I remember I bought a Packard Bell SX25 with 4 meg of ram, and a 107 meg HDD back in 1993 from the Navy PX. When Doom 2 came out I spend 350 to get another 4 meg stick so I could play without a batch file. Back then they came with a DOS manual and a upgrade manual. That started my second career as a PC tech.
18:55 I owned one of them in 1992, cost me an arm and a leg, was a workhorse. Took it to all customers sites and it paid itself off fairly quickly. Even had the expansion box in the rear with added memory, think it was 6MB RAM in total. The 4MB RAM cost at the time close to 4k... Added a hard drive card into the other slot, it was a good 386 for it's time. But sadly it's all gone...
I found a Compaq Prolinea 4/66 in the e-waste a couple months ago. Had to take it apart and clean it out, as it had been sitting out in the elements. It had some issues. A dead CMOS battery, the CD-ROM needed a new eject motor (they're fairly universal), and 1 channel on the speaker-out of the Vibra-16 card not working (which I'm currently attempting to repair). Everything else worked! The biggest issue was cosmetic. The last guy to own it had installed the CD-ROM himself, but didn't have proper rails for it, so he ended up mashing it together and cracking the bezel at the front. I was able to somewhat repair that with a hot staple gun and some cut plastic from another drive bay cover.
Quantum LPS240AT. Back in the 1990s, we had one of its little brothers, the LPS120AT, floating between several machines, and that sound is burned into my memory.
Good to see you again :) I'm not sure you fully cleared the battery leakage, there's definitely some corrosion around the PC87312VF IC as well as some other SMDs around it, and even some in the ISA riser board. Maybe you tackled it later though :D
i had one prolinea 4/20s and later a 4/50 when i was growing up.... i loved the ProLinea small formfactor. WOuld love to have one again, but they are hard to find or expensive. fun to see them working!
I really like these prolinea computers. I worked with exactly the same machine back in 1993-94 - also in holland btw. Used it mainly for AutoCAD, it had 16MB of RAM iirc.
Coincidentally, the Prolinea 4/66 I found in the e-waste a couple months ago came with two versions of AutoCAD installed, as well as Office 3.0 and some proprietary DOS-based rail-yard shipment manifest software that hadn't seen the light of day in 25 years.
I have that Compaq Prolinea 4/33s, which I upgraded to a dx2-66 with a cd-rom drive, and customised slightly by painting it black to match my modern pc and changed the leds to blue!😁
Back when I was kid being an apprentice in a local computer shop we HATED machines like this because they were proprietary. As a collector now, I LOVE machines like this, I guess for the nostalgia factor. I just scored another haul of some gear myself, and it happened to include an original Compaq Portable. I'm looking forward checking it out this weekend and hoping the stuff I acquired hasn't been in moist areas for too long 🤞
I have two PCs from Compaq: Prolinea 4/66 and Deskpro 4000. I consider the lack of a normal BIOS to be a big drawback. A particularly headache is installing diagnostic utilities on the hard drive. The only plus is that they both work! Moreover, one turned 30 this year.
Lol I immediately recognized the signature sound of that Quantum HDD. I had the Quantum Fireball in 1998 and the sound is VERY similar ❤ Nice video. Thank you. I discovered your channel recently so please keep up the great work 👍
This is just like my old setup when i was a kid, awesome, i'm really sad in hindsight that we got rid of it, it would be such a cool thing to still have today, to this day i'm still always looking for desktops that fit under my monitor lol it always pisses me off when i have to put the computer vertical on the floor. Years later i got a Compaq CQ60 which is my favorite laptop of all time, so Compaq was an amazing company in my book and it's tragic that they're gone. What i wouldn't give to be able to still buy their hardware today
Nice video again! Thank you. These machines are well and decently build. I have as well the Prolinea 4/33, Deskpro 4/33is which are sharing the same design case. The Deskpro 3/25 is a dual CPU motherboard, it can hold a 386 CPU, but also a 486 CPU. For the battery, I used the external connected with a 3 AAA battery holder.
Interesting to see a built-in bios in that machine. I own a Compaq Prolinea 4/66 which hasn't such a feature. It requires a system disk to enter and change BIOS settings.
