I Bought A 30 Year Old Laptop From eBay! Can We Fix It?
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- Опубликовано: 28 май 2020
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In today’s video we’re going to try and fix a 30 year old Sharp PC-4741 laptop that I bought off of ebay. This notebook was released in 1990 and features a 40MB hard disk! So, can we restore it? Let’s find out! #vintage #laptop #restoration
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Superb. Really like your style, Psivewri. Long live eucalyptus oil!
I was litteraly checking my notifications every 10 mins every day for another masterpeice video of yours. Thanks for the astonoshing content love you. YOUR THE BEST
So this is why you needed that Conner replaced, its an awesome machine!
I really have enjoyed this
Yeah my laptop crashed
WD Engineers: If you open up a hard drive, it will never work again.
Nathan: Hold my rubber seal
I mean, these days, they're assembled in clean-room conditions, and are often close to airtight in their construction. Some high end server drives are even filled with helium, rather than regular air. A thirty year old hard disk, though? It's a miracle they worked at all, to begin with, considering how delicate modern mechanisms have to be. I guess tolerances for putting 42 MB into the same space we can currently cram, what, 6 TB, are much looser.
69th like nice
I did it once. It was a dying 80 Gb HDD and just opened it. I closed it after taking a photo and put it back in the PC, it did not matter because all the information was already backed up. The hard disk works even today, but without a boot sector. It's also very slow.
I've successfully recovered multiple drives that had stuck heads by opening them up and manually unsticking the heads. I didn't have any clean room and the people involved didn't want to pay for data recovery and their data wasn't that vital.
I've even done experiments where I opened a drive, ran it with the cover off and blew dust and spit into it and surprisingly the drives continued to work fine for some time before I started getting read errors and other problems. Obviously that's a worst case scenario, and I wouldn't trust any drive after popping the cover and unsticking the heads, but it's not the end of the world.
I wouldn't try opening newer high capacity helium filled drives though.
@@NoobixCube it's just a myth that you NEED those conditions to open up a hard disc safely. Sure, you risk debris breaking something but i've opened many disc drives in a regular room environment and they still work.
Vintage content, hell yeah
Lol
Very old but worth to keep in the archives.
Yep
Wow. As an IT guy for 35 years this was made all the more interesting at the 14:30 mark when Solution 6 was mentioned. I worked for Solution 6 and to have it described as "primitive" made me laugh. In 1990 Sol6 (as it was genrally known by users) was actually quite advanced compared to what it replaced. Basically, it saw the shift from proprietary systems of the day to DOS based (and later Windows). Life revolved around Novell networks for us and then NT3.5. The good old days (pre-internet)! Sol6 was (and still is) Australian software and was bought by MYOB in 2008. Entertaining video as we would never have pulled an actual HDD apart. It would have been tossed in to bin as soon as we saw it was a Conner.
Technology and strategies always moving my dude! It may have been advanced back then, Just like the hardware, But just like hardware, Coding has moved forward leaps and bounds since. Yes it will seem strange and funny to those who were involved or around something that was mind blowing at the time, Being now thought of as old school/primitive to future generations. My dad worked as part of the Xenix team at Bell Labs in 1980, Derived from the ground breaking Unix system and was the backbone to DOS.. Oh boy is that a relic to how far clever minds have come in this space lol
Those were the days (1977-2000) where a 5-year-old computer was truly a relic.
Today, I use a 12-year-old Thinkpad for work everyday, and I don't even notice how old it is most of the time.
I use a old laptop from 2013 gaming one I found in a dumpster
Msi ge70 2oe 011ne
yup I love my x220
I still use i5 6th gen for travel and remote desktop. Computers are just so overpowered now-a-days that they don't age as quickly as they did in the past. I can't imagine using the VIC-20 I purchased in 1980 in 1990. But I can totally see me still using my 6th gen from 2016 in 2026.
@@FS--ew3sewhere did you find this dumpster
The insides of this laptop are really interesting. Almost looks like a desktop board crammed in a laptop chassis.
