I was on a flea market a couple of days ago, and guess what I found? An old computer from 1992!
It had no charger, so I plugged in my 1.5 A, 12 V power supply charger and... Nothing. After a while, I came to think that the amp delivered was just not enough. I brought up my car battery-charger, and guess what! It booted!
Since I couldn't use the car battery-charger forever, I constructed a charger from a 16v DC adapter.
But after testing the memory, the computer returned this error:
"CMOS RAM ERROR, CHECK BATTERY/RUN SETUP", so run the setup I did.
The BIOS got loaded!
My joy was, however, short. As I was to soon find out, the PC was stripped for it's harddisk before it was delivered to the flea market. But to my astonishment, I found out that my other lappy, from '99, actually had a harddisk that fitted in the old computer. I removed it from the newer computer, and installed it on the laptop.
Of course, the PC wouldn't boot since the file system on the newer harddisk was totally different from the old FAT16 this PC could read:
I made a floppy disk with MS-DOS, and pressed "any" key.
Yay! "STARTING MS-DOS"! It worked!
I now had to format the harddisk with FAT16. After that was done I had to install Microsoft Windows 3.11. That was easier said than done. The installation files were a total of 13MB, so i had to use 12 floppies!
I did get 3.11 installed correctly, and not long after, I saw the recognisable loading screen:
I had accomplished! The PC now contained Windows 3.11!
I loaded a diskette containing the best DOS game ever:
Copied the files and started it up:
To my astonishment, it worked flawlessly!
This has been a very fun project. Thank you for reading through!