I am amazed how thick that "laptop" is. A Mini-ITX desktop case is smaller than that.

Yes, definitely lunchbox thickness.  I guess it's about right for the age though (1988), given it has a hard disk. Technology has come a long way in getting things smaller.

Tim Locke I hollowed out my SLT-286 today. Might try to figure out what I can fit inside it. Its thickness should make for a very customizable laptop, and there should be room for decent airflow. 

+Terry Stewart Terry check out the Compaq Lte the 8086 forerunner, it was much tinner and lighter.. so portable the case was about 1/4 of the size of yours (I still use the case today to carry documents and my tablet in!). Here's the Compaq Lte:

http://myweb.tiscali.co.uk/mickfrench/compaqlte.htm

Paul UK nice. Where can I get the bag

do you have a way to make a copy of the diagnostic disk?

your videos bring me great joy. all of them :D

You're welcome Mark.  Enjoy!

Thanks for those supportive comments Bunch.

William Carlin Yes sir c++ is fundamental to High-level programming but hybrid Source code like virtual C# or jvm are what the cool kids are into nowadays. Modern-day Linux didn't really catch on till 2004 but back in the day I was fortunate enough to have DSL so I force myself to learn how to use unix commands for things like unpacking tar BZ I like now that you wear you just type in simple sudo command and software installs from the internet.

Thanks for the support James!

Good luck with the job!

I’m pleased to say that the mod was successful! However I found that cutting into the chip with a knife (at least the knife I had) was quite difficult. So I just went ahead and ordered a desoldering station (I had been needing to get one anyways) and desoldered the chip. It was a little scary, but it worked out very well, with no damage done to the system board!

Good for you! (:

Yes, it is a complicated non-standard connector alright.

Maybe an Amiga ;-) Hi Dan I love your chanel. It helped me find alot of amiga tips.

jaykay18 so there are different types of VGA which is the standard VGA and what's called super VGA but super busy a can display at HD quality and has an extra yellow because of the way the signal is formatted but it's default is native 64-bit at 800 Bobby VGA is native 32-bit in RGB format. Any monitors that had blue tipped monitor cables could support the super VGA but super VGA is backwards compatible and it all the pins on the graphics card which all integrated graphics cards have the super VGA format which Microsoft included in Xbox.

The removable keyboard sort of harks forwards to tablets with bluetooth keyboards too...

Hi Eric. Thanks for those kind words. I do have a copy of the manual. Email me to terry(at)webweavers(dot)co(dot)nz to get a copy.

Well it all depends on supply and demand. Units with their chargers are not common. If it helps, i sold this one for $NZ 250 ($US175)

No idea. It's common for these computers to become separated from their chargers. The charger is complex so it's hard to find a modern replacement. I don't know of one.

CTRL+ALT + < . To restore it CTRL+ALT + >

 @tezzaNZ  Thanks! ( ╹▽╹ )

Hi Panos, I have the diagnostic disk archive file. Drop me an email at terry(at)webweavers(dot)co(dot)nz and I can arrange to get it to you.

Boot from the floppy with a fresh dos on it with antivirus. Clean hardrive with it. Use dos command sys c: and Lo. You have a clean system. Dont forget to get to bios and change boot priority to the floppy

Sounds like You have the dreaded "Stoned Virus" the worlds first ever virus. Do not put any more Boot disc's In, as It will spread from disc to disc, and computer to computer. Watch this and He explain In more detail on how to get rid of It. Good Luck. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4wpAucMg65Q

No, it isn’t. You’re probably looking at asking prices. They usually sell for around $50 to $100.

As someone who owns eight SLTs, I can attest to their reliability! I’ve had very few major issues with any of them.

Going slow-mo on the manual as Tezza flips through it suggests that it's either Ctrl + Alt + "<" or Ctrl + Alt + ">" ... I'm not sure if those are meant to be less than/greater than signs (which surely need Shift as well?) or left/right cursors (or whether that's the separate cursors or those on the (virtual) numeric keypad), however. Still, it'll only take maybe a dozen different tries to find the correct combination given that guidance, one hopes :)

(and yeah, rather non-standard!)

From memory it's Cntr-alt and the "<" key to go to external monitor. Cntr-Alt and ">" to go back to the internal screen.

Hi, sorry Albert. The manual is a user manual, and doesn't go into that level of technical detail.

