Compaq Presario 5522 DOS Gaming (with networking and hard drive deaths!) -

[@BrunoPeixotoVieira]

Oh my god! Your video brought me incredible memories. My mom bought this same model around 1994/1995. Was my first computer. Played a lot of Lucasarts, Sierra, Infogrames adventures on it... I’ll try to find one to be my DOS machine too! Thank you for the video.

[@BigCar2]

Such acting skills! Love the opening.

[@MrLurchsThings]

No point in taking this stuff too seriously.

[@djdjukic]

Great job on the front panel repair, Compaq seems to have used some brittle ABS plastic mix, I have a P3-550 DeskPro tower whose front panel is in pieces from slight bumps it has received over the years. Liked how you made the IDE cable as well. Just a very well done video. Subscribed!

[@TheRetroChannel]

Great video, glad you finally got everything just right. And that intro, the idea sounded good, but seeing you actually do it on camera, perfect!

[@honkybear666]

I have used mTCP with a computer that had no PCI or ISA slots used a xircom parallel port to ethernet port. Why I here you ask. This was a DOS machine with a bunch of customized device hanging off the back that ran a sawmill. It was either replace the whole equipment at $250,000 plus or get this going. Boss chose my option. I then wrote a script that automated everything and everyone was happy. Phil’s Computer Lab has an excellent video mTCP. Thanks Mr.Lurch as always. BTW it’s great to know others make the same mistakes as me 😂🤣😂🤣😂

[@tenminutetokyo2643]

These all in ones were the rage in the mid 90’s.

[@BennBirch]

Fantastic #doscember video my friend. Probably my favorite so far to be honest. Kudos to you sir and keep putting out interesting content like this. Looking forward to what you bring us in 2021 and wishing you all the best from all the way in the middle of Canada. CHEERS!

[@RetroTechChris]

You're the best, Jason... you brought that thing back to aesthetic greatness! I absolutely love your sense of humor!! And oh the joy of replacing the heat sink bracket. And that Pentium system only has ISA expansion?!? Oh, and I never knew that you could set environment variables in config.sys... fascinating!!

[@MrLurchsThings]

I’m guessing because the slots come off a riser, just keeping them all ISA was the easiest (read: cheapest) solution.

[@RetrogradeScene]

You got a great finish on the case!! and what a case to repair, Compaq always put the effort into designing interesting cases!

[@brentsummers7377]

These and the non CD rom versions were classy machines in their day. Good design & easy to work on with that slide out motherboard tray. And very simple to set up, only needing a power cord, mouse and keyboard to be plugged into clearly labeled ports. They would also accept a standard ISA modem into one of the slots you used for the network card. The early models of these DX2-66 etc would sometimes have only a factory fitted 2400 (2.4k)baud modem! So a 28.8k ISA slot modem was a huge upgrade.

[@ctrlaltrees]

Great video! Looks like a well designed machine - that motherboard is really neat and compact. It's always worth maxing these things out these days for what it costs. Personally I probably wouldn't have bothered putting the modem back in - that said, I'm not sure whether you guys actually have broadband yet. 😉 Really interesting situation with the HDD BIOS config stuff - I've never come across that one before!

[@MrLurchsThings]

Har Har (re: broadband). I left the modem in mainly to fill the hole in the back.

[@JVHShack]

@@MrLurchsThings I was sort of wondering if the RJ-45 port of the NIC would line up with the hole for the modem if inserted into the modem's slot. From my rough guess-timating based on what I saw, it's quite likely. I know that there would have to be some minor modifications made in order for it to work, but if it did work out, it'd be fantastic.

[@MrLurchsThings]

@@JVHShack actually it’d probably go close.

[@omfgbunder2008]

A p1 133 normally should have a fan, but given the crap contact of socket 7 heatsinks, I doubt it really matters 😂

[@Hutschnur]

Hello Jason! Great lurchy video, I remember these Compaq Presarios very well. I sold them in the mid-90s and had to install the video capture card. I wish you and your family merry Xmas and a happy and healthy new year! PS: Love your Def Leppard shirt ;)

[@RiksRandomRetro]

Great video! Agreed the intro was well done. I personally had a CDS 520 (486 33) as my first real computer so this was a great nostalgia kick. I have to say the plastic repair was impressive too and I'd love to see a more detailed view how you accomplished that. Products used, paint color etc. Nice work!

[@MrLurchsThings]

Honestly, it's something I want to go back and relive :) But quickly... Initial wet sanding was done with 240 grit wet and dry, Primer was generic (so for me, from SuperCheap Auto) high fill spray putty. This was followed by wet sanding with 800 grit wet and dry. The paint... I actually took the machine into a local automotive paint place who does both colour scanning/matching and custom aerosol cans - so that was the paint.

