PC Archeology: Let's explore the Samsung S5200 and attempt a repair on the gas plasma screen

[@johnpetruna8888]

In a video about a grey computer with an orange display, you wore a grey flannel that features orange stripes, and I applaud you. Nice.

[@JMPDev]

Haha, I did not notice this. That’s awesome

[@MatthewHill]

Might have more to do with the ice storm!

[@fisqual]

I volunteered at a recycler 20 years ago and the amount of this stuff we threw out as useless hurts my soul to this day. You're such a good steward to this old tech. Thanks for doing what you do and especially thanks for sharing it with us!

[@pelculator]

I curse myself and my parents everyday for the stuff we threw out over the years…

[@KAPTKipper]

I worked for a School district in the late 90's the amount of old Commodore PETs we had tossed in to landfills seems criminal now.

[@JamesHalfHorse]

Same. The stuff we just threw in bins to be melted down ugh.

[@NuntiusLegis]

And actually I never threw away a working or only slightly damaged computer, still have my C64 and my 486.

[@kelvinstokes996]

I don't. I simply didn't have the space to hold onto things, with the anticipation of 20-30 years. I'm glad I got rid of things and didn't have to hold onto the clutter!@@pelculator

[@mkonji8522]

I have another gas plasma system from compaq (portable 386) but I managed to fix the lines by carefully taking my hot air soldering station for short bursts in the targeted area. 2 lines poped back up after about 2 years but repeating that method fixed it again for me. Super scary doing that but I had a secondary system I was using for parts that had a good display so I figured what could I lose if I killed it. This samsung is super cool though.

[@rillloudmother]

i feel like hot air might be worth trying on adrian's gas plasma..?

[@D-K-C]

good

[@clavius5734]

What temperature were you using?

[@MothKeeper]

3 Billion Kelvin.

[@rarbiart]

1:02:40 this type of ribbons can be reglued. at work we had to do this to some embedded LCDs 2 decades ago due to EOLed parts. but it's a process which needs a lot of chemicals (desolving old glue, cleaning, new glue) and mechanical tooling (screwing jigs with silicone covered clamps). and even longivity of the repair is more like 90% over the next 2 years. (and please DO NOT try any of those hacks like "brushing with silicone sock over soldering tip to reheat existing glue". it will not last and deform the flexboard in a way that prevents any future repair)

[@forbiddenera]

Yeah I think strange parts? Has a video on repairing LCDs or oleds or something in a factory, like in a way most would have thought impossible!

[@davidkane4300]

The military still uses gas plasma displays in very old mission critical systems, so there must be a supplier still making them. Not saying they'll be compatible with this, but the tooling and parts should still exist.

[@rarbiart]

@@davidkane4300 those gas plasma displays of fire solution and fuse timer computer in the gunners hatch in german gepard tanks still seem to work without stripe issues, at least in the videos which we see coming from Ukraine.

[@davidkane4300]

@@rarbiart exactly... I saw these displays used in very old NATO communication systems (teletype?) That are used 24/7. I doubt they are 35+ year old parts since Adrian mentioned they will become unreadable with heavy use. A company must be making replacements. They may not be cheap enough for an individual like Adrian to purchase, but military equipment is often auctioned when it becomes surplus, and that is affordable... Sometimes brand new (or low hours) equipment is auctioned.

[@dominikschutz6300]

I thought fiddling with a heat gun could improve the picture, but the process with the regluing sounds more appropriate. Maybe an instruction could help Adrian out :)

[@mattdavala3790]

I was watching another video and I fell asleep. I then woke to you doing a continuity test and I thought my fire alarm was going off. I leaped out of bed only to realize it was you and not my house burning.

[@JMPDev]

Better a false alarm there than the opposite 😅

[@bouuigigw]

Love the shout outs to 8 bit guy, LGR, and Tech Tangents.. This is truly a great community to be part of. :)

[@olivierdebonne]

35:16 Hey Adrian, when you connected the SCSI hard disk to your bench PC and noticed that it was ‘almost’ empty you could see only 3 MB of free disk space instead of 30-ish MB. I assume the ‘dir /a’ command would have revealed the DoubleSpace container, which is more than likely a large hidden file. At least, that is how Stacker worked, and most likely DoubleSpace too. DoubleSpace was later renamed to DriveSpace as the result of a Stac Electronics lawsuit, that was in DOS 6.22.