Are you sure? Look if your machine’s cursor changes to a little block in the upper right corner of the screen while booting. Then hit F10 to enter the bios setup. You can see that cursor in this video as well, at 1:22
that's right. Now I remember it starting up bios by pressing F10 when I got the computer but formated the hard drive and it did not work after that. It's quite strange, it seems that there is really some sort of "bios partition" on the hard drive but I never managed to recreate it. But I found the needed system disk which enables me to start the bios utitily and change system setting. It seems really strange do me, unlesse the IBM PS2-systems, I've never experienced that kind of BIOS. @@BlackEpyon
Like BlackEpyon states: there is a kind of BIOS partition on the hard drive, where you access BIOS settings from. In case that ist missing, you can use the system disk to access it. Quite a uncommon way for me... @@kouwes4686
I had a Prolinea 4/25 but I binned it.. :( Deskpro's and SLT still in the house luckily. Knew it had an ET4000 and I do love how Compaq - still with its old logo - was built and documented.
I got one like that but with a 486/33 processor. Later I upgraded it to a DX2 added more ram and a cdrom.I used it for years with Slackware linux on. Later I used it as an X-terminal to a more powerful machine that also ran Linux. it worked flawlessly. And the formfactor made that I saw it as an afforable alternative for a sun pizzabox workstation.
2:13 - Of course: Quantum ProDrive LPS. Back at those times I was able to recognize the manufacturer and even the family of a hard drive by its noises only :-)
Bedankt! Fijn dat u er weer bent. Het bekijken van uw video's is als het openslaan van een magazine van dezelfde tijd. Mocht u ooit onderdelen zoeken voor Compaq, heb zelf ook 7 compaq machines (386-Pentium2) en ben nu bezig met het restaureren van een Compaq Prolinea 3/25zs. Groeten uit Utrecht /Nederland.
I have ProLinea 4/25 with completely dead motherboard. :( I've bought 2 similar motherboards in unknown condition and they have been dead, too. Had to put this project on hold until I dare to buy myself an oscilloscope. (Maybe it can shine some light on any of the 3 boards...) It is currently so sparingly enjoyed hobby that I just can't justify that spending for myself yet... It is a beautiful machine.
Very cool machine. Seeing those specs is really nostalgic; it seems incredible to me that once upon a time, computers only had a 50 mhz processor and 240 mb hard disks
Great machine, I have exactly same system myself saved from scrap some 5-6 years ago and it is in great conditions sans few scratches the metal case got when it was sitting in a recycling bin. It was an old computer used to configure telephone switches for a teleoperator. I installed 16MB RAM (it came with 8MB), OPL3 sound card, NIC and MPU card, 5.25” floppy and OCd the CPU to 66MHz. These older Compaqs were sturdy machines until they started to cheap out. Their BIOS boot HDD partition is also incredibly stupid solution and it started to appear around mid 90s.
@@BlackEpyon I find that highly unlikely, because cheap crap had regular BIOSes too. Compaq started doing this around 1994 or so, so they were still well built machines at that point and they could've easily saved more elsewhere, if costs were the main driver. I think their main idea was to make BIOS updates easier and it may apply to manufacturing process too, as firmware can be updated at the point when HDDs are written. Compaq's solution uses also proper graphics and looks a bit like modern UEFIs, so they perhaps wanted more "user friendly" experience with all the diagnostic tools packaged in proper GUI. But there is no excuse as it just complicates everything in case of HDD upgrades or replacements. It is incredibly stupid system and this is coming a bit from a vintage Compaq fan.
@@TheGrunt76 It's probably because of the GUI. Obviously, the ASCII-based interfaces generic PC vendors were using at the time take up less space. By the way, UEFI absolutely sucks balls if you have any plans to install older cards of any kind. I've got several RAID cards that are useless for what I wanted them for, because even in legacy mode, my main rig's UEFI absolutely refuses to talk to those old BIOS's. Worst case senario, my server (running an ASUS DSBF-D12) still has plenty of PCI-E and PCI-X slots for more RAID cards, so I could throw another RAID array in there instead. I just don't want to spend several hundred bucks on a new RAID card.
@@TheGrunt76 I absolutely agree with you. I got a 1994 Prolinea 4/66 whose hard drive was replaced. And now I’m finally ready to install the diagnostic utility. Because it is impossible to get into the BIOS. Idiot decision by the company. But to give it its due, the PC has been working for 30 years.
nice video, thanks ! I have a Compaq in a case like here... IT has 486SX/25 CPU with an upgrade - 486DX5-133 in a socket. Works but has some graphic issues in some games... Also it shows only 256 colors in win95 - no High color(
Great to have you back! I really missed seeing your videos! Actually, I would love to do a collab video sometime if you're interested! Keep up with the awesome content, it's great stuff!
