published on 21.04.22
I’m restoring a laptop from around 1991. It’s a Peacock Computers 386SX Notebook (more commonly sold in Germany as a Tandon NB/386sx – thanks to Stephan Großklaß for his page about the Tandon). This version has a UK keyboard.
From initial inspection, it looks to have the following main components:
- an IIT 3C87SX-20 co-processor
- 4MB of RAM (in 4 sticks)
- a 60MB IDE Hard Disk (Conner Peripherals CP2064, assembled in Scotland!)
- an IDE Floppy Disk drive
- 4 * “D” Cell Ni-Cad battery pack
- 4 * “AAA” Cell Ni-Cad battery pack for the BIOS
The main Ni-Cad batteries are dead, and the 4 AAA Ni-Cad batteries for the BIOS have leaked quite badly, so both sets need to be replaced.
The HDD is likely to be a key failure point going forward, so it seems a good time to replace it with a Godshark IDE to SD adapter. That’ll make space for some new AA NiCADs, whilst lowering the heat and noise too.
If the floppy drive doesn’t work, that can be replaced with a FD to USB adapter as well.
At the moment, it’s not getting past POST, and that’s probably because of the leaky BIOS Ni-Cads. The display is flickering and sometimes doesn’t show at all: i’m hoping that’s just down to those leaky batteries as well!