[@GeomancerHT]

I remember doublespace killing my DOS drive in the late 90's (we were poor so our computer was old), I had the first digital pictures of my sister in a school play, my mother would never forgive me about the incident.

[@jameshughes258]

This is my thoughts exactly. Doublespace worked by creating a file and then 'zipping' everything within it. The doublespace driver would need to be loaded for you to see the 'drive' contents within the file. When you boot from the drive - it's loading it and then the drive is visible.

[@nickwallette6201]

Scrolled down looking for this comment. ^ Adrian, this is your first stop. 3MB free on a 31MB partition with nothing but command com? I don't think so. :-)

[@somethinggeeky]

That plasma display archeology was actually super interesting. Don't feel bad if you replace it with a modern display. A usable busy not authentic computer is better than e-waste 100% of the time.

[@JMPDev]

I totally respect his feelings there though, he’s made it clear from the beginning that his main draw of this machine was that unique display, so replacing it would defeat the point for him.

[@BilisNegra]

Well, the computer is usable with an external screen so it would not have to necessarily go to e-waste.

[@j__r0d]

Nice to see a shoutout for Joe's Computer Museum. I recently had an order from him that had an issue, and he was super responsive and even sent me a free sticker! 8-bits are all you need!

[@AnthonyRBlacker]

Wow that thing a SERIOUS blast from the past.. Laplink, I remember using that to copy from computer to computer back in the 90s.. man.. what memories!!

[@ferrellsl]

Yeah, between the years of the sneaker net and LANs, that's all we had. The version I had on hand had the ability to transfer files via the COM: or LPT: ports. It was great for moving large amounts of data that simply wouldn't fit on floppies or for people who didn't want to sit for hours feeding floppies from one PC to another.

[@MarianoLu]

100% laplink, pw (professional write) disk doubler and windows 3.1 a big blast from the past.

[@macgeek21]

a tech radio show i listen to had a caller a few years ago trying to get laplink working to transfer files to a new i think windows 8 machine. i had hysterical laughter as the host explained why thats not possible anymore. macs had a similar feature called target disk mode which apple abandoned when it switched to intel.

[@TonyHamlyn]

I still have a laplink cable, db9+db25 connector both ends (null modem cable essentially).

[@AnthonyRBlacker]

You're absolutely correct, as soon as you found the drivespace (or doublespace) on the HDD, I knew you were missing the container file by not booting that drive directly!! At least you found it!!!

[@macgeek21]

i used to run into this issue all the time with old(new at the time) computers. weird how they did that? i can't see that it saved any space and it would just confuse people saying where did my files go.

[@kaiyoshi2243]

Remember that DOS 6.22 can only see hard drive partitions up to 2.1gb. So that 4gb SD card won't work unless you partition it into two drives. Unless of course the computer has further limitations. 528mb is another limitation for some systems. So there's another size you can try. Love your videos, always look forward to the next video.

[@migsvensurfing6310]

To complete your info DOS3.3 32MB

[@der.Schtefan]

To be honest, this was a much more interesting dive into this machine than I had anticipated.

[@JORGETECHJorge]

That Xilinx chip is actually an FPGA, not a CPLD, and it's actually the first one the company ever made!

[@rarbiart]

21:00 silicone mats and cutting boards do a wonderful job of preventing shorts during partial assembled testing. (cardboard and hard plastic seems constantly moving all over the place, which can become risky sometimes.)

[@JMPDev]

Forget if you mention it in this or the previous video, but found out today that the same exact screen is also used in the Toshiba T3200SX. A friend of mine owns one and luckily the screen is working perfectly on his. He had bought two, one with a cracked screen and one that wouldn’t boot, and combined them for one fully functional unit.