I started with the Commodore 64, then a 128 before we got a PC (IBM XT Clone) the Compaq ProLinea 3/25s was the 2nd PC for us, but was the first one Dad would actually let me work on unsupervised. Literally stuffed every possible upgrade into that box. 1.2mb 5.25" floppy, 387 math co processor, 4mb of ram, Sound Blaster Pro, SCSI card + NEC External toploader CDROM, upgraded the 80mb HDD to a 212mb, then stuffed an additional maxtor 540mb in there with BIOS overlay and everything. I built our 486 from scratch when I was 11. Dad just gave me a pile of parts one day and said "Here ya go, make it work and don't break anything" By age 12, I was Building/Selling and servicing PCs all over the Susquehanna Valley in Pennsylvania. Still to this day, the DUMBEST thing I've ever done was shut down that successful business and go to college.
I remember installing a CD Rom drive with a IDE expansion card. It has a 3 isa riser card. Pretty cool This was a nice machine I think mine was a 486 DX2 50 mhz It was the first computer after the XT machine we had
Production suggestion here. Can you turn off the auto-white-balance? Sometimes the monitor bezel is a creme color and sometimes it's badly yellowed. It can be distracting. I write this as a fan of many years.
Great video. I built one of these a couple of years ago and its certainly a nice little system. I noticed you don't have the 5.25" drive caddy, I have a 3D printed file for one that I used in my system. If you need it just let me know.
Interesting how they cost reduced the Prolinea vs the Deskpro XE. The XE has a rechargeable coin cell, 4th ISA slot (on the back of the riser) and an L2 cache socket.
@@nelizmastr At least with Pentium boards, COAST modules are everywhere. The trick is just making sure you have the correct type. Pipeline burst or synchronous? how many chips? Parity or no parity? Intel tried to standardize it, but the only thing everybody kept in common was the slot!
It's also interesting compared to the consumer-oriented Presario 600 series. My Presario 633 has the coin cell and 4th ISA slot on the riser, (came with a 2400 baud half-height modem installed) but doesn't have the XE's provision for L2 cache. The missing 4th slot on this Prolinea really surprises me, since the riser PCB still has the unpopulated holes for the slot.
The ET4000/W32 graphics on these is indeed local bus. I've owned an almost identical Presario 633 since new. I remember it was even printed on the original Compaq box: "Fast Local Bus Graphics!" It's actually a really good performer. The VGA output quality is quite good with the Music-branded RAMDAC as shown in the video, but it is limited to 256 colours due to that IC. The bandwidth also limits 1024x768 to interlaced modes only. One of these days, I hope to transplant a more capable RAMDAC in its place to allow 64k colours at 800x600 and below, and to enable non-interlaced 1024x768 modes.
You disappear for a year, and then show up with all of this Compaq crap on the table? Yeah, ok. I can live with that! Deskpro 575 was one of my all time favorites. Great machine. Prolinea, for being a lower-end business machine, was actually pretty capable.
Interesting to see so many late-486-era things in a mainboard with a copyright from '93... Built in speaker and ide/floppy, modern-ish bios-chip form factor, PS2, auto-detect harddrive, on oard video.. But funnily only Isa and a relatively slow CPU. Nice and future proof mix
Good old Varta Batteries... always wreaking havoc 😵💫 Intel 486 DX2 50 MHz😍 ... always will be my favorite Vintage CPU, since it was my first CPU to ever play with... Whenever I find (and rescue if possible) a 486 System... it is as good as always equipped with a 66MHz 486🤔. By the way, do you still accept donations for your channel? I've tried to contact you on your email😅 Best regards😋
Interesting that this version has of the Prolinea uses a Varta. I have owned for nearly 30 years a Prolinea 4/25s that is nearly identical, other than having a soldered on PQFP 486/SX25. Mine also had a soldered on Lithium coin cell, instead of a VARTA, which, when removed, had the pads for a coin cell socket underneath, which I promptly installed. Yours appears to have metal tabs for the SIMMS, while mine has the dreaded plastic SIMM clips, two of which are broken. I had a 270 MB Quantum drive. I bought it at a company computer sale in 1995. It was nearly new, but non-working. When I opened it up , I discovered someone had moved a jumper, apparently intentionally. I moved it back and it came to live and I could read the hard drive. Armed with the name of the previous owner, I dropped by his office and saw he was sporting a fancy new Dell Pentium workstation machine. I asked him about it and he whispered that he'd wanted a new machine, so he borked that one and his IT guy didn't even bother checking what was wrong. Fine By me! It got a 486dx75 ODP processor that was promptly overclocked to 100mhz and went on to be my little brother's college PC for 3 or 4 semesters. I need to replace a SIMM socket, but other than that, it still works great.
Mine also had the soldered-on coin cell. The Ni-Cd VARTAs, where I find them, I replace with a Ni-Mh of the same style. Keeps the appearance correct, and those don't leak! Ni-Mh are also rechargeable. Just in case, cause you never know!
