Alarmingly troublesome Bondwell B310 laptops
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- Опубліковано 22 сер 2024
- Bondwell laptops were notable for having Cherry MX Blue clicky mechanical keyboards and a built-in alarm system. Unfortunately they also suffer from bad surface-mount capacitors, so these days it is very rare to find one in fully working condition.
I laughed when the alarm came on and you got startled. Sorry, but that camera jerk was hilarious.
+Daniël's Tech & Music Channel The alarm was *LOUD* and I was only about a foot away from it, so of course I got startled!
+vwestlife xddddd
+VWestlife -So, when did the FBI release you? ;)
Daniël's Tech & Music Channel I know that was hilarious
That's easily the hardest I've ever laughed at a vwestlife vid, I thought he was gonna fall over.
Who the hell is General Failure, and why is he reading my disk?
+Max Greyfeather It's like how we have a surgeon general, or a General of the army. He's in charge of failures. He's gotta inspect your disk to make sure that it has indeed failed before it can be called such.
+Blowtorch the Robot He is the commanding officer of Captain Obvious and Corporal Punishment.
He was born in 1990 and has two floppy children named A: and B: and are both 3.5 inches tall. He is lazy and never works with anyone because he can't understand what they are saying.
+Vara Mepresia "general failure" meaning that there is a problem with the floppy drive.
Meme Hunters wooooosh
Now I see why you put "alarmingly" troublesome.
10:27
that alarm must've been a smoke alarm jeezus
That alarm scared the hell out of me xD
+Kyle's Tech Channel
me 2
that alarm scared the crap outta me
Looks like you might have needed new underpants after that alarm.
My IBM Thinkpad 380 ED also let the smoke out, but continued to work after it! To this day I still can't understand what burned because everything still works!
I'm very surprised those old Conner drives spun up! Those were famous for having stiction problems. I had a 40 and 60MB, both suffered from it. As long as they were left on, they'd continue running (probably indefinitely), but once spun down you'd have to flick your wrist with them in hand to get them to spin again.
I wonder if that alarm actually disabled the machine in some way, or if it were really just an alarm. Imagine that thing going off in the middle of a quiet library! No wonder it didn't take off.
I guess all's well that Bondwell's! Yeah, that doesn't make sense.
I grew up with one of these as my personal computer due to my dad getting one in exchange for some computer repairs. Probably the greatest computer time-sink I could have ever been given back in 96 or so. Played a lot of test drive and battle chest on it.
I find getting old computers working to be almost irresistible, even though I've no use for them, and no space!
Still super cool! I acquired an old Bondwell 310. I'm looking to find a boot disk. It gets as far as asking for the boot disk. I noticed on ebay people are selling exterior modems. So much fun to ride some old historical PC waves, I love that you try to restore them!
That was one helluva smoke test! You let it all out and then it powered up anyway, incredible. Clearly uxwbill needs to one-up you sometime!
40 MB hard drive. It's incredible how tiny the hard drive capacity was just 20-25 years ago.
Mike Hall I still have my 512MB flash drive from 2005 :)
I payed 50 euros for it back in the day. Now for 35 euros I can buy USB drive that is 256 times bigger than the one from 2005 :)
Mike Hall The cheapest laptops are already hitting the 200 euro mark. That was unthinkable just 7-8 years ago :)
Mike Hall Yes, but that was a second-hand (used) laptop. I was talking about the prices of brand new full sized (14-15 inch screen) laptops.
Mike Hall Lenovo also makes good cheap tablets. For 130$ you could buy pretty good tablet. My little cousin has a 100$ one and it runs pretty well considering the price :)
Mike Hall Ipads are extremely expensive and personally I think that they are ain't worth it that much unless you find a good deal on an older iPad :)
The video is 13:37 long.
Leet.
What the hell dose that mean
Mike Hall leet is offensive
I've repaired that model of floppy drive with very similar symptoms by just replacing all the electrolytic capacitors on the bottom of the PCB surrounding the motor.
WHY would you put 12v in a 9v device?!
that was priceless! i laughed myself sick when that alarm went off and you jumped back.......
Well at least we know the alarm works...
.. because vwestlife is gonna turn it up until something pops... :D
Philip vB I thought that was PhotonicInduction?
baaelectronics Yeah, that was the joke.
Philip vB lol!
Those backup batteries in the Bondwells look like bog standard 123 photo batteries? (I believe certain Apple products and some PC motherboards also used that type)
The negative pole can be found with a multimeter. Testing conductivity between power connector and the metal parts of the laptop.