12:27 Imagine finding this frog at your doorstep at 10PM and it sounded like this.
lol
Lol
Lol
7:36 Your machine posses CGA video card see here (2:10 "Console CGA" to the right), and Keen 1, 2 and 3 have only EGA versions, so you have to try Keen 4, 5, 6 and Dreams they have CGA variants.
11:40 WTF man :D?! it started to work opened WoW Cool!!!!
15:25 try Windows 3.0 it runs even on 8086
intel386DX The CGA version of Keen 4 (and probably the others too, never actually played them) looks absolutely awful in colour (it uses the Cyan/Magenta/Black/White CGA palette), but since that’s a monochrome display you won’t see any of that.
What you will see though is the horrible ghosting that comes from it having a particularly bad refresh. I’m not sure exactly what sort of panel it has exactly, but it’s definitely unsuitable for games.
@@ianweber9248 yes refresh rate is poor, but it is still playable and you can even connect the external monitor.
Every time I see one of those chunky laptops I think how perfect would be to fit a modern Raspberry Pi inside. So much space! The battery compartment actually seems like a perfect place to fit it so it can be replaced easily.
The refresh rate on the LCD is awful though so you'd have to replace that also
hey buddy! great videos. you might want to use a sowing machine oil. wd40 is not a lubricant.
I was about to say that
@@DoNotSayThree "WD-40" without anything after it is more like a penetrating oil rather than a lube.
for finer mechs, sowing machine oil is a better fit, because it's easier to apply and it's simply made for being used on small moving parts.
@@JessicaFEREM ummm yeah lets just ignore "SOWING" machine.
Well done for not losing patience and getting that drive working!
This is definitely your funniest video so far man. “Paul’s juicy menu” 🤣
In those days, my 286 didn't run W3.11. You actually needed a 386.
Thanks for letting me relive those beautiful days of DOS-computing.
I love how you always judge the packaging.
Man! Your videos are so interesting that I look forward to new videos. You make the entire process look so easy. Keep up the great work.
I love your work so much man. You have been a big inspiration for me and I have been refurbishing old computers and other technology because of these videos. Thank you so much!
Xtree (gold) was the program everyone used for file management before Windows was popular. Many still used it right into the 2000's.
Any reason why something like it wasn't included in various DOS versions by default?
Where do you even learn this stuff?
From breaking a lot of shit
@@jamesorrell7462 can confirm, a good way to learn
Asking questions and google 😁
Self taught probably
No school and no teacher can make you as skilled with hardware like that.
Hey Nathan, I have also bought a similar laptop and your video has helped me a lot. Keep up the good work!
your voice is so calm
I love this content! There is a lot of fixing to do and the laptop is vintage which is my taste :) Hoping for more vintage laptops :)
12:26 That's how my knee sounds when i get up...
Have you tried WD-40?
lol bruh
Your content is very entertaining! Thank you for brightening my days with your good, relaxing, funny content! I’ve been a fan since January this year, and have never missed a video since :)
That main menu brought back some memories. I used to use it on my 8088s and 80286s. You could configure the top menu "name" to say anything you wanted.
The drive may have had stiction... opening it up may have helped loosen up the stepper motor, and moving that head and armature by hand may have helped as well. Good video!
Psivewri’s friend; I need a computer.
Psivewri; Hold my eucalyptus oil while I visit eBay.
Stop
*no* *self advertisment ShAgGeR*
100 likes isnt alot lol
Damn that thing is old, I love it!
Those things were like $5000.00 in todays money. They were like $2500.00 in 1990. I remember seing thes at Radio Shack and the demo model was kept in a case under lock and key. The Clerks had to get it out for you and stand next to you the whole time you checked it out.
I think old electronics are fascinating
Robert Shields I agree they are the best!
Your content is SO professional and I love it.
Given the work you went through with that HDD, I bet there was a distinct WTF when it booted, followed by much cheering.
