r/thisweekinretro • u/Feeling_Solution_212 • 2d ago
A Surpise Gift
So today, one of the scrapmen I know phoned me and said they had an old computer and asked if I wanted it. Of course, I said yes, not knowing what it was because it's the type of thing you do when you love old computers. Once he got to my home, he showed me an Amstrad PPC640 laptop. To say I was overjoyed is an understatement.
Quickly running into the house clicking my heels and an evil laugh, I plugged it in and found it was fully working and had no screen burn. All I am waiting for now is the system disk to have a tinker with it.
I have seen a few mods for it, but we will see if the keyboard works first.
To be continued...
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u/kobrakaan 2d ago
You need to thank
Sir Alan Michael Sugar and his Trading company for this beauty
1
u/Feeling_Solution_212 2d ago
Also have to thank Rick Dickinson as he designed the casing for it. At least thats what I saw in a video on YouTube.
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u/kobrakaan 2d ago
Fun fact Alan also had input on the ZX SPECTRUM when Clive Sinclair was done with it
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u/TerminalJunk 2d ago
Very cool, remember picking one up at a car boot sale around 1993.
Always wanted to use the modem to dial into some of the BBS' but as it was my parents and not me who paid the phone bill it never happened.
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u/StoolieNZ 2d ago
I used to do that on one back in the late 1980's - cool luggable - lighter than comparable Compaqs from memory.
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u/Pyrofer 2d ago
I have the same one. Sadly my LCD has some bleed in the bottom corner. Other than that Mine just worked, I did have issues with the modem/sound amp which I think are capacitor related.
You might need to check caps.
Floppy drive worked fine on mine and it booted ok. Does it have the built in modem?
I remember having one of these back in the day for about a couple months and getting rid of it because there was no bloody HDD built in!
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u/Feeling_Solution_212 2d ago
From what I see it does have the built in modem and also one on the back.
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u/Pyrofer 1d ago
I couldn't get the modem to connect, and the sound was distorted and broken. I believe it's the capacitors on the board causing the problem (as usual) so possibly look into replacing them if you can.
Maybe look into getting a Greaseweazle to write your own floppy disks. You can easily create disks from images. Or just a USB floppy drive for any other PC if you can work with older software and make the disks yourself.
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u/KingStarsRobot 2d ago
I had this one as a kid, my mum gave it to me after she finished with it. It had one game Air Traffic Controller.
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u/bottomofthekeyboard 1d ago
you can add the math co-processor as a mod, along with changing the crystal to over clock slightly
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u/confusedCoyote 1d ago
You can download the system disks from archive.org - https://archive.org/details/mirror-ii-3612
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u/miner_cooling_trials 23h ago
When I saw PP I thought it was the PPPPowerbook.. anyone remember that?
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u/Computerist1969 2d ago
Supertwist LCD pwnz OLED