[@AliusScitmelius]

And very similar Panasonic plasma screen was in Compaq Portable 386. More info if you seach 'The Chronicles of Gas-Plasma'

[@RocketRenton]

Mitsumi are still going strong, after all these years, the OG maker of the NES, SNES, and Duke Controllers, also Vic 20, Amiga keyboards, and many other OEM products.

[@jeremychrzan]

Oh the lives that these computers (and their users) must have had. Thanks for the deep dive exploring this old machine.

[@michaelallen1432]

Doing a quick search, I found 3M 7303. That might be what is needed. It's a thermally curing anisotropic conducting tape. (This is why reheating the adhesive does not work. It cures with heat and won't "reflow") To bond it you need around 18 bars of pressure at 140C (around 260psi, so a hypothetical 1"x0.25" connection might require it to be clamped with about 60-70 lbs of force) The temp can apparently be 150 or 160. It's not super critical that it be exact, just got enough it seems. To do it your going to need to build a device to apply the heat and pressure and find something to practice on. Im thinking of some sort of copper block with a geater element like used in a 3d printer and a thermocouple, with a silicone pad so you dont have metal on glass. You'd need to make a mechanism to clamp it with appropriate force. Some sort of pliers maybe with one jaw being the heater and both jaws on pivots lined with silicone pads so they will sit flat. Then maybe a spring between the handles eoth a screw to tighten. Then calculate the force on the jaws from the dimensions of the pliers and the smount the spring stretches.

[@Fir3Chi3f]

It's always so satisfying to hear more of this lost software has been backed up on Internet Archive!

[@SebMcC2007]

I always use either test disk/photorec when it comes to restoring data. It also work on images, made with DD, I think. My old T3200 I referenced to in the comment in your previous video also used doublespace. I case you haven't been able to restore the doublespace thing, I remember helping a friend of mine, back in late 90's who had a virus on machine. Apparently the virus had deleted his doublespace image. An undelete (from MS-DOS 6.20) undeleted the missing files and the pc worked back like a charm. I did remove the virus with some antivirus from McAfee for DOS. Which was kindly provided by my IT teacher. Love these videos, keep it up!

[@coronelkittycannon]

That Raspberry Pico probably has more computing power than the entire laptop, funny how tech evolves.

[@matt1834]

When you were checking the hdd, i was going to come into the comments and say you should have typed "dir," or "dir /a"! Happy to see it all working (kind of) now! Good work :)

[@KG4JYS]

I worked in a computer shop in the 1990's and we used laplink 3 to build every computer. We would install the hardware, and use LL3 to copy over the operating system from a "server" over the parallel port since that was far faster (vs serial). It was still pretty slow, but once you started the transfer, it was completely hands-off so you could disconnect the KB/Video and move on to the next machine. One of the other nice things about using laplink is that it didn't matter what kind of other hardware the machine had. Every machine at that time had a parallel port, so it worked 100% of the time regardless of the generation or configuration of the machine.

[@AzagXul666]

What a joy, after sauna I found out there's a new video. Gonna drink some beer and watch. Cheers from Finland!

[@JMPDev]

Lived in Finland for two years and definitely miss the Sauna lifestyle, we even had one at work! Terveisiä Suomeen!

[@rbtgmnstcs]

IPA will dissolve many adhesives and make the removal sooo much easier. Once the IPA has dried, the adhesive use to be fully functional again.

[@andrewlittleboy8532]

Double Space came with Dos 6.20 but then was changed to DriveSpace for 6.22 for licensing reasons I believe.

[@michaelhall4626]

DoubleSpace actually came out with MS-DOS 6.0. Then after the release of MS-DOS 6.2, Microsoft was sued by Stac Electronics, who made the Stacker disk compression software, for patent infringement. So they brought out MS-DOS 6.21, which removed DoubleSpace, then introduced DriveSpace in MS-DOS 6.22.

[@RetroNora7734]

1:10:30 I also got such laptop that got pretty no info about it online -STM5500. And recapping the PCB on the back of plasma screen helped with poor brightness and contrast.

[@grumpyoldwizard]

That music really sets the mood. Great tune!

[@eayuwna]

Congratulations? Very nice repair vid too as usual.