Thanks Terry. Sad that there is only very little technical documentation left on this decent made laptop. But maybe good to mention is that it is possible to repair the bad battery packs by replacing the NiCads by Li-ion 18650 cells with a protective pcb module. The boards are sold as 3S, 4S (3 for 10.8 to 11.1V or 4 serie cells for 4 x 3.7 to 4.2V) lithium charging protection boards 10A,20A,25A or even 30A. See Aliexpress searching for instance on "3s li-ion lithium battery battery protection board".
By placing equal capacity cells in parallel you can double or tripple the current and the boards protect for short circuiting the battery.output too. I have a spot welder bought online in China for connecting the cells to a pack with pure nickel plate strips too (soldering Litium ion cells can degrade and even do explode or cause fire to them). My SLT/286 is beyond repair and I threw the bad battery pack away long ago. So it is too late for my machine now.

No, sorry. It's a user manual and doesn't have that kind of technical detail.

At 14:21 , I noticed a few pages in the back with connectors and what looked like pinout descriptions. May just be for the rear panel connections. Is that manual available on the net?

No, just the pinouts for the external ports. I'm not sure if its on the Net.

It seems to be a sealed unit Paolo. I'd rather not try...at least for now.

Every PC manufacturer and their mother used these non-socketed Dallas chips.. No one expected these machines to still be in use decades later you know? Those things could last for over 10 years..

 @pipschannel1222  Still not acceptable. It's basically a ticking time bomb with a 10 year or so long lifespan.

 @kosztaz87  I hate 'em too but that's a little dramatic. They are easily replaceable if you know what you're doing.. I just fixed an SLT with an empty Dallas, a few broken traces and some bad SRAM. They were never meant to live 30+ years but if you want them too they definitely can..

That sounds serious. The only thing I would advise is to open it up and check all the connectors.

Terry Stewart I open it yesterday and connections were well , hdd and floppy , etc... are in his place . Maybe capacitors ?

Thanks

Could be. These boards are surface mount. They would be very hard to diagnose the fault and work on. If you want to persist, see if you can find a service manual on the web.

Terry Stewart Ok! I will do it . When I oppen at it , I didn't saw corrosion of the capacitors . I don't know ...

+Konstantin Kuzminykh Yea, a Cold War text-based Adventure game written in BASIC (:

ok no problem ;) at those times we in Russia had very slow computers, even slower to this one =)

+rfif1541 You're welcome!

+phlaelym why was the work environment so bad?

It was just a poorly run company.  Mismanagement, and apathy towards their employees; unless you were management you were miserable.  I started working there with my friend, who is Hispanic (keep reading and you'll know why I told you that).  I knew everything about computers back then -- I could (and still can I guess) program in Pascal, Basic, and had an understanding of C++.  I had assembled many computers from spare parts and knew the industry lingo.  But Compaq needed to look racially inclusive so they gave the high-paying job as a liaison between the customers and the engineers to my friend.  He knew next to nothing about computers and had no work experience, and was fired about a year later because he didn't have a clue what he was doing.  I worked on the assembly line. Twelve hour shifts on your feet screwing boards into the units for chump change.  One day we noticed the very obese gentleman who worked on the assembly line with us had a stool to sit on while he worked.  We talked to our manager about letting others use a stool.  Wasn't happening.  I didn't think it was right they rewarded that guy's poor life decisions by making his job easier, while the rest of us weren't given that privilege.  I quit soon after -- one of the best decisions I ever made.  The turnover rate for employees at Compaq was quite high.  Usually, places with high turnover rates are usually not the best places to work (or the employees would stay).  I had another friend working there on the line.  One day the manager walked up and pointed to a hairline scratch on the motherboard my friend had made with the electric screwdriver; it was barely visible.  My friend gouged the motherboard with the screwdriver while saying "That's not a scratch -- That's a scratch".  He dropped the screwdriver like a microphone and walked out.  I still get a chuckle from that memory.  Anyway...does that answer your question?

phlaelym Thank you for sharing your experience and replying. Sounds like one of those companies that is awful to work for but there are some things that you miss. It reminds me of the sort of work environments and politics I had to deal with working in software. Some of the companies were truly awful, dire managers and sometimes people didn't get paid and projects you'd work on for a year being cancelled, totally soul destroying but I look back on much of it with nostalgia, and remember the few fun moments and dramas with the people I worked with.

Kennynva T. Everyone had BattleChess :) That game was awesome.

