I've been on a bit of a tear with 286 PCs over the last couple of months. Actually, I'd planned one of these repairs over a year ago when I got an ALR Fast 286 at an estate sale in the summer of 2022. This was a 286 machine from 1988, and I had been able to get that machine pieced back together and working but it was experiencing lock ups. So I had been on the lookout for a nice 286 board to use as a replacement for that machine. I'd purchased a board that needed some work, but that was yet another project that had been sitting for months waiting for time to do board level work on that. But in the meantime, Free Geek Twin Cites came through once again with a "Project PC" 286. It was an incomplete machine from 1990, but it had the motherboard, RAM and a functioning Floppy Disk drive, so I was happy to get it.
Shortly after that there was another 286 Project PC at Free Geek that was also incomplete, but included a nice case, Power Supply, and most of the computer. I purchased this machine as well, thinking that I'd have enough parts already at home to build out both PCs. One of the oddities of this era is that sometimes a 286 just isn't quite powerful enough for higher resolution VGA graphics, so I had been torn about rebuilding the 286 with VGA or CGA/EGA graphics. But since I got the second machine, I would no longer have to make that decision. I could configure the faster machine from 1990 as a VGA machine and the slower machine from 1988 as a CGA/EGA machine.
I did the rebuild of my existing 286 machine first with a target date of 1990. The "new" motherboard from Free Geek has a 16MHz 286 with 4MB of RAM on it. I was able to re-use the external battery pack I had previous built for the machine and the ATI All-In-Wonder VGA card. There is a nice complement of ISA cards in the machine, including a FDD/HDD IDE controller card, a Serial Parallel I/O card, a more modern 3Com 3C509 Network card in it, and I added an CF to IDE card adapter instead of a hard drive. The CF card is 256 MB and I experimented with the BIOS settings to get 200MB usable capacity from it. The sound card is a more modern Sound Blaster Vibra 16 CT4170 which is less expensive than a period correct Sound Blaster.
I'm very happy with how the machined turned out, and it runs fast and stable...
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After getting my "best" 286 running, I started on the more basic machine targeting a build date around 1988. This PC is a 286 at 12MHz. It has 640k RAM, and I opted to stick with a CGA / EGA card. The HDD / FDD controller and Serial Parallel I/O cards in the machine are period correct although again I did opt to install a CF adapter in order to make it easier to load software from my modern computers. Given the low RAM configuration I won't be installing a Sound Card or other peripherals at this time, but the machine is working good and it looks really nice...
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The final project for this article is another 286 PC, a Compaq Portable II. Thanks to fellow collector Steve H. who passed this machine to me in a lot of luggable computers. This machine was starting up but it had an error on the screen and the floppy drives were in unknown condition. I had heard that it would have Citizen Floppy Disk Drives and that these drives were notoriously difficult to service, but when I opened the PC, the floppy drives were made by Canon. I cleaned and lubricate the drives and after this both drives boot up and run very well, so that ended up being a non-issue. This generation of Compaq PCs does not have the BIOS setup program in ROM. When I was restoring my Compaq Portable I machine back in 2020, I had already downloaded and created 360K Floppy Disks for the Compaq Diagnostic and BIOS setup programs. One of the startup error codes was related to the clock. Thankfully, Compaq used Tadiran batteries, which I have never seen leak. Even cooler than that, you can still purchase a replacement cell today. Once I had installed the new Tadiran cell I was able to go into the Compaq Diagnostics and set the time, date, and machine configuration so that there would not be any error messages at start.
Since this was the lower cost Compaq II without a hard drive I knew I was going to want to install some kind of permanent storage to make the machine more useful. Since the machine had an IDE controller built in I was able to add another CF to IDE adapter, as before with the other 286 machines. This one is configured in the Compaq BIOS to give about 120MB of storage, which is more than this machine ever would have shipped with.
The machine boots up and runs great, I'm very happy with how it has turned out...
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I think this third machine will conclude my 286 adventures for a while. Let me know if you have any 286s, or if you have memories from that era of computing. What games should I load on these PCs? What programs would make them more useful in 2023? Leave a comment below, or feel free to reach out to me via the email address in my Bio.