[@oliverer3]

Apparently I started watching this video and fell asleep, so I guess I'll encourage the ol' algorithm with doubling my watch time!

[@JMPDev]

Thank you for doing a followup episode! Was a treat getting to see that panel and so awesome that otherwise you got everything working. I hope some viewer might reach out that has some experience re-adhering fiddly screens like this, or has an extra screen they might donate. It would be awesome to see this fully restored without the screen defects. What a cool machine, thank you again 🧡

[@michaelmiller641]

Wow! That was a marathon repair, very interesting ! Thanks!

[@Lazyman1975]

I am subscribing. You are a true genius with these old machines.

[@JoesComputerMuseum]

Oooh! BlueSCSI for the win!

[@JamieStuff]

My exposure to a gas plasma display "laptop" was in the mid-'80s in the Army; I got to play with a GRiD Compass. It was XT-class, with nonvolatile bubble memory.

[@macgeek21]

exposure? i hope you wore gloves ;) ive never seen or used a plasma display. i can't remember although i can't remember using any in big box stores as a kid.

[@macgeek21]

the big tv purchase we made when i was in elementary school(4th or 5th grade) was a 20'' tv. it was huge and took up almost the whole wall. it was a mitsubishi that cost over $1000.

[@TonyHamlyn]

We had Grid laptops in the Australian telco I used to work at for field equipment commissioning because we had a few ex-us military guys working for us who said it was bullet proof lol. They were heavy and way overpriced, most had monochrome screens (not sure it was plasma) except the senior managers who forked out the big bux for a colour one. This was about 1994-1997.

[@miss_lisa]

For that hard drive, the early Norton Utilities included an unformat utility that searched the drive for the partition table mirror and directory entries and used that to attempt to recover from a format. It didn't always work, but the kind of files you are looking for would generally not be fragmented, that would make them more likely to be recoverable with that utility.

[@jwhite5008]

if unformat didn't work - probably only r-studio or similar sector-search recovery software may help. there is a free clone called r-linux which is not very advanced but might be enough for a simple task.

[@AaronBaron-e7y]

8 was going to recommend the Norton utility before Peter sold out and was the goat. I couldn't recommend Norton utilities now as it grabs hold so thoroughly that you can never totally get rid of it.

[@erichanson420]

This is very important work you're doing.

[@FariSamSoli]

Few yeas ago I got a bag of NOS Tantalum, half of them were shorted in spite of never been used

[@TheSimTetuChannel]

Very comprehensive teardown! I love it!

[@Wormetti]

Love your work, oh hey it's one of my submitted benchmarks at 43:18, didn't expect to see that!

[@DorineOckimey]

Wow, it's really good. It's very attractive and the AD is very interesting

[@saturn5tony]

Brilliant Mr Black, brilliant! 😊

[@michaelrose1814]

Keep it up, love the long form videos

[@DigitalNomad765]

Very nice, Love Old Laptops 😊😊😊 Thanks for the post.

[@Unfinished80]

That display is unlike anything I've seen before. Wow! Thanks for sharing!

[@stephenoliveau]

Adrian: Put pressure on 200v to test?! no thanks! Also Andrian: I'm doing the thing. 😂

[@JMPDev]

I’m so glad he was able to talk himself into doing it 😂 while remaining safe of course.

[@macgeek21]

the first thing or the second thing?

[@mlongval]

Thanks Adrian. Really interesting episode. Great work.

[@ryanianm]

That was really neat. Never seen a screen like that before, thx Adrian!

[@BloodBlight]

Gotta pay attention to that free space counter. ;) I instantly thought it was odd you only had like 3MBs free. But for drives that aren't Double Spaced... :) There was an old Norton program that would rebuild the FAT from scratch. I think it was just called "unformat" and would scan the whole disk for files, it worked really well. You can zero a small IDE flash card, then DD the old disk image image onto the blanked card and run the tool tool on that. For a modern option (and more aggressive), on a Linux system install a package called "testdisk" and try the application called "photorec". It won't recover directory structures or file names, but it's free and works!

