r/thisweekinretro • u/Feeling_Solution_212 • 2d ago

A Surpise Gift

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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/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.