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Sunday 30 December 2018

Compaq Armada 1750 - How To Remove The CD-ROM Drive

The first thing you need to do is remove the keyboard by pressing the 2 keyboard release catches as shown here:


You then need to remove 2 screws:


You can then slide the CD-ROM drive out:


That's it!  The CD-ROM drive has now been removed.






How To Replace The Compaq Armada 1750 CMOS Battery


You can either search eBay and pay around £7.49 for a replacement CMOS battery or you can remove the depleted battery from the connector and connect up a replacement like I have done here...


The first thing you need to do is remove the keyboard by pressing the 2 keyboard release catches as shown here:


The CMOS battery is hidden behind the panel as shown below:


Disconnect the CMOS battery from the laptop.

Carefully prise the positive and negative wires off of the battery so it looks like this:


Now you need a way to secure the wires to a new replacement CMOS battery, I tried solder but that didnt work so I grabbed some Sugru instead...


Take a small amount of the Sugru and roll it around in your hand until it becomes supple and then use it to secure the metal contacts to the appropriate side of the replacement CR2032 battery

It takes 24hrs for the Sugru to set and then you should be good to go!

Saturday 29 December 2018

More Retro Gaming Treasure!

It's starting to get a bit addictive this Retro Gaming lark - I dont even have a Retro Computer powerful enough to run some of these games (yet)!

SimCity UK Edition, Return To Castle Wolfenstein, SimCity Societies, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004, Return To Castle Wolfenstein Enemy Territory, Midtown Madness, Worms 2, RollerCoaster Tycoon 3 Deluxe Edition, Sonic 3D, Doom 3 and Unreal II The Awakening!


Another Haul Of Retro Games from CEX

Some more bargains!!  This time I've got my hands on Theme Park World, GTA 2, Command and Conquer Renegade, Theme Hospital, Unreal Tournament, Unreal Tournament 2003 and Rollercoaster Tycoon 3 :)


Friday 28 December 2018

Compaq Armada 1700 and 1750 - Entering The BIOS

According to the Service Manual for the Compaq Armada 1700 series, you press F10 to enter the BIOS.  Unlike modern computers, the BIOS program on these laptops is stored on a service partition on the hard disk drive.

If the hard disk drive has been replaced at some point then the service partition wont exist any more and it wont matter how many times you press F10 nothing will happen!

Not to worry thought as you can create a floppy disk to boot by downloading sp8975.exe from the Compaq/HP website (get it while you can).  This file wont work on a modern operating system so you'll need to run it from Windows 95.

When you launch the executable you will be prompted to insert a formatted floppy disk and a bootable disk will then be created so you can change your BIOS settings.

Thursday 27 December 2018

Retro Games Purchase

Just been to CEX to pick up some retro gaming bargains! Grand Theft Auto III, Grand Theft Auto Vice City, SIM City 3000, SIM City 4, Unreal II The Awakening, Worms 2 and Worms Armageddon!

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