[@xmaniac99]

Probably a Presario 433 then if it had a 486SX :-)

[@RiksRandomRetro]

@@xmaniac99 It definitely had a 33 sx (I threw a 100 overdrive in it eventually so we could play games over null modem cable later on against my Pentium) and it was also a CDS for sure. 510 looks like in Europe it came with said 33 so that's what it must have been. I'll find one again one day I hope!

[@RiksRandomRetro]

@@MrLurchsThings Very cool thanks for sharing the process! That's great they were able to match the paint so well at least in the video it looks basically like new.

[@DolganoFF]

I'm installing my slightly more modern Presario (with P166 MMX) and this video helped :)

[@Vanessaira-Retro]

I had a Compaq CD TV 520 back in 94 (same looking all in one with a TV tuner card inside). It was a great machine for its time, but I really wanted one of the new Pentium 100s that were just coming out. Though regretfully that was not my decision. However my Compaq had Tabworks installed on it, which I absolutely loved.

[@Vermilicious]

That's an interesting all-in-one there.

[@georgemaragos2378]

Hi Jason ( Lurch if you prefer ) Very nice video, it looks like you finally sorted out most of the issues. My oldest machine is a 16meg Pentium 100, you are correct that a DX2-66 or DX4-100 especially with vesa local bus is actually faster, but the Pentium cpu contains many new instructions that the 486 does not have ( think of it like the advance the MMX was to the pentium ) I did have back in the day almost a yearly upgrade path from say 1988 - 2000 Actually one of the last 486's had a small 1 inch or so it seems cpu fan - my pentium 100 does have a small fan as well on the cpu as i needed to use 2 clothes pegs to ensure the ide cables and stray wires dont touch the fan blades and make the scraping sound Lan cards, my first experience as lantasic with the wide 10base-T connector ( 2 meg speed ) Next was the 8bit 3com combo cards, with BNC- coaxial connectors ( i still have the cable under the house from the spare room, to both kids rooms (10 meg speed) Next was the 3com 16 bit combo cards, 3c509 maybe ?? , this had all 3 1obase-T - coax and the new cat 5 ( i cant recall if 10 meg or 10/100 ) I am guessing what yo have is the late 486 / win 311/win95 style card common called Intel 10/100 Pro - they were very popular @ 1995 The 3com 16 bit was my favourite as it worked in 386/486/pentium ISA slots and had a config program that set up the plug and play, and yes i hated that it took IRG5 as i had to change the other games sound blaster to IRQ 7 - i still have the original 2speed creative labs cdrom and SB16 - when they dropped to $800 on special at Bing Lee ( single speed cdrom caddies were still almost selling $999 ) Sort of strange you have the hard drive issues with the max space of @ 500meg, i think that was solved by 486 days unless you had the older phoenix or award / ami bios that looks like the dos 4 colour setup on 386's - the trick was to go custom and double the tracks or heads and to get it close and booting - but you cant always mix and match ( like i tell people win 95 is plug and pray ) i have a 8 gig hard drive on the Pentium 100 but use the seagate tools and formatted it with the custom bios driver - i picked this up from phils computer lab just like the multiple boot menu ( Shout out to Phil - he is a top bloke ) - that is really great and i added a few more options to combine more options for with and without sound card / cdrom / lan card Re the mTCP - i have no experience and after Xmas will grab it and try it out - i have heard many good things about it, but i would like to add that you should be able to stay in dos and load ipx/odi dos drivers for your lan card ( Intel Pro i think ?? ) get the cards initialized , and then use fast linx ( FX or the newer FX2 ) or laplink 5 for dos - these wok over network and pretty sure you only need to initialise the cards to send packets you dont need full tcpip for it to work - same as doom lan party just load lan drivers in dos ( these days its windows 10 and the modern zdaemon for doom gameing ) Merry Xmas Regards George

[@synclavier123]

Thank you for this video! I learned a lot.

