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Zenith Data Systems Model ZCV-251-EC

Came across this wee snippet with regards to running Windows 3.0 on Zenith machines:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_3.0

"This version of Windows was the first to be pre-installed on hard drives by PC-compatible manufacturers. Zenith Data Systems had previously shipped all of its computers with Windows 1.0 or later 2.x on diskettes but committed early in the development of Windows 3.0 to shipping it pre-installed. Indeed, the Zenith division had pushed Microsoft hard to develop the graphical user interface because of Zenith's direct competition with Apple in the educational market. However, Zenith PCs had to run a proprietary OEM version of Windows because they used hard disks with 1024 byte sectors (instead of the normal 512 bytes) and could not use the standard SWAPFILE.EXE"

Seems there were issues with Zenith 8086 and 8088 machines using later versions of Dos with 720k fdds;

ftp://ftp.microsoft.com/misc1/PEROPSYS/MSDOS/KB/Q89/7/23.TXT

I wonder if DR Dos 5 & 6 would do a bit better? Managed to locate a few links MS Dos (Zenith OEM) 3.3 plus though. Also Windows 3.0 and 3.1

Found a Z386 http://www.flickr.com/photos/46288984@N07/sets/72157623042190265/detail/ Has a funky cache card on it.
 
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Gave the case a good clean down. Has a bit of battle damage, a few scrapes, chips and what not but all in not too bad.

Rummaged through my ram box for suitable 30 pin 1 meg simms. I only have a dozen or so of varying sizes but I did find four that seemed suitable and tested them on my 386 test bed mobo. It's a lot easier when you don't have to fumble around in a cage. In the process I came across four 4 meg sticks which I never knew I had. I put those aside for use in my other systems.

All in happy with that. Turns out one NZ member of Tezzas forum can remember using similar systems in an school IT lab back in the day to carry out programming lessons and playing a few games. Arkanoid II and a game called Snark Hunter were mentioned.
 
Put the ram sticks in and no error was reported as to the change so assumed all was well. Ran CheckIt still no change in memory size. Had a look in the Bios and couldn't change the size. The LEDS on the mobo on start up showed both banks were ok. Looking behind the ram banks, in front of the speaker/hdd led plug there is a 3 pin jumper J520. It appears to select which 4 banks to use. Jumpers on pins 1-2 or 2-3 will give a total of 4megs due to each ram slot having one 4 meg simm. When the jumper is removed the 8 megs total is detected. Upon restarting the machine kicked up a ram error as expected, so into the bios I went and altered the ram amount to reflect that reported and all is as it should be. Ran CheckIt just to be sure and went through the ram test with flying colours.
 
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Dragged the parallel port LS120 drive out of the shed this afternoon. It's been buried, unused, for around a decade or more in a box with a couple of parallel port flat bed scanners. Hooked it up and installed the latest dos drivers. Now I have some extra storage until I sort out another hdd. Ok networking would've worked fine and be a lot quicker but there's something about using an external drive of some sort on this era machine. Also it can take 1.44 and 720k 3.5'' drives which is handy for disk copying and the like.

For some reason I'd backed up a copy of the NT 4.0 installation files and SP6 on one LS120 disks. Since then I've been given a number of NT 4.0 cds so there's no point in keeping it. It's a bit of a tedious task removing the files so I've started the process of formatting that disk now. First thing I'll do is transfer a copy of the programs that I want off the 52meg hdd over to it. Rediscovered how useful Xtree Golds PRUNE option is and now have 12megs free.
 
Put GeoWorks Ensemble 2.0 on it. Yes, I know it's a gui blah blah but having 8 megs of memory it would be a shame to waste it. I must say it runs a lot better than I expected. The LS120 drive shows up as a cd icon. Copied the rest of the stuff over an LS120 disk and deleted what I didn't want on the hdd using that horrid pointy clicky thing. I've since recovered from that traumatic experience. The hdd now has 22 megs free to play with. Not bad really. Only gripe I have with the default GE 2.0 installation is it doesn't give you the option to deselect stuff like backgrounds, samples files etc.

Forgot to mention the dos version is MS Dos 5a. mem is reporting around 562k free conventional at the moment which isn't too bad considering what is being loaded.

