: Zenith Laptop Modding :

Zenith Laptop Modding
by: dosman


9-2002

    I did this a looooong time ago. An uncle of mine gave me two of these babies. The hard drive in one died right after I got it, and the other became this mod. It was my best computer at the time and I used it to create most of DOS HeadQuarters. It's an 8088 based system made by Zenith. I don't have any pictures of what it looked like before the paint job, it was just a yellowed cream/white.

    Additional info: It came with ZDOS 3.3, a custom coded DOS. I don't know who made it, I could only guess Zenith bought it off Digital Research or possibly customized it themselves. It included some advanced tools for the time, including a hard disk surface checker. However, it was a destructive scan, it essentially formatted the disk. It has an internal 20MB hard drive, the floppy is a 720KB, and it has 512KB of RAM. The hard drive interface looks proprietary, if anyone out there has some info on it please send it to me! I've wondered if it's a custom ST-506 cable, since that was a popular interface at the time of this things inception. I also have the nice Zenith laptop bag and the external number pad. Since the other one died, I also have two battery packs.

    And one last thing for the curious, no I haven't actually done anything to the internal hardware, it's still just a basic 8088 system. But, it's certainly a stylin' 8088 system ;-)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

My fancy new labels for the lights & adjustments ;-)

 

 

 

 

Don't let that logo fool you, it's a PC system running DOS!

 

 

 

 

A nice touch on the floppy drive I do believe ;-)

 

 

 

 

 

My system didn't have the modem. I saw one for sale once but I couldn't afford it... hehe, that was a long time ago.
On the bottom you can see the red cover for the coprocessor socket. I also made sure the FCC & serial number foil tags where preserved.

 

 

 

The back without the battery pack. The battery bumped a lot of the paint off, oh well. And hey, the battery still works! It holds an hour charge still, which is almost on par with my Thinkpad T21!

 

 


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