[@melkiorwiseman5234]

There was an old program intended for emergency data recovery on floppy disks (and I think it even would only work on the A and B drives in order to prevent it from being used on a HDD). It was named OHMYGAWD and it would simply find out how many root directory entries could exist then fill the entire root directory with equally sized files containing the entire contents of the data space on the disk, replacing any file names already in the root directory. The program was an emergency last resort. If you lost something and undelete could not recover it, you could use the program and then explore the files it created in order to try to find what you had lost. Fairly obviously, it wasn't really intended for the recovery of programs, but data, and generally of textual data.

[@denispgakelly]

Amazing show as usual, Adrian. Thanks for sharing

[@keithbeard7133]

Thanks for a most adventurous journey Adrian, I look forward to the next one.

[@rod370]

Hi, Adrian. I love this video. Thank you for making it. Stay safe to you and your loved ones.

[@mikafoxx2717]

Plasma screens were only discontinued in 2013, mostly due to being expensive as heck. When OLED became good, it was the direct replacement. Huge glass screens in 1080p with millions of tiny vfd cells.. pricey! I'm watching you on a 2008 pioneer kuro plasma right now. It died in computers early because of the energy for portable laptops, and the price for desktop when color crt were cheaper.

[@JerryEricsson]

I remember reading the Computer Shopper, which was a HUGE magazine you could buy of nothing but computer adds, and drooling over machines like this. At long last I saved a few pennies and bought a crapola 386SX25 and VGA monitor, it came via truck shipping, I used it till I found a good 486, at the time Workers comp sent me to college after a crash sent me to rehab as I could no longer be a cop, a girl in college bought my 386 with the slowest Windows 95 installed on it, 95 ran great on my 486

[@SyldabiaHacks]

I always save a backup of EPROMs (from video card, BIOS) before all. It’s very important and can be very difficult to find. Nice video. Thanks a lot.

[@lougarou007]

Do you take them out and read them with a eprom burner or do you use a dos program

[@SyldabiaHacks]

@@lougarou007 yes, exactly. But I use a Windows program.

[@pbradleyking]

At a school district in the second half of the 90's, those Cyrix processor upgrades were the best bang for the buck. We had an IBM fleet of PS/1, PS/2, EduQuest & Aptivas. They all worked with the Cyrix processors. The 486DX2/66 was the workhorse of the day, with Pentium/Pentium-II only in servers.

[@ToomsDotDk]

My day job is IT forensics and when trying to undelete content aka carving then the best tool is testdisk and/or photorec from cgsecurity. but i dont have high hopes when there is used disk compression as that will make it much harder to get the right content out.

[@IJaggedl]

I was just about to make the same suggestion and decided to try and see if someone had already suggested it in the comments. Testdisk and photorec are one of the best tools for recovering data!

[@jessiec4128]

Another really good video Adrian. I really enjoy watching them. I look forward to more!!

[@Cherijo78]

Given all of the problems with plasma displays and the way they are essentially a non-starter these days, I would be interested personally in seeing an LCD panel replacement. 3D printed mounts are not difficult to do, there's a ton of space in that machine, and it seems worth it to me. You could get EGA color graphics on it, and it would make the machine actually usable. I think it would be a fun hack to watch you do, and it would save the machine in a usable state. The original plasma display could be set aside without being thrown away if someone with skills wanted to take a crack at fixing it later, but I really don't think it's even worth saving at this point. These displays were far too finicky, and it's why they didn't last long in production. I think replacing this machine's display with an LCD panel would be in line with what you've done previously with the TV set, and it could help everyone with these older machines further our understanding of how to do it. It beats having broken machines sitting around IMHO. No, it's not ideal, but plasma displays aren't coming back.

[@mikafoxx2717]

Plasma displays were expensive and way too power hungry. So for laptops with batteries it didn't make sense, and for desktops, crt's were better and cheaper.. plasma TV's stuck around until 2013 or so. I'm watching this video on a 1080p pioneer plasma. For TV's it was weight and expense that made them fall out of favor. They were the OLED of the time. My TV would have cost 8k in 2008..

