Another Compaq III 2660.......

[Bassoonbloke]

Hello there you good folks,

I recently picked up a Compaq III 2660, it has 640k ram only and had a 20mb conner HDD. When powered I needed to run the setup from a FD, which I did, with no real issues(It didn't come with it's disks, but I managed to download a copy).
I noticed at the time that there was a single vertical line of bright pixels, but was not worried about this as I have read about Gas plasma display problems.
The installed HDD was completely shot, so I installed a 1.2gb drive and got this to be formatted and useable as a 250mb drive, all good.
Dos 4 (for the moment) installed and I can boot perfectly from drive C now.
More worrying now though is that fact that over a short period of use I am getting more and more vertical lines of full brightness pixels. I am now looking at 4 spread over the display. The lines are not affected by the brightness control.
Has anyone else had this issue (it seems that usually the display shows lines of darker brightness) and if so any good ideas what to check. Is it likely to continue to deteriorate or do you think it is a repairable error not being caused by the display?
Any thoughts would be much appreciated.

Cheers,
Alan.

 

[Bassoonbloke]

Hello again,

Well, I can now report that I have upped the OS to Dos 6.22 and re-built the HDD and all is well (at least that part).
I have noticed that from cold some of the new lines that appeared on screen were missing, but then re-appeared after a while, so back to four lines again. So far it has stopped at four so maybe it has stabilised for a while.
Has anyone come across this problem and does anyone have any suggestions for a fix?

Cheers,
Alan.

 

[RWallmow]

Yeah, the lines are par for the course on these, mine tend to come and go, sometimes its pristine without any lines, sometimes some lines are dimmer, and sometimes the whole line sticks on full bright. I doubt it's something that can be fixed, kind of a problem with aging plasma displays, and sadly they are not very repairable.

I actually installed a 40GB drive in mine using OnTrack's DiskManager software (EZ-BIOS software would also do the trick), It let's you access the whole disk (via multiple 2GB partitions, since that's a MS-DOS 6.22 limitation).