@@BlackEpyon Yeah, I was aware of that. The ones with the soldered on coin cell however don't have a charging circuit. they're the modern style circuit that requires a lower voltage.
For some reason my finds two of the same hard drives but I only have one. Might that be a conflict with the CDROM drive? hard drive is master and cdrom is slave
0:19 - It's the first time ever I noticed it, so I'm curious - do you guys normally have _AZERTY_ keyboards or just in some parts of the country, or did you maybe get this computer from France?
Most people in Belgium use azerty keyboards, even in the Flemish Dutch speaking part. It’s a leftover of the old days when the administration (on typewriters) was dominated by the French speaking part. (And it’s easier if you often have to communicate in french with all the accents like é è ê ) But a part of the people that work in IT use qwerty, just like the Dutch. (Including me)
My motherboard is made in Scotland. What’s special is that it has the logo of a steam locomotive. Only now I can’t get into the BIOS. After checking the RAM, the OS loads immediately. There is no response to pressing the function keys. Why is this happening?
Its a weird feeling seeing this model again.... 30 years old...and 99.9% are in the rubbish Yet you can still find the original PlayStation 1s in the wild.🤔 Too say picking up a PS1 is by comparison easy The computer feels more like a museum piece.
As a landscaper, I have to regularly dispose of my green-waste, and the place I take it is behind one of the local recycling centres, where all the e-waste is just left outside on pallets. Because I'm there usually at least twice a week, I know the guy, and he lets me take stuff. I've picked up a few vintage computers there. Great arrangement, if you can get one, because a lot of e-waste centres don't let you in the back to root around for fear that you might get somebody's personal data, or hurt yourself, or leave a mess, etc.
You easy manually set the number of sectors ,headers, plates. There is such an option in every such Bios. You can describe it from the HDD or look it up on the Internet, you only have to take into account the "size" limitation, and those over the course of 40 years were
Why collect Compaq ? Office gear you need ? u understand boring crab ? Please get skills, what is it we do like to keep here ;) good luck getting skills here Dutch Computer.
Наука
I just wanted to tell you how nice it is to have you back. I really do enjoy your content. Thank you!
I remember I bought a Packard Bell SX25 with 4 meg of ram, and a 107 meg HDD back in 1993 from the Navy PX. When Doom 2 came out I spend 350 to get another 4 meg stick so I could play without a batch file. Back then they came with a DOS manual and a upgrade manual. That started my second career as a PC tech.
ahh you had the 25mhz, I was always happy to have the 33MHZ at that time. But then I got stuck with the Pentium 120Mhz instead of the 133Mhz.
18:55 I owned one of them in 1992, cost me an arm and a leg, was a workhorse.
Took it to all customers sites and it paid itself off fairly quickly. Even had the expansion box in the rear with added memory, think it was 6MB RAM in total. The 4MB RAM cost at the time close to 4k...
Added a hard drive card into the other slot, it was a good 386 for it's time. But sadly it's all gone...
It is great having you back! You were one of my inspirations to start my channel! Keep up the great work.
Really thoughtful of Compaq to include the info about jumper settings. Saves future ‘computer archeologists’ a lot of hassle!
I found a Compaq Prolinea 4/66 in the e-waste a couple months ago. Had to take it apart and clean it out, as it had been sitting out in the elements. It had some issues. A dead CMOS battery, the CD-ROM needed a new eject motor (they're fairly universal), and 1 channel on the speaker-out of the Vibra-16 card not working (which I'm currently attempting to repair). Everything else worked! The biggest issue was cosmetic. The last guy to own it had installed the CD-ROM himself, but didn't have proper rails for it, so he ended up mashing it together and cracking the bezel at the front. I was able to somewhat repair that with a hot staple gun and some cut plastic from another drive bay cover.
Quantum LPS240AT. Back in the 1990s, we had one of its little brothers, the LPS120AT, floating between several machines, and that sound is burned into my memory.
Good to see you again :)
I'm not sure you fully cleared the battery leakage, there's definitely some corrosion around the PC87312VF IC as well as some other SMDs around it, and even some in the ISA riser board.
Maybe you tackled it later though :D
Thanks it's good to be back. Yeah there were some continuity issues :) some of the footage was shot out of order.
My aunt gifted this PC to me in the mid 90s. I had so many lovely childhood memories with this PC with both DOS and win3.1 growing up
The boot sequence took me way back again, to the days of Windows 3.1.
That was a while ago for sure 🙂
Thanks! 👍💪✌
i had one prolinea 4/20s and later a 4/50 when i was growing up.... i loved the ProLinea small formfactor. WOuld love to have one again, but they are hard to find or expensive. fun to see them working!
