Compaq P III description Re: Fresh Meat

Hans, At 05:17 PM 5/15/99 +1, you wrote: OK Here goes: The P III is a 8/12 Mhz 286 portable with 640K or RAM standard and a 20 or 40 Mb hard drive standard. There are lots of options for it including a pod that hooks on the back and connects through the little sliding door there. The Pod has one 8 bit and one 16 bit ISA slots in it. The pod door is a bastard to get open and the pod is a bastard to get off once you install it. You could also get a 40 Mb tape drive that would mount inside the pod. There is also an optional MODEM that can be installed inside the main case. There are also two optional memory expander boards that can be installed. Each hold up to six standard SIMMs. The SIMMs can be either 256K or 1Mb types so you can have a total of 6.6Mb of RAM in the PIII. One type of expander board makes the memory appear as extended memory and the other makes it appear as expanded memory. Although the literature only lists 20 and 40 Mb hard drives as being available, Compaq's spare parts list shows several other models including a 150 Mb one. There is a regular hard drive table in the BIOS and it lists about 46 types of hard drives (they use regualr IDE drives) including some that are larger than that supported by DOS. The manual warns that you have to use other OSs than DOS to support these types. I have put larger drives in several of them with no trouble what so ever. There is a utilty avaiable from Compaq to allow access to the CMOS setup but AMIDIAG and some of the other utilities will also access it. I think you can also access it by pressing the F10 key when the system first starts up. The screen on the P III has VGA resolution not CGA. I've never seen a LCD screen on a P III. I think that one has to be someone else's model. If you take the back cover off of the P III, there are charts inside that explain all the jumper settings. The P III can run at 8 Mhz or 12 MHz or at 12 and drop to 8 automaticly when it accesses the drives. There is room in them for both a 3.5 and a 5.25" floppy drives. You could get 720K, 1.44Mb, 1.2Mb or 360K drives in them from Compaq. There were two different versions of the P IIIs. The later one had an enhanced keyboard but I don't remember exactly what the difference was. Joe