[@chickenfizz]

@@mikafoxx2717 I'm guessing you have a Kuro? I have one too and I absolutely love it.

[@mikafoxx2717]

@@chickenfizz Yep, the big 60" it's a great TV, built very well. If it ever has a problem, it's probably even fixable with new power supply caps.

[@Stormer47]

I almost wept when I saw you run hdir. As a kid, I found this tool back in 1987. By 1988 I had written my own version in C called "domdir".

[@AnthonyRBlacker]

Interesting you think (and you may well be correct) that HEAT was the devil to those connectors up top as heat has been know to rise and considering the lower lines seem to still be perfect, then you're probably correct. Funny because as you were looking at it taken apart, I was thinking maybe applying some direct heat right where those connections are, even being under the glass, that maybe some heat right on the bad areas would re-connect or almost reapply the connection to the glass.. Oh well, this was a very cool find of yours, I'm glad you took it down as far as you did and showed us... very neat, and I'm SURE the 500 something dollar replacement "replacement" screens are JUST AS BAD. Shame, glass plasma displays are actually VERY gorgeous. An ex gf of mine and I purchased a television from Sears many many years ago, it was a plasma screen, and it looked a million times better than the old LCD screen from back in the day (early 2000's).. it was a gorgeous screen, very expensive original price but still, a beautiful home theater screen for its time!!

[@jagdtigger]

12:31 I am very much of a fan of the idea of the debian logo on that cpu fan...... :D

[@michaelb.grammer6807]

I have this exact "portable" computer. Bought it in 1990 and final getting around to recycling it. I'd love it to have a museum home but haven't found one. Fired up ok but reported the same battery issue.

[@janchristensen9858]

Hi Adrian. Try to change those axial capisator on the back of the plasma screen. They look very toasty and then you get more brightnes again ☺️

[@thawedcrumpet1682]

Format another? Yes? Nah. No? Nah. I'll go with B! Love the video!

[@Retroguyuk75]

Very interesting to see more about SCSI drives. I've only ever used IDE.

[@jwhite5008]

I'm especially interested in the question - how can it boot dos which shouldn't support them natively?

[@crgd23]

@@jwhite5008SCSI adapters with a BIOS, like this one, are natively supported in DOS.

[@PaulinesPastimes]

Masterful fault finding as always. It's just crying out for an LCD screen conversion, isn't it? Plenty of room in there. 😊

[@seancurtin6103]

I've got a cheap 10" TV from Amazon with its own battery and HDMI/VGA/Composite inputs that would fit in there without even taking the case off! 😅

[@darkwing4475]

As usual Adrian,, you made this video informative and entertaining,, You have amazing talent,, :-)

[@clhessiv]

Since there appears to be a bonding issue, I would apply heat (heat gun) across the top then strategically clamp the panel. That might solve the issue

[@michaelwood9866]

hey adrian i have a question......i have 2 of the compaq portable 1 pcs and one has dual floppy and the other has a floppy and a hdd......they both dont turn on but i was wondering if you knew anyone that was willing to come get them? i don't want to throw them away as they are history and would rather see them fixed up and working....i don't have a car so i can't drop them off somewhere so any ideas? ppl you know? i live in fariview park, oh on the west side outskirts of cleveland so not sure how to get this stuff to anyone that can appreicate them.

[@forbiddenera]

Ebay!

[@forbiddenera]

Or vintage computer forum

[@silmarian]

Or even just Facebook marketplace or Craigslist.

[@tra-shathikous2470]

😊

[@FloopyNupers]

Come to Tampa

[@alanbarker2279]

16:19 Love that you describe LGR as a CLITN - he really is... 🤣

[@rommix0]

Greetings folks. Bull Clitn, the president of LGR here...

[@nneeerrrd]

Ikr 😂 He's also known as CLINT when LI forms U

[@mwk1]

@@nneeerrrd not cool

[@nunocarocinho6857]

what about that lcd screen you got from aliexpress that displayed red with the 2c, could it fit in there, until a proper fix?

[@Colin_Ames]

Excellent video, as always.

[@joeysartain6056]

Thank you for all of your hard work!