So current setup so far:

286/12 cpu
256k vga, IDE, FDD, two com ports and one parallel port
8 megs of ram
49 megs usable on 52 meg hdd on internal controller
3.5" 1.44 meg fdd on internal controller
Serial mouse on com2
Generic AT enhance keyboard
Parallel port LS120 drive
MS Dos 5a
XTree Gold
Some Dos hdd tools
Some Dos games
GeoWorks Ensemble 2.0

Future wants, upgades and add-ons:

Decent Documentation for this system.
Network card
Bigger internal hdd- Maybe IDE-CF adapter with XT-IDE bios on the nic. A scsi solution isn't out of the question. DDO also an option.
External 51/2" drive- just for the hell of it.
Sound card.
386SX upgrade card-probably impossible but there's always hope. This'll allow the use of some more exotic software such as Desqview also free up more conv. memory.
Add-on memory card-Bios has an entry for up to an extra 10 megs of additional external memory.
 
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Thanks for looking. Seems to contain the same info as th99. Something will pop up. The system is running very well. Not being stuck with OEM Dos and proprietary disk formatting is no doubt a bonus. It's seems surprising quick for a 286/12 system.
 
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Been a bit slack getting this system sorted so a bit more scavaging through my boxes of bits. I dragged out a GeniusLan nic (GR1222 chip-internet search of ge200410.exe will source the drivers) and SB CT 1740 sound card. Set up both up so so there's no conflicts. Added the SET BLASTER statement in the autoexec.bat file All good and one free ISA slot left. Need to clean up a pair of fairly grubby beige SB branded speakers I was given that are still of in the shed. For the time being SONY branded black unpowered items will do. Being almost completely deaf in one ear sound output seems fine, but a bit quiet, with the sound card volume dial turned right up. I'll slap a pic or two up sometime tomorrow if I feel in the mood.

Bit disappointed I can't upgrade it to Windows 8.1. Oh well, I guess you can't win them all eh?
 
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A couple of boring pics running xenon2 and the SuperDrive hooked up. Located the packet driver for the nic and ran that to make sure that was honky dory. Love the fact you can remove it from memory as required.

So current setup is now:

286/12 cpu
256k vga, IDE, FDD, two com ports and one parallel port
8 megs of ram
49 megs usable on 52 meg hdd on internal controller
3.5" 1.44 meg fdd on internal controller
Serial mouse on com2
Generic AT enhance keyboard
Parallel port LS120 drive
MS Dos 5a
XTree Gold
Some Dos hdd tools
Some Dos games
GeoWorks Ensemble 2.0
CT 1740 sound card
GE2000 (KYE)Genius Lan nic with rj45 and bnc connectors. Set to auto detect media type.
 

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Seeing as I still don't have good resource for a manual to tell me more about the system. I had a go to see if I could improve the video a bit in GeoWorks . After trying a few different settings "Laser Enhanced Turbo VGA" gave the best setting of 800x600@16 colours. I'll add that to my notes in case I want to try another Gui on this machine. Apparently there's no vesa capbility as that setting just gave a garbled screen.
 
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Just playing around with the ol gurl today and decided to slap http://www.glennmcc.org/arachne/197-8086 on the thing. There don't seem to be many posts on the interweb of folk with 286s having much luck with it. Anyway, I ran the packet driver, then ran the arachne setup routine. Once that was finished I started it up. The Bootp/DHCP routine didn't want to take, so manually set up addresses etc. and away it went. The 8megs of ram has helped somewhat I'd imagine and it certainly doesn't get hung up like the win/wfw 3.x browsers. Obviously not staggering fast but there's no pesky ads either. Resizing the tool bar gives you more screen space. Hooked up to a 10mbps hub via rj45s which is hooked up to the dsl router via a rather untidy 10 mtr length of cable running from room to room.

The fun you have when installing wfw on a 486 ;)

Edit- Though I'd have a go at making a post on the
286-Hello World!!! Works a treat I must say.

Only thing I've added from the previous posted specs is the Genuis Easy Track. That's taking a while to get use to. Always wanted a track ball type pointing device to play with.
 