Good job. I remember those hard drives pretty well... Even when new the heads would sometimes stick. I used to work in a computer repair shop (down to boad level!), and we saw hundreds of these hard-drisks... Together with Western Digital Caviar (at that time!) they were hopeless. As for the graphics problem, you simply do not have graphics. It's a computer with text capabilities only.
Hi, you and Linus helped my find my hidden talent of fixing/ making tech, thank you so much :)
that is incredible, you broke the one rule of pc tech repair and it actually fixed something. I'm amazed, awesome video!
Makes me so thankful for the ease of technology we all utilize today. Thanks for the awesome video (:
I really enjoy watching this. It brings back memory on my first computer encounter. Especially when I see WordStar (our word processor before) , Lutos 123 (our spreadsheet before similar to excel), and DBase III which is a database programming language we back when no one knows SQL would exist.
Love this channel, great video
Thank you for your RUclips-Videos. 🙌
I live in Germany and i can learn many Things about the language. You speak sooo clearly English and i can understand every single word. And my Hobbies are to repair Computers and watch Videos about it.
Thank you ✌️
You are one of my favourite RUclipsrs!
Greetings from Germany🇩🇪
Hey Psivewri,
Hello from Queensland! Your videos are awesome, and have inspired me to start working on computers myself! Hands down my favourite tech RUclipsr.
Very interesting, love your content keep the good work.
Totally off topic, but I love that little beard thing going on Nathan! 😂👍💕
Absolutely a great video. I hope you kept this machine!!!. Congrats for your patience with it too!
I wonder if that drive is one of those that used a rubber bumper to stop the head in the parking area like I have seen in some other videos of people fixing old macs... If it’s the case then the drive may die again when the head sticks back to it. It’s amazing to see how old hard drives were much more resilient, I mean, you moved the heads without even rotating the platter and that didn’t seam to cause any damage. Try that on a modern drive and I don’t think it’ll work fine afterwards...
The interface is called "Direct Access" had it on my first PC around 1992, Windows 3.0 would run on that, it only requires and 8088 class CPU because it supports real mode, Windows 3.1 does not.
Have you considered trying Windows 3.0? It's the last Windows OS compatible with the 8086/88 processors, and I've gotten it working on a V40 before. It's a tad slow, but definitely usable.
exactly :)
Awesome video, that thing is badass! Also that’s crazy the drive worked after opening it!
i quite like watching you restore old macs i find them fun to watch
Bruh this is such an underrated channel
Archimedes: "give me a lever and I can move the world". This guy: "give me something I can clean and polish with eucalyptus oil, and I'll build a video/project around it".
friggin love this series
Probably the hard drive had a problem that is quite common to these old units: there are little rubber bumpers that prevent the head stack's voice coil assembly to hit hard on the metallic magnet's frame when the disk parks the heads. These bumpers degrade with the years and transforms themselves in a mess of sticky goo, that literally sticks the head stack assembly to the voice coil's magnet's frame. The voice coil actuator doesn't just have enough force to disengage the heads from that sticky goo and the drive fails its initial test as it's not able to move them, so the computer won't detect it.
What did you do when you opened the hard drive was to move manually the head stack (be careful, this could scratch the disks!). This unlocked it, now the drive was finally able to move its heads so it passed its power on self test and shown itself to the BIOS. So you solved temporarily the problem, but be careful as that sticky goo is still there, and it'll lock again the drive in a very short time.
To solve it, what I did on an handful of my old hard drives is to put a little piece of adhesive tape over that goo, so the voice coil's assembly won't touch anymore the sticky surface and won't lock again.
11:50 reminds me of diana adams from osfirsttimer
YEA lol!!!
Xtree! Fantastic bit of software, I used to use xtree gold on my old dos PCs, was such a great file manager
Still using it for over 30 years :-)
Now it's called x64 on Win10
@@mdijkens Xtree - A great bit of software, If more people used, they would understand their computers better.
@@peterasq exactly. And it still can do stuff I can't find any other tool doing that
I was surprised you got the hard drive working. Great video as always!