[@VK2FVAX]

Nice video as always. I feel bad as if I'm nitpicking but that's certainly not the intent. There's some plus's and minus's with the RAM and that Opti Viper chipset. First minus is that FPM ram is slower than EDO. So fetch execute is slower. L2 Cache will partially save you here. Positive.. they're symmetric SIMM's and the Viper can interleave memory, but may not in this case due to the onboard 8mb. The 8mb is actually potentially a problem if you want to max out the RAM because the cache controller probably won't go beyond the 64mb boundary. The top of the memory is usually the first stuff accessed so it'll be the slowest in the uncached region. If you have a copy of cachechk.exe, you can experiment and watch the RAM Cache transfer speeds to figure out what your machine is actually doing. I find it super interesting. If you can't disable the 8mb, you may want to do the Macintosh IIsi trick and experiment with a 8mb smartdrv.exe cache to use the slow memory so the first stuff mapped by the MMU in pmode32 will be ram "hopefully" in the cachable region. Anyway. Nice video. I think you're also in Sydney? Nice to see another local. I liked the story of the Fandango on the 2nd FAT copy. I had a similar problem with older 4 vs 6 SCSI access on AM53cxx's on one of my VAXen beyond 1gb it'd wrap the CHS translation bytes and fandango across the start of the drive when I examined it.

[@nikosnf]

I love your videos. I love your English accent. Merry Christmas!

[@MrLurchsThings]

*cough* Aussie :D

[@zaxchannel2834]

If I had one of those I'd be tempted to try to put Rhapsody onto it and claim it's a Mac from an alternate universe

[@xmaniac99]

Very nice, congratulations

[@walterwold1168]

It's good to hear how others also how struggled with the same stuff as me with this BIOS configurations for Flash drives, I thought I was my rookie skills. I did exactly the same thing. Tried to manually set it up. Tried for several hours, or maybe it went up to days 😝. I finally managed to install a 4GB flash drive. I tried several, but a industrial card was the thing to use. I do think its possible to install 8GB as max.

[@DaveJustDave]

Love the def leppard shirt!

[@MrLurchsThings]

Saw them live several years ago. Just amazing.

[@KasparOnTube]

surprisingly modern looking computer for its time, I thought its like pentium II or III era machine based on outer look in beginning of video :)

[@timrb]

Great vid mate!

[@jerryvr]

period correct would be a 3C509 network card :)

[@sprybug]

I'm a little worried not having a fan on the CPU at that speed. You can get away with it on a P75, however I never saw a system with an Intel Pentium processor above that without a fan.

[@MrLurchsThings]

This did occur to me and it something I will keep an eye on.

Perfect!

[@griftereck]

that video opened, like someone seeking help at an AA meeting. Apple Anonymous. :o

[@wimwiddershins]

I kinda missed this era of the PC gaming ecosystem, coming from Amiga. When I finally got a 486 it was almost exclusively for work.

[@BCjeffro420]

very nice! I have the CDS 520 version of it.

[@CRG]

Great video, just catching up on my DOScember viewing today. Out of interest is there any possibility of taking this system up to say a 200mhz MMX chip, not that there's anything wrong with the 133, I am simply curious? MTCP is a fantastic package. I actually use its FTP on my 286 rig for writing files to floppy disks. Just make sure the floppy is in the drive before you run the FTP server and it'll see it.

[@MrLurchsThings]

I hummed and harred a bit on choice of cpu. I just couldn’t find enough info to say it’d support an MMX cpu, so I played it safe. Now that the video is done, if I ever trip over a 233 MMX or similar, I’ll give it a go.

[@awd42]

It's probably a Socket 5 board, which only supports 3.3V CPUs and a maximum 2x multiplier. Pentium MMX needs 2.8V, so you'd need one of those interposer upgrade boards to run P-MMX, K-6, etc. (not to mention a fan!). Probably not worth the hassle...

[@MrLurchsThings]

@@awd42 Its Socket 7, but yeah - only 3.3v

[@einokeskitalo3217]

Love a Presario.. I have a 425.

[@BaumInventions]

The Compaq Presario CDS520 was the first PC i ever bought for myself. Good times.

[@anca30000]

me too!!

[@paulawillaminachandler-ren3725]

Dude how can you make such a statement 3:00? LOL Pentium 75 with its 3.3 million transistors, twice the amount of cache, larger RAM support, stable over clocked operation, the only thing that 486DX with its 1.1 million transistors has over Pentium is more support for DOS. Well DOS it is I guess. Good video hun.

[@mstcrow5429]

Had a 5528. Oddly, yours is same, but bigger HD? Don't remember MX chip.

[@stevedegeorgejr115]

Any idea how to get into the bios? I can't figure it out on my 5528 :( where is the magic cd?

[@MKRENB]

No fan for the CPU-Cooler? I think the faster Pentium would like it.

[@MrLurchsThings]

Haven’t had a problem yet.

