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New England Compaq SLT 386/20 (working, with power supply): Cost of shipping

Covers: Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Maine.
L

langelgjm

New Member
Joined
Jan 1, 2009
Messages
7
Location
Hudson, NH
Delivery Options
In Country Shipping or Local Pickup
Hi - I have a Compaq SLT 386/20 portable computer. I purchased it secondhand about 20 years ago at a Greater Baltimore Hamboree & Computerfest. It works and comes with the original power supply. I'd love to find a new home for this computer! I'll be sad to part with it but I had a lot of fun with it over the years.

Specs: 20 MHz 386, 7 MB RAM (this is what DOS reports, Windows reports 18 MB "free", but not sure if that's including virtual memory), 115 MB hard drive, 3.5" floppy drive.
Currently running MS-DS 6.22 and Windows for Workgroups 3.11. No operating system disks are included.

Condition: Good. There are some stickers on the case, but otherwise no cracks or damage. The power supply connector had a "tang" that broke off, and there's some electrical tape on the connector side, but it still works fine.

Over the years I also modified the computer several times:
  • There is a 12 volt car adapter wired directly into the battery contacts (the battery itself is missing), which allows the computer to be plugged directly into a car power port and used without the power supply.
  • At some point I replaced the original hard drive; the current drive is 115 MB, of which about 50 MB are free.
  • Finally, the computer has a clock chip with a sealed battery which died long ago. Using these instructions, probably more than a decade ago, I cut into the clock chip and wired in an external battery pack to maintain clock/configuration settings. This seems to have worked without issue since then.
The posted pictures were all taken this week. I haven't used it extensively in years, but in the past I successfully used the integrated modem, VGA out (which supports color on an external monitor), serial port (for a mouse), parallel port (for a parallel to ethernet adapter).

I'll also throw in two vintage games - Super Tetris and SimCity, both on 3.5" floppies. I can't guarantee the condition of the floppies, they haven't been used in many years. The games come in original boxes with manuals.

I'm pretty much only looking to cover the cost of shipping (which will probably run between $30 and $50, it's quite heavy and won't fit in any flat rate boxes). Free local pickup is also an option if you are within driving distance of Nashua, New Hampshire.

Please feel free to post any questions and I'll do my best to answer. Thanks!

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Thank you! The computer arrived today mostly safe. Packaging was appropriate, but these days it seems that no matter how well you pack your package, a modern day carrier will find ways around it to induce some damage. It appears that computer suffered a heavy blow on the right side - there are multiple cracks on plastic on that side front to back including snapped off hinge cover. Functionally it does turn off, screen functional, but hard drive does not spin up fully any more and reports "Disk controller failure" after POST and spins down (not completely unexpected - it is on the right side). I will open the chassis later today to see if that is maybe due to cable connection become loose after blow.

This happened before with old computers shipped to me and shipped by me, through a thick layer of padding. UPS was usually better than FEDEX, but this time they dropped the ball.

I think the machine is still serviceable, the screen, motherboard, keyboard, power supply do work. The hard drive hopefully can be replaced.

Thank again
 
I'm sad to hear it was damaged in transit, but hopefully it will be repairable. Given how sturdily these machines were built it must have been a pretty serious blow. If it's only the hard drive, that's probably one of the easiest parts to source and replace. Good luck and let us know how it turns out...
 
Of course it would be too good if it was just loose cable. But no such luck, all cables were snug. But since there were no sound of head moving during startup my next idea was the heads were jammed by inpact. With that in mind I opened the drive, moved the head by hand and sure enough after applying power the disk came to live the head started moving, MSDOS booted.

(I am always mesmerized by the view of working exposed hard drive heads, so I immidiately shoot the video of boot sequence. But it turns out the forum does not allow attaching video files, so the video will be for my own enjoyment.)

Anyway, that turned out to be the easiest part, tha hardest part was closing the disk back, as the rubber gasket around the lead detearated, became soft and elongated, not fitting around the lead groove. I tried boiling it in water, but that did not help. I ended up cutting out a piece to make it shortrer, and after few tries the lead was seated on top of gasket evenly, although with a small hole in gasket. Hopefully it will not collect to much dust though that hole to crash the head on the surface, it is not going to be up 24/7.

So after putting it all back together, booting and trying to enter command at DOS prompt I had another bad surprise: the keyboard was broken. The keys prodused seemingly random input. I plugged external keyboard, bad it showed the same problem, which started to be supicious - probably something loaded during boot was making fool of me. But with this broken keyboard I could not get to autoexec/config files. So I started excersise with pressing ctrl-alt-del and then hitting various keys in a hope to bypass startup file. Eventually I ended up with keyboard error at boot that left me at plain dos (I think I was pressing f5 at the time). And sure enough the was a command in autoexec with like kbd and dvorak. Commenting that out resulted in sane keyboard after reboot.

All in all the machine is functional for now, I do not know how long the hard drive will hold with that new vent hole, but should not die right away. The broken plastic all around does make it look somewhat sad, but I've seen much worth. So at the moment I am quite happy, maybe over weekend I will wipe the hard drive and isntall os/2 on it to match the prominent sticker on its face :)
Thanks
 
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