[@SimonsSolarShed]

I really enjoyed this series i kept shouting at my tv screen "try using heat whilst powered on and see what happens? Hairdyer or heat gun. I dont know why but I was gutted you didnt event try it lol. Keep the amazing content coming i love it. Cheers adrian.

[@gloria10be]

i have 2 Toshiba T3200 and see a lot of similarities. I powered them up and both started crackeling with a lot of smoke and weird smells. It are the RIFA capacitors in the power supply that blew up. Ordered new ones. I ll keep you informed.

[@mfbfreak]

1:11:18 it does not work the same as a CRT. There are no fluorescent substances in there to deplete (there are in 2000s era plasma televisions), and neither do the cathodes lose emission in the same way thermionic cathodes will. The way they fail is probably more likely akin to that of a NE-2 neon indicator bulb. They do wear out eventually. I have a Toshiba T3200 with the wide screen, but it has always been used on 320x240 resolution. You can vaguely see the outline of where it has been used VS the always dark sides of the screen.

[@jvegazorro]

1:16:28 I have seen similar damage on plasma screens of laptops and televisions, it is due to the use of cleaning liquids based on non-isopropyl alcohol, which produces evaporation and condensation of water in the connectors, which produces corrosion.

[@Reziac]

You can copy those files to another HDD just like you would any other file (remember to SYS the disk first); this is an easy way to get rid of Doublespace without risking running the uncompress utility. DOS version is in the timestamp.

[@cameramaker]

The glue on the outside is rather serving as a strain relief - to avoid excessive bending / sharp edges of the flex-to-glass joint. The glass-flex connection is made by "soldering" at specific temperatures - you can google "chip on flex" parts for LCD panels, its very similar technology.

[@toshihitsu1989]

Yeah those ice storms and towards the end of January were really bad up there mom lives in Springfield Oregon and her power went out for about 4 to 5 days had no water looking out she had a fireplace to keep warm

[@michaelkaliski7651]

I had one of these and the display was fantastic compared to LCDs of the time. The ability to change the palette for the best contrast with various programs was pretty much essential. With a maths coprocessor chip fitted, these portable machines were the equal of pretty much any desktop of the time. The plasma display could get pretty toasty at high brightness and contrast settings and there were warnings in the manual to keep things dialled back to avoid display problems. Obviously when these computers were used in a commercial environment where the users weren’t footing the bill, the display and contrast sliders were always pushed all the way to the right. The software loaded and legacy versions of DOS pretty much prove this was used in an office and not treated with a great deal of consideration.

[@MrDuncl]

Mousetrails had to be added to Windows to make it usable on LCDs. Otherwise you would lose the cursor as soon as you moved the mouse.

[@roysigurdkarlsbakk3842]

SCSI was way faster than the alternatives in the eightees and way into the ninetees as well - that's a good reason for using it, even without an external connector.

[@BrandonBlume]

I have a Toshiba T3200SX laptop. Very similar setup. Unfortunately the screen stopped turning on and then at some point the glass cracked. Even the VGA output doesn't work anymore (just gives and all white screen). I took it all apart (luckily I managed to track down a disassembly instruction manual) and planned to research how I may be able to fix it but it's still in pieces and I haven't touched it since. Really sad about that. I liked that huge thing. It was fun putting an sound card in one of the two ISA slots it had. It did have a VGA display though. The screen displayed 256 shades of red. Hooking up an external monitor would display all colours obviously. One thing its screen never had a problem with the entire time it was working, though, was the vertical line problem. The plasma display part number on mine is a MD480T640PG3

[@MrDuncl]

I had one of those in the 1990s. I sold it off for a few £s when the hard drive failed. I recall the Hard Drive was some strange JVC type that didn't even have a separate power cable,

[@BrandonBlume]

@@MrDuncl Yes. The floppy drive too had a proprietery connector.

[@ShadeAssault]

I also wonder if the glue/adhesive they used to bond the circuit board to the glass may have been hydroscopic and sucked in moisture. Could possibly explain why it corroded there and nowhere else on the boards.