I've got the exact same laptop, B310+, in mostly working condition, though mine's the model without a backlight. The only problem with mine is the screen has started getting weird ghosting lines and such, which I expect is the electrolytic caps failing.
The floppy drive is indeed a standard 1.44MB floppy drive, and can be replaced with another drive. I thought I had replaced mine with a generic PC drive without changing the jumpers, but I'm forgetting if I did that or just managed to get the drive reading again.
For swapping to the external monitor, at least on the B310+, the first thing that shows up on the screen is: Press F1 for LCD, F2 for CRT. So I'd assume that it would be the same on the SX if you wanted to try it with a VGA monitor.
Well, if you can't find a floppy drive with a selector switch, you could always replace the cable with one that has a twist in it. Or make your own cable extension. Might be hard to fit all of that into a laptop case, though.
Sure looks like that case is big enough to hold a mITX motherboard. Would be a pretty neat mod!
What a waste of beautiful vintage tech. If you can't fix it, sell it on to someone who can plz... Please, don't send them to the crusher :
Hey westlife. You can put the harddisk as you said in a normal pc to format it. But format it as an /s so it has an operation and boot on it. Then just copy dos on it, edit the autoexec.bat and config.sys ( make those 2 files manually) to let it run the dos copied on the drive.
It should work then.
Edit: Copy old norton commander also. its such a handy dos tool.
That made me cringe. Voltage MATTERS, it's Amperage that does not. You can plug a power supply that has far more amps and the hardware would only draw what it needs, or less amps and it will fail to power on, but what ever voltage is rated for that is what you need to use. Modern electronics are actually designed to work around +/- 10% of their rated voltage, older ones were very picky. That was a really bad mistake to make for someone who does so much with computers. That and the fact that you didn't do a full visual inspection first, because you could have just powered it on with standard C sized batteries. This is the first time I have actually been disappointed. It's a real shame what happened here. Worst of all, a professional could have honestly probably repaired the damage. Would have been hacky, but given the size and quantity of components on these old machines, even blown PCB tracks could be repaired, not to mention how cheap and easy surface mount components are to acquire and replace today, so it's a double whammy that you scrapped it.
I know that, but as I said in the video, I wasn't getting any response out of the laptop, so I decided to get a bit "brute force" with it.
ONE WHOLE MEGABYTE OF RAM!
ONE WHOLE MEGABYTE YA DON'T SAY!!?
The alarm on mine just scared the crap out of me too!
OMG! The Graphic on the box of the beloved Twin Towers where I used to do business. That day I was Late and Thank god.
I'm sure you know what day I'm talking about......... I used to live in South Jersey. After that I now live in rural Georgia
July 4?
+AIO inc. I hope it isn't 9/11 .-.
everen lee Yes it is......And the Paris attacks are making it seem very fresh in my mind... Traumatized.... :(
everen lee
Reminds me too much of that terrible incident.
"I was walking through blood and bone in the streets of Manhattan looking for my brother"
"Oh, God, man I'm sorry"
"Yeah, he was in northern Canada."
:(
floppy problems fall into a few categories I've seen. 1) heads are filthy, especially in old drives. 2) Heads are magnetically biased and should be degaussed (quite rare, but possible in older drives). 3) bad components in the drive itself, quite common the older the drive gets, especially if any electrolytic caps in use. 4) bad controller onboard the drive, rare, and pretty much unfixable unless you can get a known-good board for that specific model, and sometimes that specific lot number.
First impression when taking delivery of my brand new B310 back in the day: open the laptop and the "Bondwell" name badge immediately falls off. For a company that sounds like they make glue, that was not a good start. Things went progressively downhill from there.
I still have my old B310sx, and it still works. Gave many years of service till windows became more necessary for work. Had a parallel port network adaptor and serial port connected modem. Only problem was the screen lid clips broke when someone else used it.
Wow, those are some of the strangest laptops I've ever seen.
I couldn't do it - I had to watch with the sound nearly silent until I found the part where the alarm goes off!
I'm glad I looked at some of the comments first, otherwise that alarm going off would have startled me too! It might be fun to build a wooden case for the keyboard to fit into.
Well that late 80s early 90s capacitor problem explains why one of my walkman cassette players from 1989 no longer functions. That also explains how when I opened it up, a capacitor fell off the PCB.
Bondwell is a toshiba laptop isn’t it?
That is a 3.6 volt battery that macs used up till 2002
They would have probably been fine after a full recap.
Maybe that smoke was a smokescreen to make you think the laptop died.. A James Bondwell laptop
My first computer was a Bondwell B310. It worked fine...until it warmed up, then the screen shut down. It spent more time in repairs than being used.
