laptop

[hobbz]

i know this is weird, but does anyone have an old dos laptop (386) lying around that they would part with?

thanks

sorry if in the wrong forum..


chris

[Bodie]

Mind if I ask why? Just curious.

[ervins]

I think I have an old IBM Thinkpad that is a 386...BTW before they got bought by Lenovo IBM Laptops were the best laptops bar none. What is the reason for wanting one?

[hobbz]

well i program radios for cops/ems/firemen and sadly enough many of the radios they carry are so old that the computer has to be that old to program them. the one that we have been using the display driver died and i can't fix it.

ervins - does it work and if so what would you want for it?

[ervins]

Let me look.

[Bodie]

Have you tried running an emulator on your current PC?

There's a few open source (FREE) emulators here. Just search for "386".

http://www.thefreecountry.com/emulators/pc.shtml

[Nate]

Emulator won't work as the old Motorola DOS software used the serial port in such a way that CPU clocking was critical. We tried it on 486 and Pentium class CPUs with no luck (this affected the MCX1000 radio software) even trying a shareware slowdown program yielded unpredictable results.

I do have an old AST 386SX laptop that I would be willing to part with for free. It ran that old software just fine. I will have to make sure it still boots.

I concur on the Thinkpads. I have a T-23 I'm typing this on right now. Absolutely the best. It's so sad to see Lenovo taking them the same way as the cheaper brands.

[ervins]

Emulator won't work as the old Motorola DOS software used the serial port in such a way that CPU clocking was critical. We tried it on 486 and Pentium class CPUs with no luck (this affected the MCX1000 radio software) even trying a shareware slowdown program yielded unpredictable results.

I do have an old AST 386SX laptop that I would be willing to part with for free. It ran that old software just fine. I will have to make sure it still boots.

I will look today...Just remind me. It maybe formatted as I often delete the HD when I decommision PCs/ laptops. Funny thing is I have a AMD 64 3200+ that is decked out that is being decommisioned or for use by my daughter who has a newer Imac as well.

[hobbz]

nate and ervins - i really aprecaite you checking for me. if i could get them both it would be great as there are 2 of us that program radios and we usually are going seperate ways.

do you all know if the batteries are good on them? if not its ok, i will just buy one, but i gotta have the old 386

nate i would be happy to pay shipping just let me know.

[nevin]

Man i honestly think I might have an old one laying around...the battery dont hold a charge but it has an AC adapter...I will have to check and get the specs for you I know its old but do not remember what proc it has.

Would be happy to part with it as it sits in my closest collecting dust as I am a pack rat and also love old techno stuff...

Will try my best to remember to look at it for you but if i dont post up by tomorrow just shoot me a PM if you still need one and remind me to look.

[andrushok]

sorry if in the wrong forum..chris

Not wrong! this is exact forum!
I have very old compaq laptop 386 24Mgz, 4MB RAM HDD 80MB with MS-DOS and Windowz 3.11. I tryed to find the similar on ebay and could not find oldest than 100MGz. It works fine, but just one problem - no floppy, no CD-ROM of course. But I have work around for that, so it is possible to download/upload files with this box.

One more point, if you need to emulate DOS on your new PC, just install DOSBox (it is free). I run very old DOS programms under this shell (mostly games, which I still like, such as Wolf, Digger, Lode Runner and WarCraft II). All works fine. You can even tune the "vurtual speed" in this shell.

[CTRider]

Emulator won't work as the old Motorola DOS software used the serial port in such a way that CPU clocking was critical.

If I'm not mistaken, you can manually select the maximum port speed for your serial port. That, along with the emulator should do it. You should also be able to manually slow down the processor in the BIOS and then boot into DOS. Just make sure you change it back before attempting to load Windows.