Hey Mate awesome video! Nice to see another Aussie interested in vintage tech. Just a note... Don't use WD-40 for lubrication. WD-40 is a Water Dispersant, good for cleaning or freeing up stuck bolts but the creaking hinge will just creak again in a few weeks.
Opening a hard drive usually ruins hard drives. But fixed this one... odd.
Just spray some eucalyptus oil on the platter and it'll be fine
RustyX2010 I don’t have any oil....
Well, given what other comments have said, it's likely that the head was stuck and disassembling the hard drive and moving the head freed it.
Also, the rubber grommet, likely there to reduce the noise produced by the hard drive, may have deteriorated and started to get into the head mechanism, causing it to get stuck.
@@stephaniethebatter7975 That’s a good theory. That’s probably what happened.
No way! you got the drive working with the top off! simply amazing, Nathan!
Even though most of the repair attempts here evade my limited knowledge, I have leaned to admire a new level of perseverance.
“The Eucalyptus Oil Squad.” Iconic.
Commander Keen and Lemmings are made for 386s and 486s and require a graphics card which that laptop doesn't have. You should probably try some of the early 80s sierra games such as ultima or their point and click adventure games as they will function on 8 bit cpus like the 8088 as the 286 line of cpus and onwards are 16bit.
not exactly he have problem not starting the games because this machine have CGA video card and he tried EGA/GVA games on it! btw Keen 1,2 and 3 have only EGA variants, but 4, 5, 6 and Dreams have CGA versions as well , so he have to try them :)
and this CPU is 16bit with 8bit data bus www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/V40/index.html . And all keen games runs even on 8088/8086 4.77MHz ,but scroll smooth on at least 8MHz ! and this CPU is the near the most advanced for XT platform NEC V40 at 10MHz even have 80188 instructions and have 8080 8bit emulation mode!
You’re so good at fixing stuff dude!!!!!!!!!
We need more people like you on the interwebs.
Windows 3.1 required a 286
It's probably a CGA video card, possibly MDA (monochrome).
Text mode games and demos will work
notice in the BISO SETUP it is CGA here 2:10
and the CPU is V40 the most advanced CPU on XT machines it even have 80188 instructions, but still it can only run Windows 3.0 (3.0 can run even on 8088) ! :)
yeah there are Pac-Man and Tetris clones for text mode DOS haha
There’s also some demos like “YO!” by Future Crew.
I thought I was the MAN with my IBM Thinkpad T43.
I Have humbly been schooled.
This is why I become membership of your channel and this video is one of the most difficult pieces of classic techs you've ever managed. It's good to see it back to life but not perfect and it has some rarest parts in it, making it difficult to repair. Ouch!. Hope you're okay then, Nathan. 😟🙂
I was quite lucky to get this running! Thanks for becoming a member :)
that is incredible. i've taken out so many connor drives from old compaqs thinking they were dead. now i'll need to see if giving them some fresh air will revive them like yours did!
When you opened the hard disk, the head wasn't parked. I'm guessing when you moved the head it bumped it back into life 🤔
Yes, that was the problem
9:59 how does the laptop even turn on if thats inside it
Great work ♥️
You worked so hard on thos one. Great video as always. Thanks for the amazing content.
Your voice is so satisfying lmao. I use it to fall asleep 😂
ASMR for nerds, or gay nerds.
UwU v2 Major compliment
I bought my laptop in October of 2019 and I’m already starting to get some issues with it (It’s an Acer Swift 3 if you’re interested) when a 30 year old laptop only had a faulty hard drive...like bruh😂
Aleksander Gorgoń fix it
RMA it?
hypnotic video!!! thanks for sharing!!!
I am a fan of your videos. Though I may not always comment, this is a blast from the past for me. This particular laptop never ran great brand new. The co-processor is either damaged or corrupted in some way. But it was neat to see her crank up never the less. : = )
Also, I just wanted to say every time the laptop creaked my cat jolted awake and looked at me angrily lol. #eucalyptusoilclub
Double check all the BIOS settings, make sure VGA card is detected. It may also have a make or model number either there or on the chip/board. If BIOS detects your graphics card, you may be able to download the drivers onto a disk and install them that way. Thanks for the trip down memory lane!