Ain't no one stealing that laptop! :)
It's like a car alarm on a house.
I had that same unit when it was new in 1992. It suffered bad from screen burn-in and was generally just ok.
Fun fact, they don't use MX Blues, rather MX Dark Blues, a very rare
type of switch which is only confirmed to be used on the B310!
Those older Teac floppy drives fail from bad caps on the motor control board. The caps go bad and the motor runs at the fastest possible speed. Replace the caps and it will work like new again. :-)
Haha, that smoke was hilarious. Never had a computer literally burn out like that.
it would be nice to see you with a Lexicomp LC-8620 or simular. I love the little guys but mine got stolen from me before I could see about getting it set up to run
You know, the old high school I used to go to have an open day every year, and I remember when I went one year, they had on display a very old notebook computer that I think also had a mechanical keyboard on it, it made quite a notivable clicking sound when I pressed the keys. I think the computer was a GAF Portalite 286/16, well, that's what I remember being written on the front bezel, but I may be wrong. I don't know what kind of key switches it has, but I'm pretty sure they were mechanical, they could have been very high quality rubber dome key switches.
I think it's really sad that you couldn't get either of them working, did you try putting C cells in the B310SX to see if that would get it working? I wonder how long the thing would last on C cells, my guess is probably an hour at the very most. Could the 286 use C cells? I too was seriously startled by that alarm, very unpleasant noise, no wonder you jolted the camera. I suspect when the alert light was flashing that means you need to disarm the alarm before it activates. In theory the alarm isn't a bad idea, it'll certainly deter theft of the computer. The floppy drive in the 286 sounds very unhealthy indeed when it spins the disk motor.
As soon as I saw the alarm light flashing I expected it to go off, interesting feature for sure.
Not sure if its the same, but isn't there a way that you can change the drive selection by swatching some of the wires of the floppy disk drive cable? I remember doing it back when I had my ATARI ST'S.
Hi I'm new to your channel do you only have old laptops and computers or do you have a modern one as well?
+Treamor My newest computer is an HP Compaq MP8200S with an Intel Quad Core i5 CPU.
There is one acer laptop that uses cherry mx blue swatches, the Predator 21x
That keyboard sound is amazing.
The cherry mx blue keyboard in those things sounds so nice. I'm on a MX clone board myself. It's kinda like the green switches apparently.
I kinda don't like Cherry MS Blue switches, as nice as they are, they hurt my ears when typing in a quiet room
That alarm was comical
Somethings never change:
"What the password for your laptop? "Dunno, I forgot"
"Whats the password for your bitcoin wallet that worth millions?" "Dunno, I forgot"
I wonder if that alarm was a disgruntled response from that smoke you started?
I love those older sounds
You seem to be very knowledgeable gut about hw side of things. I am software guy, so I want to ask. Are there any cheap (
Look for a used IBM Model M.
Looks like it is a common thing for floppy to not work, i saw similar unit with same problem. Also, you can change unit ID by switching cables in the ribbon.
This looks very similar in casing to a Tandy laptop I bought back in '92. It used a Cyrix 486 SLX chip which was a weird 386/486 hybrid, had 4 MB or ram (upgraded from 2), a 60 MB HD, a 2400 baud modem (bought separately) and a passive B&W LCD. That little sucker lasted until '05 until the HD finally gave out (the FD gave out a couple of years before). By then though it was pretty much a paperweight as far as useful software went. Tough lil' bugger though. It got dropped a few times but kept right on chugging.
Didn't know they made Cherry MX Blue Switches back then...
That alarm :)......Let me know if you decide you're ready to part with one of those keyboards ;)
Even if you can't get a motherboard working, I would atleast recommend using a hot air gun to pull all the significant chips to save them.
Have you tried 720k disks ?
I wonder if it was the display board that was smoking?
That alarm tho
1st person I see owning a Conner hard drive. I ended up having a CFA540S from a 486 (i lost it when I moved), it's half-dead, but not really sure how does work with modern IDE-capable machines.
Looks ready for a RaspberryPI swap, if unable to be repaired.
Hi vwestlife would it be possible for you take a picture or scan the cover of that catalog? I need a better look at that.
Looks like a Photo/Camera battery of the era. I think it is a 720K Floppy like my Toshiba 1200 had.
Did you try replacing the BIOS/CMOS battery? Sometimes machines appear to be DOA but with a fresh battery it make come up... As for the floppy if drive doesn't have a drive number jumper then before or after the cable "flip" sets the drive number.