I really like these prolinea computers. I worked with exactly the same machine back in 1993-94 - also in holland btw. Used it mainly for AutoCAD, it had 16MB of RAM iirc.
Coincidentally, the Prolinea 4/66 I found in the e-waste a couple months ago came with two versions of AutoCAD installed, as well as Office 3.0 and some proprietary DOS-based rail-yard shipment manifest software that hadn't seen the light of day in 25 years.
I have that Compaq Prolinea 4/33s, which I upgraded to a dx2-66 with a cd-rom drive, and customised slightly by painting it black to match my modern pc and changed the leds to blue!😁
That is great! Sounds like the beginning of an interesting journey into the world of old computers. Waiting for the next video!😉
Back when I was kid being an apprentice in a local computer shop we HATED machines like this because they were proprietary. As a collector now, I LOVE machines like this, I guess for the nostalgia factor. I just scored another haul of some gear myself, and it happened to include an original Compaq Portable. I'm looking forward checking it out this weekend and hoping the stuff I acquired hasn't been in moist areas for too long 🤞
I have two PCs from Compaq: Prolinea 4/66 and Deskpro 4000. I consider the lack of a normal BIOS to be a big drawback. A particularly headache is installing diagnostic utilities on the hard drive. The only plus is that they both work! Moreover, one turned 30 this year.
@@user-qd4mj4pp9k Exactly! And happy birthday to your computer LOL
I used to own this EXACT computer. So good to watch this!
Glad to see you back "doing your thing" like before, I enjoy the teardowns.
Lol I immediately recognized the signature sound of that Quantum HDD. I had the Quantum Fireball in 1998 and the sound is VERY similar ❤ Nice video. Thank you. I discovered your channel recently so please keep up the great work 👍
That’s the best looking compaq design they ever had
The system is looking pretty well after a good clean and that hard drive is nice & crunchy!
that's a nice sleek computer.... good to see that retrospector 78 has a new video out!!the computers are so cool to Iook ar on your channel..
This is just like my old setup when i was a kid, awesome, i'm really sad in hindsight that we got rid of it, it would be such a cool thing to still have today, to this day i'm still always looking for desktops that fit under my monitor lol it always pisses me off when i have to put the computer vertical on the floor.
Years later i got a Compaq CQ60 which is my favorite laptop of all time, so Compaq was an amazing company in my book and it's tragic that they're gone. What i wouldn't give to be able to still buy their hardware today
Nice video again! Thank you. These machines are well and decently build. I have as well the Prolinea 4/33, Deskpro 4/33is which are sharing the same design case. The Deskpro 3/25 is a dual CPU motherboard, it can hold a 386 CPU, but also a 486 CPU.
For the battery, I used the external connected with a 3 AAA battery holder.
Interesting to see a built-in bios in that machine. I own a Compaq Prolinea 4/66 which hasn't such a feature. It requires a system disk to enter and change BIOS settings.
Are you sure? Look if your machine’s cursor changes to a little block in the upper right corner of the screen while booting. Then hit F10 to enter the bios setup. You can see that cursor in this video as well, at 1:22
It wouldn't have shown up if the hard drive wasn't working with that BIOS partition.
that's right. Now I remember it starting up bios by pressing F10 when I got the computer but formated the hard drive and it did not work after that. It's quite strange, it seems that there is really some sort of "bios partition" on the hard drive but I never managed to recreate it. But I found the needed system disk which enables me to start the bios utitily and change system setting. It seems really strange do me, unlesse the IBM PS2-systems, I've never experienced that kind of BIOS.
@@BlackEpyon
Like BlackEpyon states: there is a kind of BIOS partition on the hard drive, where you access BIOS settings from. In case that ist missing, you can use the system disk to access it. Quite a uncommon way for me...
@@kouwes4686
Love your retro videos 👍🏻👍🏻👍🏻
I had a Prolinea 4/25 but I binned it.. :( Deskpro's and SLT still in the house luckily. Knew it had an ET4000 and I do love how Compaq - still with its old logo - was built and documented.
I got one like that but with a 486/33 processor. Later I upgraded it to a DX2 added more ram and a cdrom.I used it for years with Slackware linux on. Later I used it as an X-terminal to a more powerful machine that also ran Linux. it worked flawlessly. And the formfactor made that I saw it as an afforable alternative for a sun pizzabox workstation.
That's a neat machine! Glad to see another video from you once again!😉👌
2:13 - Of course: Quantum ProDrive LPS. Back at those times I was able to recognize the manufacturer and even the family of a hard drive by its noises only :-)
Bedankt! Fijn dat u er weer bent. Het bekijken van uw video's is als het openslaan van een magazine van dezelfde tijd.