This is probably my favourite video you’ve done.
Great video and it's a miracle you got that 42mb HDD working!
Hey Psivewri remember Guitar guy from qna that's me I lost my Gmail account
I like this fixing challenge. :) Wow, was the harddrive pickup arm stuck perhaps ?
So happy you could get that Conner Peripherals hard disk working again!
good save and nice piece
Love your vintage computer vids.
Very good restoring video
I think the key is when you took the hard disk apart, you moved the head.(it was stuck in the middle) I've had some hard drives in the past with stuck heads, therefore the motor couldn't spin the platters and it gives errors.
Yay I love your videos it's so cool to see old computers get fixed I might do this too
Very interesting, I actually tried to research that hard drive and found nothing, although I guessed that it was a ~40MB hard drive, I didn't find the drive at all.
It's strange that the connector design is almost identical to 44pin IDE, and I even counted the pins to see if the number matched, which it did but the image made it hard to gauge scale, so I posited that if the connector width was 41mm, then it was indeed 44pin IDE, but knowing the age of the laptop now and just how small the connector is I can see it isn't 44pin IDE at all.
Happy to see it working, but I believe that it only started working again because you unstuck the heads, probably banging the drive on its edge might have brute forced it to work as well without having to risk disassembly.
Great video as always, and another computer saved from the bin by eucalyptus oil and a bit of tinkering. :)
Amazing work
sweet! love your vids!
Looks like the arm of the hard drive was just stuck on the disk. That happens sometimes. You can either smack the side of the HD on a table or manually open it and move the arm yourself. Good job reviving such an old computer.
In/near 1990, I was the user/maintainer of the photo studio's IBM XT. I also used XTree to make it easier to run PFS: Write and File (Also known as "ProWirte" and "ProFile" back then). An 8088 processor wasn't going to run any version of Windows, but it could run Ye Olde GeoWorks/PCGeos GUI. I used GeoWorks Ensemble 1.0 and 1.2 after I replaced the 20MB HDD with a 40MB HDD and replaced the full length 512K Monochrome graphics card with a 640K half length Color graphics card.
Beautiful , solid design with a art deco vibe . When i think of the amont of work to design just a single model of japan laptop , just insane
Love you cleaning laptops keep up the good work 😁😁😁
I may have been born four years after this computer came out and will never do away with modern laptops and the internet, there will always be something interesting and charming about these old computers from the 80’s and 90s.
80's electronics are so beautiful
This guy knows exactly what he's doing, he's awesome!😊👍
another great stuff in the morning!
Opening up a hard-drive like that outside a clean room (and running it with the cover off) would have destroyed it had it been a modern drive (especially those 4TB+ helium filled ones!). But that old 40mb drive with only one platter probably will be fine. (though I would have still recommended setting up a negative air pressure box to keep dust out).
I suspect the reason opening it up fixed it was that the platter motor was stuck. Was the screw in the middle you took out went into the top of the platter area? If so loosening that was all it needed to get going again and that's why it started working again. ;)
Honestly that laptop looks really cool
Thanks mate for new video
I had a Nec 286 around 1992 back in 8th grade that was very similar. You could probably run Windows 3.0 or 3.1 but Windows 3.11 is certainly out of question. I couldn't run it either as my laptop only had 2mb of ram. Even if I maxed it out to 4mb of ram Windows 3.11 wouldn't work. You needed a 386 sx or better for it's virtual mode, and a DX would certainly be a better cpu for it. Luckily Windows 3.1 ran just fine. I think mine had a weird type of advanced MCGA by the way. It wasn't until 12th grade did I buy a laptop that had any color, the NEC could do 16 or 256 greyscale. It could hardly work with anything but "pc jr" display modes. Your standard 640 by 480 by 16 greys would have been the best it could do. My later 755 and 760ed Thinkpads offered much better capabilities getting me past high school and in to college. Sweet memories I admit.
That screen looks more modern than brand new laptop lol