pouët.net

Due to some bad changes in my personal life, I had to buy my own computer. I was in hurry and also lacking money, so after whole day of browsing Allegro (EBay-like site) I bought for a low price this:



Compaq CONTURA AREO 4/33C
Processor: 486 SX 33 Mhz
RAM: 8 MB
Cache: 8 KB
FDD: no
HDD: 0.17 GB
CD: no
PCMCIA: II
Display: DSTN Kolor&nbsp7,8"
VGA Card: SMOS 8108&nbsp512 MB
Max. resolution: 640x480
Soundcard: no
Speakers: no
OS: Win3.11 (installed)

And now the fun part comes. What can I do on this junk? Primarely I bought this as a portable wordprocessor, but I want also to watch some demos, play games (I hope that Doom 2 will run...) maybe at last start coding.

So? Can I do such fun on this nice Compaq?

Paint it black, stick apple logo and sell it on ebay

It's black right now. And no Apple stickers. Pentagram yes, but not a goddamn Apple.

Perhaps you could use it to keep your legs warm.

i used to have a very similar one, was perfect for FT2ing and watching crystal dream :)

How much did you pay for this... thing? Hopefully not more than 20 bucks. :)

Create an Edge of Disgrace port

(ok, probably not much of a challenge there)

If it has got a parallel-port get this.

wat ? why did u buy that toy ?

Seriously, you can find 128Mb pentium II in trash cans nowadays...

I had and still have contura aero 4/25, pretty much same laptop but with 4mb ram. Used it as serial terminal.

A passive matrix display? Watching demos won't be much fun.

I bet shipping was more than the price of that thing.

:O

Too bad I see this only now... I just got rid of a Gateway Solo 9300 Pro. I would have just given you the damn thing for free.

I found a mint IBM Thinkpad T41 for about 50 quid...

What? You mean you paid real money for that piece of junk? Wow.

I mean you can even get a computer from this millennium for free these days...

I have something similar (but p1) for watching old demos, as I no longer have a box capable of running dos. As a warning though, the screen is so bad that if yours is similar you probably won't want to watch demos on it. BUT: plug in external speakers and a monitor, and it's perfect :D

:D

1995 called and wants its laptop back...

I would like one of these!
I would just boot my MS-DOS disks, format the disk, reinstall the DOS, the norton commander and then demos (does it have a CD-Rom? No :P)
Disk by disk, arj by arj, copy some demos and watch.
Then some compiler (quickbasic, nasm and some C although I'd only write assembly in this one)
The some games (Lotus 3, adventures, eye of the beholder and doom)

http://web.archive.org/web/20010405060539/http://www.compaq.com/newsroom/pr/1994/pr070294a.html
It was called a subnotebook even back then..

http://web.archive.org/web/20010405060539/http://www.compaq.com/newsroom/pr/1994/pr070294a.html
An empty space was added...

Primo, thanks for answers & good laugh.
Secundo, I payed for this about 15$.
Tertio, I don't have enough room for *real* computer, even midtower or IBM.
Quarto, I don't have much money and offers are quite shitty, for nice Toshiba Pentium II they want from me about 100$. It's quite a steal and I need a computer now.
Quinto: passive matrix display WTF? How will this display animations and similar? Blinking?

On the bright side, you'll get free motion blur :)
On the not so bright side, you won't get a lot else :)

I remember a presentation of this machine in a greek magazine. It was called back then the "rolls royce" of laptops. I really wanted one badly.

I have a similar machine (Compaq Contura 430cx) but I only use it to run 64hdd at the moment. It's not a very fun computer for demos since it doesn't have a soundcard.

I used to have DamnSmallLinux installed on it. It was pretty good. The xvesa X client that DamnSmallLinux uses by default is very lightweight and it was even possible to run some of the less resource hungry graphical web browsers with acceptable responsiveness. Of course my computer is much more powerful (486dx4) and has more RAM (16mb IIRC) so performance might not be as good for you. The only problem with DamnSmallLinux is that it's a real pain in the ass to install on a computer that doesn't have a CD-ROM drive or USB ports.

Btw if your battery has died like mine, I recommend taking it out. Makes the laptop a lot lighter.