Mocht u ooit onderdelen zoeken voor Compaq, heb zelf ook 7 compaq machines (386-Pentium2) en ben nu bezig met het restaureren van een Compaq Prolinea 3/25zs.
Groeten uit Utrecht /Nederland.
Dank je wel !! Niet evident steeds maar nieuwe videos te blijven maken. Had een rust periode nodig. Groetjes terug uit Belgie !
kijk die Windows, het is een Hollandse PC ! kaart ->
Quietly competent and professional...
the reliabiity is incredible.
I have ProLinea 4/25 with completely dead motherboard. :( I've bought 2 similar motherboards in unknown condition and they have been dead, too.
Had to put this project on hold until I dare to buy myself an oscilloscope. (Maybe it can shine some light on any of the 3 boards...) It is currently so sparingly enjoyed hobby that I just can't justify that spending for myself yet...
It is a beautiful machine.
Very cool machine. Seeing those specs is really nostalgic; it seems incredible to me that once upon a time, computers only had a 50 mhz processor and 240 mb hard disks
Great machine, I have exactly same system myself saved from scrap some 5-6 years ago and it is in great conditions sans few scratches the metal case got when it was sitting in a recycling bin. It was an old computer used to configure telephone switches for a teleoperator. I installed 16MB RAM (it came with 8MB), OPL3 sound card, NIC and MPU card, 5.25” floppy and OCd the CPU to 66MHz. These older Compaqs were sturdy machines until they started to cheap out. Their BIOS boot HDD partition is also incredibly stupid solution and it started to appear around mid 90s.
Maybe they were cheaping out on the EEPROM. Those were still pretty expensive in the early 90's.
@@BlackEpyon I find that highly unlikely, because cheap crap had regular BIOSes too. Compaq started doing this around 1994 or so, so they were still well built machines at that point and they could've easily saved more elsewhere, if costs were the main driver. I think their main idea was to make BIOS updates easier and it may apply to manufacturing process too, as firmware can be updated at the point when HDDs are written. Compaq's solution uses also proper graphics and looks a bit like modern UEFIs, so they perhaps wanted more "user friendly" experience with all the diagnostic tools packaged in proper GUI. But there is no excuse as it just complicates everything in case of HDD upgrades or replacements. It is incredibly stupid system and this is coming a bit from a vintage Compaq fan.
@@TheGrunt76 It's probably because of the GUI. Obviously, the ASCII-based interfaces generic PC vendors were using at the time take up less space.
By the way, UEFI absolutely sucks balls if you have any plans to install older cards of any kind. I've got several RAID cards that are useless for what I wanted them for, because even in legacy mode, my main rig's UEFI absolutely refuses to talk to those old BIOS's. Worst case senario, my server (running an ASUS DSBF-D12) still has plenty of PCI-E and PCI-X slots for more RAID cards, so I could throw another RAID array in there instead. I just don't want to spend several hundred bucks on a new RAID card.
@@TheGrunt76 I absolutely agree with you. I got a 1994 Prolinea 4/66 whose hard drive was replaced. And now I’m finally ready to install the diagnostic utility. Because it is impossible to get into the BIOS. Idiot decision by the company. But to give it its due, the PC has been working for 30 years.
Ah, Quantum drives. Yes, they do make a very distinctive noise... especially when they are self-destructing, as they are wont to do.
Not these ones, apparently. When I found my Prolinea, the hard drive booted straight up!
Glad to have you back!
Ah, the whirring and clicking of an old system coming to life...lol
You’re back!! We missed you!
Thx a lot ! Feels good to be back.
Great video, so glad you are back!!
nice video, thanks ! I have a Compaq in a case like here... IT has 486SX/25 CPU with an upgrade - 486DX5-133 in a socket. Works but has some graphic issues in some games... Also it shows only 256 colors in win95 - no High color(
Great content as always love your channel great to see you back cheers Kurt Australia
Very nice system. I wonder why they spent the extra for an ET4000 but then cheaped out on 2nd level cache.
retrospector and necroware on the same day!
And MikeTech too. Nice day.
Really like your channel, sir.. Thanks for this interesting and entertaining video
Great machine.. I Iove it 🙂
Great to have you back! I really missed seeing your videos! Actually, I would love to do a collab video sometime if you're interested! Keep up with the awesome content, it's great stuff!
Great video✌
would be nice to see one of those setup with Novell Netware as well.
Have a video on the channel where I setup a novell netware network using old hardware
I had quite the same on deskpro SX25, and 486/66 :p very nice machine
Nice video 👍🏼😄
Those hard drive sounds causes an endorphin rush
This was my first PC, before that i had a C64 and an Amiga.
