaner/dissolver, pretty much the opposite of lubrication.
W D 40 - Water Displacer/Penetrating Agent, it's a solvent for water, but, you're not wrong, it strips every bit of lube out and leaves a coating of silicone which IS a lubricant. Just a really fine one that does not protect metal bearing surfaces as you suggest.
It's a hard one to pin down, like me you're suggesting that some kind of 'real' lube needs to be used ;0)
can you have a reference for this CF to IDE plz ? i have a ALT386 i need to replae HDD
Hey - great Video!
where are you from? Im about to sell my 386Sx. do you got any idea where id do that?
I'm from Germany. You can always sell stuff on eBay and honestly, you'll probably get a better price there any anywhere else.
But if you want to do the retro community a favor, you'll look for a local club, hacker space or web forum about retro computing.
People there will probably not be willing to pay as much, but they will care for your hardware a lot better.
read the sticker it has the hard drive configuration info
Do you have a service manual for this laptop? I was in the process of replacing the drive on this laptop, but now i have a blank screen (laptop does still go through the other boot up routines - leds, floppy) even after putting the original drive back.
Dan Selvey Sorry, I don't have any documentation for the computer.
I remember having some problems with the Video card after reassembling everything. The slot for it is placed a bit problematically and even applying some pressure on plastic below the expansion slot or routing one of the cables that go underneath it slightly differently would cause the screen to stop working.
See my channel for some clues to this... I can't remember off hand but one of the voltage rails from the PSU is required for the screen... I think it was something weird like -24v or something... the capacitors on these PSU die a horrendous leaky death and this is what caused my screen failure.
Ich frage mich warum du nicht einfach ein Promise Drive Max benutzt hast, das ist eine 8Bit ISA Karte mit einem Option ROM welches es ermöglicht Festplatten größer als 137GB an alten Computern zu nutzen, da du ja ein ISA Slot frei hast
1. Weil ich es nicht kenne.
2. Weil es eine 8 Bit Karte ist, während ich so eine 16 Bit Anbindung habe.
3. EZ-Drive belegt nur ein paar KiB konventionellen Speicher.
4. Der Plattenplatz ist mehr als genug :-p
my first pc was a Link 480Z
I had a 386sx version of this laptop
Yeah, they seem to be a bit more common, even though they were probably quite a bit more expensive.
@@flashmeback it's also possible they just changed the CPU after they produced a few of those laptops. I think the 386SX was made as a direct replacement.
look like as Atary Stacy notebook
Vendo portátil AMSTRAD AT 286
Cumon show whats its capable of
If you want the standard DOS tools for this laptop then drop me a line.
the 10uf would have been fine
Oof he's cute. Who knew.
Hdregenarator
I'll take a look at it. Thanks for sharing.
Using conductive material at all for the cover of the computer was such a stupid design flaw lol
I guess it's for EMC. So it makes sense because otherwise they wouldn't have gotten it certified. But they could have added a non-conductive coating on top.
wtf?:)))), n1