He is showing the dead Bios battery right at the beginning and doesn't care about it, because he can't identify the type. As the 'B' of 'Bios' stands for 'basic', replacing this battery would be the first thing to do. Either it is a rechargeable NiCd cell or a regular one - voltage is important, not the shape (this cable-tie implements that it is a replacement anyway).
I owned the 'little brother' with two floppies and no harddisk. Passed it on to a friend who used it long, long time as a type-writer. These Bondwells were not bad at all.
So you set the smoke alarm off then?.
TURN DOWN FOR WHAT! (Then the alarm sounds) That would've been amazing. :D
It's not that amazing: www.dropbox.com/s/ogl4pomzfxp25e4/bondwell.mp4?dl=0
I one time had a Pentium AT motherboard that refused to detect any PCI or ISA card! I still need to test the caps on that thing, but I know some caps went bad!
Well, this was highly entertaining :-) Even though the smoke came out, it clearly still works so I think it's worth attempting repair.
old disk drive only took low density disks... most of the new high density didn't work so you need to tape the high density, double sided hole
Not with the B310. It has a high density floppy drive.
seem to remember it the other way BUT I'll defer to you. Maybe it was some other device I scavenged.
No 80287? 80287s generally were in 40-pin DIP sockets.
Try changing the CMOS Battery. It could be that gets erased, and this RAM not being powered could be why it is not booting.
I really like your videos man.
Have you ever thought to Google the keyboard command fur monitor switching?
The battery is most likely a 3.6V non-rechargeable lithium battery.
Kevin, i have one of those jumper floppy drives, but its too late now :/
Politely curious, do you collect old computers? How many do you have?
Yes, and a lot.
Cool hobby, wish I had the space to do it. Good luck to you.
Funny, at 58 I'm old enough to remember most of these.
One of those laptops you fix one thing n something else goes haywire.
can i play gta 5 on it i wont mind if it would run at medium graphics
+Al Zubair I can't tell if you are being serious.
If you are: Fuck no.
If you are not: Yeah. Sure it can. At 1 FPS.
no i tried it ran on ultra grahics in 60 fps but then i woke up from my dream
1fps? lllllllll
10:26 that scare though hahaha
Would it be a good idea to turn one of them into a smartphone dock?
I've had an interest in having an convenient way to use a keyboard with my phone.
But what will you do with two Cherry MX Blue clicky mechanical keyboards without a laptop ?
you can harvest the switches off of the pcb, save them as replacements. or do a diy keyboard
these are cool machines :)
oh and.. that jump scare though :D
9.3 volts comes from older direct-transformer type power supplies as they have a division of the standard wall current that's been smoothed out with a few capacitors. 9.3v is just easier to make than 9.0... also, if your system likes 9v in general, 9.3 gives you a bit of a buffer zone to work with. You can go a bit higher than required voltage and be fine, but going lower can cause anything from it just not working to actually damaging certain components.
Sounds like a Proprietary Laptop with Proprietary parts or outdated parts.
@ vwestlife which program will u use to send files over serial?
I got A Good idea put it In a computer built by you and install a version of Windows
Would you mind making a video of the hard drive spin up?
Also, those aren't cherry blue mx switches, they're just simple mechanical return switches.
And I'm sorry, but that alarm was absolutely hilarious!
+AIO inc. They are definitely Cherry MX Blue switches. Did you see the part where I showed a close-up of the Cherry logo?
vwestlife
No, I'm watching on mobile (iPhone 2G). I'll look again later.
10:25..... sorry dude.... I had to laugh.... :)
Early tantalum capacitors were quite prone to fail. Shouldn't be hard to replace with modern capacitors.
+DjResR Surface mount capacitors are not easy to replace.
vwestlife Actually it's not that hard to replace, it's tricky to reuse old ones though as it tends to melt the terminals off if heated too long (10 seconds), I have done it myself. You need a small soldering iron, heat one side and lift the cap up with it and then desolder other side, or wiggle old one off if it's a silver barrel type. Clean up the pads from solder with the soldering wick, then solder new one in place (small capacitors are dirt cheap). Mark the polarity before desolder as it is polarity sensitive part (brick type tantalum has positive side marked with the line compared to usual electrolytic). The capacitors are quite large compared to 0603 LED I reused a few times - 1206 is smallest capacitor I have seen, even 0402 LED wasn't as hard to solder as I thought earlier until I tried. Nearsighted focusing error helps me also although.
/watch?v=3bdMS0SsHnQ is a good example.
Cheers.
They were called tantrum capacitors for a while...
AIO inc. Quite interesting. :)
The real question is if it can run 3d mark firestrike at 120 fps at extreme settings