Thanks for not doing CCPway ads 👏👍
I just wish the North American PCB mills were as accessible and cheap as PCB Way 😑
This was my first PC growing up but 386sx nice to see one again, great video thanks.
I started with the Commodore 64, then a 128 before we got a PC (IBM XT Clone) the Compaq ProLinea 3/25s was the 2nd PC for us, but was the first one Dad would actually let me work on unsupervised. Literally stuffed every possible upgrade into that box. 1.2mb 5.25" floppy, 387 math co processor, 4mb of ram, Sound Blaster Pro, SCSI card + NEC External toploader CDROM, upgraded the 80mb HDD to a 212mb, then stuffed an additional maxtor 540mb in there with BIOS overlay and everything.
I built our 486 from scratch when I was 11. Dad just gave me a pile of parts one day and said "Here ya go, make it work and don't break anything" By age 12, I was Building/Selling and servicing PCs all over the Susquehanna Valley in Pennsylvania.
Still to this day, the DUMBEST thing I've ever done was shut down that successful business and go to college.
I remember installing a CD Rom drive with a IDE expansion card.
It has a 3 isa riser card.
Pretty cool
This was a nice machine
I think mine was a 486 DX2 50 mhz
It was the first computer after the XT machine we had
Production suggestion here. Can you turn off the auto-white-balance? Sometimes the monitor bezel is a creme color and sometimes it's badly yellowed. It can be distracting. I write this as a fan of many years.
Great video. I built one of these a couple of years ago and its certainly a nice little system. I noticed you don't have the 5.25" drive caddy, I have a 3D printed file for one that I used in my system. If you need it just let me know.
Could you share the file with me? For example, on Google Drive? I would be grateful to you.
i own one with an overdrive, been running debian for over 2 decades
Pretty
Interesting how they cost reduced the Prolinea vs the Deskpro XE. The XE has a rechargeable coin cell, 4th ISA slot (on the back of the riser) and an L2 cache socket.
Those cache modules are impossible to find!
@@BlackEpyon yeah, took me a good few months to track one down for my XE.
@@nelizmastr At least with Pentium boards, COAST modules are everywhere. The trick is just making sure you have the correct type. Pipeline burst or synchronous? how many chips? Parity or no parity? Intel tried to standardize it, but the only thing everybody kept in common was the slot!
It's also interesting compared to the consumer-oriented Presario 600 series. My Presario 633 has the coin cell and 4th ISA slot on the riser, (came with a 2400 baud half-height modem installed) but doesn't have the XE's provision for L2 cache. The missing 4th slot on this Prolinea really surprises me, since the riser PCB still has the unpopulated holes for the slot.
A red varta! HOT!
Is that local bus graphics?
The ET4000/W32 graphics on these is indeed local bus. I've owned an almost identical Presario 633 since new. I remember it was even printed on the original Compaq box: "Fast Local Bus Graphics!" It's actually a really good performer. The VGA output quality is quite good with the Music-branded RAMDAC as shown in the video, but it is limited to 256 colours due to that IC. The bandwidth also limits 1024x768 to interlaced modes only. One of these days, I hope to transplant a more capable RAMDAC in its place to allow 64k colours at 800x600 and below, and to enable non-interlaced 1024x768 modes.
You disappear for a year, and then show up with all of this Compaq crap on the table?
Yeah, ok. I can live with that! Deskpro 575 was one of my all time favorites. Great machine. Prolinea, for being a lower-end business machine, was actually pretty capable.
Interesting to see so many late-486-era things in a mainboard with a copyright from '93...
Built in speaker and ide/floppy, modern-ish bios-chip form factor, PS2, auto-detect harddrive, on oard video..
But funnily only Isa and a relatively slow CPU. Nice and future proof mix
The ET4000W32 onboard video is in fact 32bit VLB.
another survivor
Does this Quantum drive just have a lengthy seek test, or is it struggling to unpark the heads due to the rubber bumper issue?
warm soap and water and toothbrush to clean the motherboard
I just run it under the tap and scrub. There's nothing there that's water permeable. Just make sure to thoroughly dry it before powering it on.
i.k i've done it multiple times b4@@BlackEpyon
Great video and PC! Does this PC have the cables necessary to add a CD-ROM drive to it?
Good old Varta Batteries... always wreaking havoc 😵💫
Intel 486 DX2 50 MHz😍 ... always will be my favorite Vintage CPU, since it was my first CPU to ever play with...
Whenever I find (and rescue if possible) a 486 System... it is as good as always equipped with a 66MHz 486🤔.