[@ad5mq]

Commonest cause of failure is temperature, the voltage withstand decreases with higher temp. 16v cap on a 12v rail has very low tolerance for heat, and being closed in a warm/hot environment causes the aging rate to increase very rapidly, eventually the dielectric fails and the cap shorts, in the worst case this can cause it to draw enough current (and generate enough internal heat) to explode.

[@Solidst8dad2112]

This is very true. When i was in EE school in the early 90s we were taught to go with a 3x margin of voltage on caps(35v for a 12v rail, 16v for 5v rails) (this was prior to 105C caps being easily available. The biggest challenge was cost and size increase for the higher voltage rating.

[@nathanwoodruff9422]

Hey Adrian at 23:30 in the video, the start up screen tests the CMOS battery. The computer states that the "TESTING CMOS battery ...OK" So the computer does have a battery in it.

[@ropersonline]

14:58: Yes, UNFORMAT was a good idea, but if anyone is in a similar situation WITHOUT the DBLSPACE stuff you went on to discover, I suggest they try running old MS-DOS 5.0 UNFORMAT or UNDELETE on (their dd/image copy of) their drive. Not any newer UNDELETE/UNFORMAT programs that do all kinds of "let me help you with that" nonsense, but the bare old commands whose functionality relied on only a quick format having been performed or on only the first letter of the filename having been erased (probably replaced with NULL?). And if none of that helps, people could still try bigger guns like _foremost_ or some other file carver. Good luck to whoever needs it!

[@Clavichordist]

AccPac is an accounting package. My brother's company used the accounts receivable module, they could be purchased separately, and it did what it was supposed to do. Like other similar software, it's no longer supported or available.

[@MrNoobed]

7:05 I think eevblog has a couple videos about failure modes of different capacitors. I definitely remember a good one about smd board stress cracking ceramic caps

[@SockyNoob]

And loud noises and vibrations

[@prsklenar]

Adrian, back in the 1980s I was a mainframe DBA and did most of my work on the various displays of the 32xx family. Including the 3290 Gas Plasma Displays. We had them running 24x7 and they didn't get warm. They got HOT! 🤣

[@retroretiree2086]

I don't know if anyone has said this but the directory listing you show at 17:08 has the value E5 in the first byte - that is the marker for a deleted file. So... with a sector editor replace the E5 byte with an ASCII char ('A'..'Z') and write the sector back to the disk. This will "undelete" the files.

[@YarisTex]

The EGA modes added to Planet X3 were done by Benedikt Freisen, not David. Of course all done with David’s blessing

[@GDLarcade]

That was a fun series, thanks! I enjoy seeing you do your detective work on these old PCs. A lot of pinball machines in the early 90s like Addams Family had a gas plasma display in the backglass for showing the scores and animations. I'm sure they weren't exactly the same tech as what was in that laptop, but similar. Problems with the pinball ones over time were burn in and "outgassing" which is just what it sounds like. Fortunately you can buy an amber or full color LED replacement panel these days, but it isn't cheap.

[@ropersonline]

1:14:36: I wonder if the S5200 supports clamshell mode? Meaning, with an external keyboard and monitor plugged in, can you run it with the lid closed? Heat-wise too?

[@jasonharmon4588]

Did you try undelete in case files were deleted as opposed to the drive being formatted?

[@simonjones832]

Another fun and intersting video, no idea about this sort of thing how about taping off worst section then focused uv light on the contacts might be mold. Maybe hacked laser pen to add heat burn the contacts through the glass look forward to the next one.

[@gusbert]

Tantalums are a massive problem even today. My company has banned their use in any future products due to their high failure rates! In my experience, even upping the voltage rating will not stop them from failing.

[@sebastienproulx8704]

About the recovery of the old hard drive partition. I remembered there is an utility in the old version of Hiren boot CD or in the Ultimate Boot Cd. I don't remember the name but it will allow you to recover previous partitions and or recover file from that.

[@sebastienproulx8704]

The utility is called Ranish partition manager. Hiren boot version 7 also have a copy of Norton Disk Editor 2002 that will allow you to manually recover files.