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I'm going to have a shot at loading an early version of Mosaic on Windows 3.1 on this machine. I've downloaded winpkt.com and trumpnet winsock. Unsure if they are 286 suitable though. Seems pretty straight forward. Load winpkt.com to the same memory location as your nic packet driver, start windows and run the winsock setup. From what I've read so far it seems it can't be done and requires Windows 3.1 to be run in 386 enhanced mode.

Anyone else tried this at all? I know it's adding more overhead then just plain Dos but it's worth crack just for the hell of it if it is possible on this ol girl.

Found some old VCF posts along the same lines and one points to this page http://www.vectorbd.com/bfd/winsock/index.html as a good point the start. Another useful Windows 3.1 link http://www.k7tty.com/Utilities/Windows31/

Old versions of Mosiac ftp://ftp.ncsa.uiuc.edu/Mosaic/Windows/Archive/

Ok I've found an old Uncreative Labs post that suggests it is possible- http://www.uncreativelabs.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=953&sid=9f6343a8c3dbbb9d17b20bf52094d6e8
 
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Getting Winsock up and running was the easy part.

Finding a browser is proving to be a bit more problematic. Tried a few early Mosiacs, they start up but I'm unable to type into the url field. Ok PECAK you need to go to File then make the first selection then another window opens with a field to type the url. Cntr-O are the key strokes required.

In the end I did get Mosaic 1 on the internet but the the results are less than startling. The sites Arachne deals with wont even load. At least I gave it a go.

Tried IE 1.0 and 2.0 but they would'nt even launch. Given that they are based on later versions of Mosiac that's hardly surprising. I'll try a few of those other applications to see if any will work on this system at all.
 

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A couple of nice utilities were included with Trumpnet Winsock to monitor system resources.
 

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Picked up a BackPack CD Rom drive this week for the machine. Later model with 32x cd reader. It came with the driver/setup disk. Installation went as smooth as silk. Series 5 drivers apparently, according to the data sticker underneath the drive, which isn't mentioned on modem7s site http://www.minuszerodegrees.net/backpack_cdrom/backpack_cdrom.htm The driver disk is 1998 though by the looks.
 

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Managed to pick up 9 LS120 disks this week at a reasonable price. This gives me 12 disks in total. Just transferring all the hdd files over to a disk using xcopy. Worked a treat.

Updated listing of bits n bobs:

286/12 cpu
256k vga, IDE, FDD, two com ports and one parallel port
8 megs of ram
49 megs usable on 52 meg hdd on internal controller
3.5" 1.44 meg fdd on internal controller
Serial mouse or Genius track ball on com2
Generic AT enhance keyboard
Parallel port LS120 drive
Parallel port Backpack CDRom drive
MS Dos 5a
XTree Gold
Some Dos hdd tools
Some Dos games
GeoWorks Ensemble 2.0
Microsoft Windows 3.1
CT 1740 sound card
GE2000 (KYE)Genius Lan nic with rj45 and bnc connectors. Set to auto detect media type.

On the look out for a QuickShot similar to the one I had on my old 286/16.
 
Just been mucking around with networking in windows 3.1 in Standard Mode on the old girl. Turns out the ftp and telnet clients bundled with the tcpip32b package for wfw 3.11 appear to function just fine on it. I was expecting them to be 386ehn only applications.
 

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IMAG0200.jpgFound a irc client that will work with trumpet winsock and in standard mode on the 286 called WS-IRC http://www.ecsis.net/pub/netuser/win3x.htm It actually does quite a nice job and connects faster the mIRC in my 386DX25 using Wfw 3.11. There're two versions, a time limited full version and a two session version which is quite adequate for for this machine.

So now I can visit #vc windowed, which was one goal I wanted to achieve on this 286 because of the ample amount of ram available, instead of plain old single tasking Dos. I've had it up running for some time and it seems quite stable, well as stable as anything running in Win 3.x can be.

Because it still only has a 50meg hdd I got rid of GeoWorks 2.0 for the time being to give free up some space. That's backed up on an LS120 drive so it's quite a simple matter of restoring it when required.
 
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Found some powered beige speakers to go with my 286 set up at a second hand shop on the way home from a 100mile trip. Gave them a bit of a scrub up with a wet clothe and tooth paste.
 

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