By the way, do you still accept donations for your channel? I've tried to contact you on your email😅 Best regards😋
My Prolinea 486 DX2 66 has a soldered coin cell battery which I replaced. Therefore I'm lucky not to had encounter such worries.
Interesting that this version has of the Prolinea uses a Varta. I have owned for nearly 30 years a Prolinea 4/25s that is nearly identical, other than having a soldered on PQFP 486/SX25. Mine also had a soldered on Lithium coin cell, instead of a VARTA, which, when removed, had the pads for a coin cell socket underneath, which I promptly installed. Yours appears to have metal tabs for the SIMMS, while mine has the dreaded plastic SIMM clips, two of which are broken. I had a 270 MB Quantum drive.
I bought it at a company computer sale in 1995. It was nearly new, but non-working. When I opened it up , I discovered someone had moved a jumper, apparently intentionally. I moved it back and it came to live and I could read the hard drive. Armed with the name of the previous owner, I dropped by his office and saw he was sporting a fancy new Dell Pentium workstation machine. I asked him about it and he whispered that he'd wanted a new machine, so he borked that one and his IT guy didn't even bother checking what was wrong. Fine By me! It got a 486dx75 ODP processor that was promptly overclocked to 100mhz and went on to be my little brother's college PC for 3 or 4 semesters. I need to replace a SIMM socket, but other than that, it still works great.
Mine also had the soldered-on coin cell. The Ni-Cd VARTAs, where I find them, I replace with a Ni-Mh of the same style. Keeps the appearance correct, and those don't leak! Ni-Mh are also rechargeable. Just in case, cause you never know!
@@BlackEpyon Yeah, I was aware of that. The ones with the soldered on coin cell however don't have a charging circuit. they're the modern style circuit that requires a lower voltage.
Mine Prolinea 486 DX2 66 Mhz also has a soldered coin cell battery which I've replaced.
Dutch PC it is
😊😊
For some reason my finds two of the same hard drives but I only have one. Might that be a conflict with the CDROM drive? hard drive is master and cdrom is slave
I own the 4/100.
can you make a backup of SPSS 5 please?
I'd love to find a compaq prolinea 3/25zs
0:19 - It's the first time ever I noticed it, so I'm curious - do you guys normally have _AZERTY_ keyboards or just in some parts of the country, or did you maybe get this computer from France?
Most people in Belgium use azerty keyboards, even in the Flemish Dutch speaking part. It’s a leftover of the old days when the administration (on typewriters) was dominated by the French speaking part. (And it’s easier if you often have to communicate in french with all the accents like é è ê ) But a part of the people that work in IT use qwerty, just like the Dutch. (Including me)
@@kristofnys3212 Thanks for the clarification!
In Belgium the only people who use QWERTY (myself included) are in IT who do development. The rest is indeed all AZERTY.
Does compaq 4/50 mean 486 processor at 50 mhz?
My motherboard is made in Scotland. What’s special is that it has the logo of a steam locomotive. Only now I can’t get into the BIOS. After checking the RAM, the OS loads immediately. There is no response to pressing the function keys. Why is this happening?
Its a weird feeling seeing this model again....
30 years old...and 99.9% are in the rubbish
Yet you can still find the original PlayStation 1s in the wild.🤔
Too say picking up a PS1 is by comparison easy
The computer feels more like a museum piece.
As a landscaper, I have to regularly dispose of my green-waste, and the place I take it is behind one of the local recycling centres, where all the e-waste is just left outside on pallets. Because I'm there usually at least twice a week, I know the guy, and he lets me take stuff. I've picked up a few vintage computers there. Great arrangement, if you can get one, because a lot of e-waste centres don't let you in the back to root around for fear that you might get somebody's personal data, or hurt yourself, or leave a mess, etc.
How can you set the BIOS/CMOS to recognize hard drives other than those in its list? Trying to restore one with a dead original HDD.
You easy manually set the number of sectors ,headers, plates. There is such an option in every such Bios. You can describe it from the HDD or look it up on the Internet, you only have to take into account the "size" limitation, and those over the course of 40 years were
What kind of monitor is being used?
But can it run carmageddon
Looks like a Tulip here in DK* 1994
*Not Holland
does works 4.0 still work in w11?
No. Windows 11 doesn't like 16-bit software.
Why collect Compaq ? Office gear you need ? u understand boring crab ?
Please get skills, what is it we do like to keep here ;)
good luck getting skills here
Dutch Computer.
69 Pins. (Nice)
Based on the sounds, I knew it was going to be a Quantum drive. I remember having a 1gb Bigfoot back in the day and that sound. ;)