[@PearComputingDevices]

I actually own one of these. I believe it was a 486 sx 2 at first. I ended up upgrading it to a dx4 100. My parents bought it originally for our living room but when my sister had gone to collage she took this with her and it got replaced with a Power Mac G3 aio. After my sister came back from collage it was mine. I ended up also replacing the Windows 3.11 with Windows 95. Thus it also needed more ram. I think by the time I got done with it I had 48 in mine. Don't remember. It was a long time ago.

[@xenaretos]

16 megs does seem like a reasonable pairing for a pentium. My first pc was a pentium 2 with 32 megs of ram, and I don't remember it feeling lacking back in 1998.

[@maikmerten]

About the not-so-great improvement in Quake: I couldn't quite make out what chipset the motherboard uses. Are you somewhat certain the full range of RAM is L2-cached? Some chipsets did have a 64 MB limit, meaning that any memory beyond that would be dog-slow. In theses machines adding RAM beyond 64 Megs can decrease performance.

[@EgonOlsen71]

Looks like this machine has no 2nd level cache at all. There are some empty spots on the board where I would expect them to be. Not uncommon for Compaq PCs though...pay more, get less.

[@maikmerten]

​@@EgonOlsen71 Okay, that'd be quite awful and would permanently relegate this machine to "super-fast 486, really substandard Pentium"-level of performance.

[@jamesjan]

Where’s the L2 cache? The board look like they have some empty solder pads meant for some sram chips.

[@PJBonoVox]

Nice stuff dude. The real trick of a paint job is if it wasn't a pain in the ass multi-day process, you didn't do it right. There's no shortcuts to a nice finish.

[@MrLurchsThings]

Agreed, it's all about the prep and there are no shortcuts.

[@sedrosken831]

Wow, a Quake timedemo of 13.9 on a Pentium-75?? My DX4-100 was right on its heels at 11.0 and my 5x86 did better at 14.0. I wonder if something's actually wrong there or if the 50MHz bus is just holding it back that much -- but then, that'd be a little pathetic given the DX4 and 5x86 were both on a 33MHz bus... It's not the video chip, the Trio64V+ is actually a very decent little 2D accelerator and I was using the VLB variant of it myself for my 486.

[@TheRetroChannel]

It's now mine! MINE!!!

[@MrLurchsThings]

Heh 😂

[@zarkeh3013]

Hah! I forgots about the cmos setup on floppy, bleh! Maybe consider an XT-IDE to overcome auto-detecting problems and give lba48 translations for big ol' storage! (...if your going flash, use win10 to partition it to be sure they are aligned!)

[@Pickle136]

i did my pentium build with win98se and then i could use filezilla as a client to my ftp server. Win98se also allows MSDOS to use full partitions with LBA mode, so no 2 gb limit. you can also use setmul to make the pentium run as a low 386 (see Phils 136in1 stuff) also with Phil's msdos scripts i found i got more conventional memory removing the NOAUTO option. I dont know if that applys to his pure MSDOS

[@MechaFenris]

Secret of Monkey Island is one of my favorite games :)

[@Beerfloat]

Were they good freebase memories?

[@catriona_drummond]

It will run Diablo 1 perfectly fine

[@rhuwyn]

Honestly. I think a video of the plastic repair you did would have been worthwhile at least to show how it was done even if you don't show how much time it truly took.

[@oso2k]

It helps to use NICSCAN.EXE from Georg Potthast (www.georgpotthast.de/sioux/packet.htm) or PCINIC + PKTDRV from David Dunfield (www.classiccmp.org/dunfield/dos/index.htm) to identify your NIC if you're unsure. PKTDRV will also provide you the driver if it has it in its database.

[@catriona_drummond]

top tip - try "mem" instead of "chkdsk". it's awesome :P

[@PG-gs5vb]

Did I just see playing Doom with a mouse?!? ;)

[@MrLurchsThings]

it's a thing. And yes, it did feel weird.

[@bamdadkhan]

i use the same solution but my DOS machine has a proper DHCP address so i can copy anything from anywhere. also about carmageddon - i guess you know there's a nocd solution for it, like almost all games. don't know about you but i don't want to mess with CDs in 2020 unless i collect big box games.

[@xmaniac99]

Fast Page Mode RAM

[@Ryanfox1981]

You could always use LapLink 5 winworldpc.com/product/laplink/5x to transfer via LPT or serial :)

[@jjohnson71958]

give it the amd k or k6 processor chip

[@stoojinator]

I used to work as a computer tech when these first came out. And they were the most horrible pieces of crap. What you're seeing with performance is the best you'd ever get out of it. Some things worked well. Others not so well. Remember, these were business and educational PCs. They were never really ever intended to play games.