+Kennynva T. When you wish you still had something which ancient tech, you know it's well made and designed...that bond between user and device, is a reflection of very well engineered, well designed machines, sadly lacking in mass produced Chinese rubbish today.

You are exactly right...you could throw this laptop across the room and it will still work...try to do that to today's machines..

Midnight Rocker38 Yes, probably around then. Things were progressing very quickly around that time...

Depends what you wanted to do. The majority of mundane Windows tasks including basic Office stuff don't actually trouble a 286 that much, particularly a faster one like this, and don't consume huge amounts of memory unless you make something really complex - if you can get a 1mb, or better a 1.5mb to 2mb machine you can load most software.

In fact given the relative simplicity of most of Windows 3.1 and the typical 16-bit programs written for it, 386 and 486 chips barely accelerate operations on a pure code front (only getting some small gains from better cycle efficiency, caching and loading up their pipelines at a higher speed... IF you had a 386DX or a non-SL 486) and until Win32S came along really only sped up thanks to higher clock rates.

My main early experience of Windows systems was with 386 SX-16 desktops at school and a 486 SL-25 laptop (essentially a 486 core in what was otherwise a 386SX system... and 386SXes were basically AT's with a 386 chip shoved onto them, so the architecture for both was really just that of a very fast 286) brought home by my mother - later, I got an SL-33 as my first owned laptop, traded for a box of soap powder with a similarly cash strapped student - and if you turned off the desktops' turbo switches or put the laptops into battery-saver mode they both ran at 8mhz. Overall processing speed in both cases probably not any better, at least not significantly so, than this Compaq. (And likewise with a 486 SX-25 desktop I have - which was in use for sports science data capture and some light word processing at a previous workplace until at least the late noughties if not early 2010s, as its attached printer was still serviceable with new cartridges, and there were some USB floppy drives around the site for file transfer - although the effect isn't as marked because it's a full 32-bit system and I think it only drops to 12.5mhz)

But everything still worked just fine. There was a little more of a redraw delay for more complicated pieces of vector clipart and suchlike (in MS Works which was more common at the time), but I had until then been used to using an Atari ST, so I quite liked watching the relatively colourful, relatively high rez images being built up. It still seemed fairly quick, and more interesting than the near-instant redraw of full speed mode on the 486.

So I figure if you put 1 or 2 of the 1mb upgrade sticks into this machine, and resigned yourself to somewhat slow hard drive loading (the one thing that using a 386 or better, and having lots of memory for RAM-caching, genuinely accelerated), you probably wouldn't have found it to be "obsolete" in terms of general Windows / MS Office type tasks for a great many years to come, basically until 16-bit drivers were no longer available for any device you wanted to plug into it, or maybe the rise of USB. Of course, if you wanted to take part in the multimedia revolution, or install Windows 95, it would have been more limited, but then there were enough 386 and 486, even some early Pentium laptops that were just as handicapped. I've got a P120 machine that still only had a VGA-resolution internal panel (able to run up to 16-bit colour on it, however), so it didn't have any additional space for document creation on the go (Powerpoint is especially irksome at 640x480), and came with "just" 8mb on board, which although it makes running Windows 95 possible, also makes it torturous... really you need at least 12 or preferably 16 (...as it was already obsolete when I bought it, I just hopped straight on eBay and bought enough to max it out, to I think 40mb...)... plus very poor quality onboard audio (better than a lot of 486s that had nothing but the beeper, though) and no CDROM support... like, at all. Unless you used a parallel port one. In which case you were as well to use a Zip drive as well - which is something that had entirely 16-bit compatible drivers available for DOS...

It always amuses and annoys me in equal measure when I see adverts for computer retailers on the TV and they bang on about how such and such system has a Core i5, "perfect for multitasking", and the example of multitasking is using an art package to create a picture and then copying it into Word which was sitting in the background. Like, I can totally do that on the 1.1mb, 12mhz 286 desktop I also have. It doesn't have any ability to run background tasks, maybe, but your word processor or paint program aren't going to do anything whilst sitting in the background anyway. You're not "multitasking"... merely "task switching". And a computer from 1988 can do that just as well as one from 2018, really.

Jim Bales A very small one, but you do see these on e-bay occasionally. I'm not sure what they go for.

Terry Stewart Thank you Terry.

I have one that I would like to get rid of. You can contact me at longfellowjoseph12@gmail.com