compaqportableplus
Veteran Member
It took many years, but damnit, I finally have one now!
Most people don't seem to be aware of this machine's existence, and think they went from the Portable, Plus then straight to the Portable II, but this machine came out in 1985 after the Plus and before the Portable II!
This is a fully AT compatible 8MHz 286 system housed in the original full-sized chassis of the Portable and Plus. You can see it also uses the AT keyboard layout instead of the original PC/XT layout the Portable and Plus used.
My particular one is in very nice cosmetic condition. It came with the original case as well (it's the same brown nylon case that the previous two models used).
I bought this one untested and getting it running was an adventure for sure! Several tantalum caps shorted and a few exploded! Once that was all corrected the machine worked for a while and then went brain dead. It froze at the DOS prompt and when I switched it off and back on, the power supply ran, but it was lifeless otherwise. No video output or beeps. So, pushed around on the socketed chips on the motherboard and it came back to life afterwards! I was deeply concerned that something on the motherboard had failed but was relieved that it was just a bad connection.
However, even after reseating all socketed chips (except the CPU) it was still freezing and then failing to reboot. Pushing around on the motherboard would restore functionality every time and I eventually determined that the fault was close to the CPU, so I pulled the CPU, cleaned the contacts on both the socket and the CPU itself, and also resoldered every pin on the CPU socket, which seems to have fixed the issue.
The machine has been stable ever since, so I think it's all good now!
The original 20MB Miniscribe hard drive works great and sounds incredible. Still has Compaq MS-DOS 3.10 on it! I will probably still give it a low-level format eventually just to keep it working reliably.
It also still has the factory 1.2MB floppy drive and tape drive.
Oh, and when I first got this thing working, I thought the foam pads in the keyboard were going to need replacing, as the keyboard didn't work at all, but it turns out the pads were fine, and the contacts were just dirty. Once I cleaned the contacts every key worked fine.
Here's a pic of the motherboard from this machine. Most people probably haven't seen one of these.
Beautiful board!
That's all for now. I can't believe I finally have one of these things!
Most people don't seem to be aware of this machine's existence, and think they went from the Portable, Plus then straight to the Portable II, but this machine came out in 1985 after the Plus and before the Portable II!
This is a fully AT compatible 8MHz 286 system housed in the original full-sized chassis of the Portable and Plus. You can see it also uses the AT keyboard layout instead of the original PC/XT layout the Portable and Plus used.
My particular one is in very nice cosmetic condition. It came with the original case as well (it's the same brown nylon case that the previous two models used).
I bought this one untested and getting it running was an adventure for sure! Several tantalum caps shorted and a few exploded! Once that was all corrected the machine worked for a while and then went brain dead. It froze at the DOS prompt and when I switched it off and back on, the power supply ran, but it was lifeless otherwise. No video output or beeps. So, pushed around on the socketed chips on the motherboard and it came back to life afterwards! I was deeply concerned that something on the motherboard had failed but was relieved that it was just a bad connection.
However, even after reseating all socketed chips (except the CPU) it was still freezing and then failing to reboot. Pushing around on the motherboard would restore functionality every time and I eventually determined that the fault was close to the CPU, so I pulled the CPU, cleaned the contacts on both the socket and the CPU itself, and also resoldered every pin on the CPU socket, which seems to have fixed the issue.
The machine has been stable ever since, so I think it's all good now!
The original 20MB Miniscribe hard drive works great and sounds incredible. Still has Compaq MS-DOS 3.10 on it! I will probably still give it a low-level format eventually just to keep it working reliably.
It also still has the factory 1.2MB floppy drive and tape drive.
Oh, and when I first got this thing working, I thought the foam pads in the keyboard were going to need replacing, as the keyboard didn't work at all, but it turns out the pads were fine, and the contacts were just dirty. Once I cleaned the contacts every key worked fine.
Here's a pic of the motherboard from this machine. Most people probably haven't seen one of these.
Beautiful board!
That's all for now. I can't believe I finally have one of these things!
