Chicony LT3600 (LT3400, LT5300)

[freakedenough]

Hi guys,

hopefully one of you has an old 286 or 386-class laptop from Chicony and its manual.
Ive got a LT3600 and it has a broken screen (I guess the ribbon cable is damaged, touching it changes the garbage i see on the LCD), it has an external screen VGA port, however, when I plug it in and power it on, it doesn't automatically enable the external screen.
There must be some weird keyboard combination to do so (similar to the Compaq Portable 386 where it is CTRl+ALT+comma). Further in my interest are the 8 dip switches inside. Please help a poor..

Thank you!

 

[freakedenough]

worst case:
i found the manual on ebay, however, without a tool LVGAKEYB that came with an utility floppy disk, there is no way to enable the FN key to enable the external screen. the conner cp3044 hard drive in this laptop seems to be dead, i cannot read or write on it. it appears empty (on a 486, k6-2 system). fn and minus/plus does dis- and enable the TURBO led, however, FN+END gives no reaction - ext screen remains with no signal. also ctrl+alt+o using an ext keyboard gives no signal

also the screen flex cable is soldered on the screens end, replacing it - respectively finding a replacement - is even harder.

 

[freakedenough]

however, it seems that there is a way to write a COM file with debug to enable the external screen if LVGAKEYB is lost; i will try to create it on a different device and attempt to boot from floppy having it in autoexec.bat.

 

[DeltaDon]

It would be very unusual for a ribbon cable to be soldered directly to the LCD. What's the LCD P/N? There's no connector at all? What's at the other end of the ribbon? Perhaps there's a cold solder joint where the ribbon bonds tot he LCD? A gentle touch from a soldering iron would rebond the ribbon to the LCD.

 

[freakedenough]

Might be unusual but its the case here, sadly. I already tried the gentle touch with a soldering iron/heat already, didn't help at all.
The LCD is a Hitachi LM837DXF

 

[DeltaDon]

A weird design - I looked at the Hitachi LCD on an online seller's site (ouch for price!) and see the ribbon cable is part of the display. I assume you tried checking resistance on each wire in the ribbon? You might get lucky and find broken wire(s) that you can bridge since it is a wire ribbon and not a Mylar with plated traces. OBTW, I worked on a lot of later Chicony laptops (MP 968 - MP995) and they all had LCD's with connectors. I ended up buying the last of the USA service center's parts when Chicony pulled out of the laptop business. But no parts for your early model laptop.

 

[freakedenough]

For the googlers in here, I scanned the whole Chicony LT3600 manual and put it on web archive: https://archive.org/details/manual-chicony-lt-3600

I for myself decided to throw the device away, I cannot even use it with an external monitor based on the above.

 

[3lectr1c]

Hello,
You're one of the only people to put photos of this thing online. I'm currently working on documenting all of Chicony's laptops on my website: https://macdat.net/pc/chicony_home.html
I didn't even have this one listed. An LT3400, LT5300, and LT5400 all appeared in Chicony's FCC (US regulatory) records, but the LT3600 didn't. All I can find on this thing are from European sites, so I'm assuming this one was never sold in the US. Would you mind if I used your photos on my site?

 

[freakedenough]

Feel free. I later uploaded the whole manual to web archive.

Manual Chicony LT 3600 : Chicony : Free Download, Borrow, and Streaming : Internet Archive

Manual for laptop computer Chicony LT3600 in EnglishBought from eBay in 06/2022 for fu**ing 30€ and scanned for public in 07/2022Parts - such as FN-Key...

archive.org

 

[3lectr1c]

Thank you, for the permission and also for preserving that manual! I'm sorry you couldn't get yours to run again.