I also had one of those, but the mains powered one. Built in power supply, and a ST506 RLL drive, along with a plug in board that had the controller. Yours is a later one, with what looks like a proprietary connector. Made by Seagate of course, you can always see the style of the drives. The one I had used an 80186 processor, and ran at a blazing fast 12MHz. It died when the backlight died, but the LCD had been so faded as well that it was only visible in a dark room. Had a whole 640k of RAM in 64k and 256k chips soldered to the board
2020 jan - I have 8086/8088 version with two battery packs, does not have 8087 upgrade yet. Does not have keypad port. model -92. (made in Japan)......Long ago had another like your 80286 and the very rare external expansion box, connected with ribbon cable. it had an acient netork card in it for Novell. (External Bus plate covers where ribbon goes).
I caught this video because I have an old Zenith Laptop that was probably built by Toshiba. I'm trying to figure out how to get to the hard drive, but they were so clever building this thing, there are no screws in the bottom part - none. I feel like I'm, trying to solve Rubik's cube or something; I can't figure this out at all. (I am having the same problem with brittle plastic.)
The floppy drives in these only support double-density 720K disks, so high-density 1.44MB disks won't work. MS-DOS only formatted the disk as 360K because it wasn't set up correctly to work with the 720K drive, using a DRIVPARM command in CONFIG.SYS. Please save the hard drive, as it is getting difficult to find one for these Zenith laptops that is still working, because they used an early 3.5" hard drive with a proprietary interface.
Get those caps on the hard drive recpaced ASAP! I would do the motherboard and DC converter too. I’m really dreading taking apart my pristine supersPORT to replace the caps as it’s likely gonna crumble. But it has to be done as the machine is starting to show signs of malfunction.
Good news! The machine came apart just fine without breaking! The only caps that were nasty were the hard drive ones, so I got those replaced. All of the others look fine (not that that means anything) but I think they can wait for now.
I have one of those computers and it seem to be in good shape except for no battery, and no carrying case. The computer turns on and I won't be transporting it anywhere except maybe to a repair shop. The cmos may be out of date on my computer, but it seem to be fine otherwise. The one you have was definitely abused before you got it and is even worst shape now. You either have to look for another one or dump that one.
HDD is not dead. There is a mechanism that locks the drive when is laptop turned off, as years passes this part that locks/unlocks gets rusted and cannot move by its own. You can move this part manually to help HDD start spinn or fix it removing corrossion.
I was thinking that the whole time - I was waiting for him to get to the keyboard breakdown just so I could see what kind of switches were in it. -Sent from a WASD with Cherry Clears that takes me back to 1987 like nothing else
Awesome piece of computer history.
I also had one of those, but the mains powered one. Built in power supply, and a ST506 RLL drive, along with a plug in board that had the controller. Yours is a later one, with what looks like a proprietary connector. Made by Seagate of course, you can always see the style of the drives. The one I had used an 80186 processor, and ran at a blazing fast 12MHz. It died when the backlight died, but the LCD had been so faded as well that it was only visible in a dark room. Had a whole 640k of RAM in 64k and 256k chips soldered to the board
2020 jan - I have 8086/8088 version with two battery packs, does not have 8087 upgrade yet. Does not have keypad port. model -92. (made in Japan)......Long ago had another like your 80286 and the very rare external expansion box, connected with ribbon cable. it had an acient netork card in it for Novell. (External Bus plate covers where ribbon goes).
I caught this video because I have an old Zenith Laptop that was probably built by Toshiba. I'm trying to figure out how to get to the hard drive, but they were so clever building this thing, there are no screws in the bottom part - none. I feel like I'm, trying to solve Rubik's cube or something; I can't figure this out at all. (I am having the same problem with brittle plastic.)
The floppy drives in these only support double-density 720K disks, so high-density 1.44MB disks won't work.
MS-DOS only formatted the disk as 360K because it wasn't set up correctly to work with the 720K drive, using a DRIVPARM command in CONFIG.SYS.
Please save the hard drive, as it is getting difficult to find one for these Zenith laptops that is still working, because they used an early 3.5" hard drive with a proprietary interface.
Get those caps on the hard drive recpaced ASAP! I would do the motherboard and DC converter too. I’m really dreading taking apart my pristine supersPORT to replace the caps as it’s likely gonna crumble. But it has to be done as the machine is starting to show signs of malfunction.
*Replaced* ASAP I mean.
Good news! The machine came apart just fine without breaking! The only caps that were nasty were the hard drive ones, so I got those replaced. All of the others look fine (not that that means anything) but I think they can wait for now.
I have one of those computers and it seem to be in good shape except for no battery, and no carrying case. The computer turns on and I won't be transporting it anywhere except maybe to a repair shop. The cmos may be out of date on my computer, but it seem to be fine otherwise. The one you have was definitely abused before you got it and is even worst shape now. You either have to look for another one or dump that one.
Still have mine... HDD long since dead, but will still boot and function off floppy...
I believe the supersPort 286 uses an IDE hard drive. But the supersPort 8088 uses a strange 26 pin hard drive connector.
+iVTECInside Try recapping your drive. It may bring it back to life!
HDD is not dead. There is a mechanism that locks the drive when is laptop turned off, as years passes this part that locks/unlocks gets rusted and cannot move by its own.
You can move this part manually to help HDD start spinn or fix it removing corrossion.
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When we get out of our asses and stop with the thinness wars for laptops, we can finally have modern laptops with mechanical keyboards...
I was thinking that the whole time - I was waiting for him to get to the keyboard breakdown just so I could see what kind of switches were in it. -Sent from a WASD with Cherry Clears that takes me back to 1987 like nothing else