Compaq P III description Re: Fresh Meat

From: Joe <rigdonj_at_intellistar.net>
Date: Sat May 15 16:53:03 1999

Hans,

At 05:17 PM 5/15/99 +1, you wrote:
>> >I just picked up a Copmaq Portable PLUS (DM 35), a
>> >Portable III (DM 40), an Intelevision (DM 20, German
>> >Version with German manuals :) and a MacSE FDHD (DM 15).
>> >Happy Happy Joy Joy.
>> >Is there any site with information on the Compaq Portabele III ?
>
>> I haven't found one but what do you want to know? I have several of them
>> and I have an owner's manual.
>
>Just anything - seems to be a neat 286 machine - a bit heavy but neat -
>especialy the 'display lift' :) I have seen a second one today (with
>b&w LCD (mine has an orage plasma), but the guy still asked for 150 Mark.
>Way to much (he also offered a set of 4 TRS-80 cassetes at - take a seat:
>50 Mark !!!).

  OK Here goes: The P III is a 8/12 Mhz 286 portable with 640K or RAM
standard and a 20 or 40 Mb hard drive standard. There are lots of options
for it including a pod that hooks on the back and connects through the
little sliding door there. The Pod has one 8 bit and one 16 bit ISA slots
in it. The pod door is a bastard to get open and the pod is a bastard to
get off once you install it. You could also get a 40 Mb tape drive that
would mount inside the pod. There is also an optional MODEM that can be
installed inside the main case. There are also two optional memory expander
boards that can be installed. Each hold up to six standard SIMMs. The
SIMMs can be either 256K or 1Mb types so you can have a total of 6.6Mb of
RAM in the PIII. One type of expander board makes the memory appear as
extended memory and the other makes it appear as expanded memory.

  Although the literature only lists 20 and 40 Mb hard drives as being
available, Compaq's spare parts list shows several other models including a
150 Mb one. There is a regular hard drive table in the BIOS and it lists
about 46 types of hard drives (they use regualr IDE drives) including some
that are larger than that supported by DOS. The manual warns that you have
to use other OSs than DOS to support these types. I have put larger drives
in several of them with no trouble what so ever. There is a utilty
avaiable from Compaq to allow access to the CMOS setup but AMIDIAG and some
of the other utilities will also access it. I think you can also access it
by pressing the F10 key when the system first starts up.

  The screen on the P III has VGA resolution not CGA. I've never seen a
LCD screen on a P III. I think that one has to be someone else's model. If
you take the back cover off of the P III, there are charts inside that
explain all the jumper settings. The P III can run at 8 Mhz or 12 MHz or
at 12 and drop to 8 automaticly when it accesses the drives.

  There is room in them for both a 3.5 and a 5.25" floppy drives. You could
get 720K, 1.44Mb, 1.2Mb or 360K drives in them from Compaq.

  There were two different versions of the P IIIs. The later one had an
enhanced keyboard but I don't remember exactly what the difference was.

   Joe
Received on Sat May 15 1999 - 16:53:03 BST