I've never been a collector of PCs other than for actual museum use because after all, they're all the same aren't they? Particularly after 1997-ish when clones were everywhere and the beige box was king. Hells, I even built myself a couple of beige boxes back then for playing Quake and Half Life.

Now though? Not much nostalgia for them. However when a mate messaged to say he'd rescued his late Dad's old Compaq and would I like it? Immediate YES please. After they'd invented the PC clone with the portable range they moved into desktops of which this is a later version. This is the Prolinea 4/25s circa 1996, the middle of the Prolinea range with a 25MHz 486 CPU, 4MB of 70ns RAM and a 120MB (yes, megabytes) Quantum hard drive. There was a socket for a co-processor too. As you can see, this one is running Windows 3.1 - NOT 3.11. It also has a 1.2MB 5.25" floppy drive which is a very handy thing to have indeed.

Downside - these machines have VARTA boardkillers - a realtime clock battery that over the years outgasses, and if the leak is bad enough it will destroy everything it touches. Less than optimal. So when I picked this machine and its peripherals up I did a quick check for leakage on the back and sure enough the PS/2 keyboard connector had verdigris on it which isn't a good sign. Last week was perfect for an investigation so I whipped the top off and discovered DUSTMAGEDDON. So, so many dustpuppies it caused an instant sneeze. In the old days at $DAYJOB we had an air compressor that was ideal for cleaning things like this, but we closed that down 2 years ago so what do I have now? I know! A Wagner spray painter! Dry and empty of course. This thing can shift some air so is it suitable for blowing decades worth of puppies from an old Compaq? It sure is. That plus the brisk breezy evening ensured that not only was the machine blown clear of dust, but that all of that dust ended up in my face.

Next issue - battery goo. It was obvious from the staining how far the alkali had spread and it seemed that I was quite lucky in that all the dust and crap on the board had soaked up the leakage, to a degree. While there was noticeable damage at the battery location and keyboard socket the rest wasn't bad at all. Aside from the board mounting screw next to the battery. That snapped clean off. I gave the board a white vinegar bath to neutralise things and sprayed with IPA to remove the encrusted dust, then put it in the dishwasher after removing the ROM chips and covering any paper labels. This worked a treat, and after 48 hours drying it was ready to power up, which it did!

No keyboard though. Bah. The underside of the board was perfect so I removed the PS/2 socket and discovered that the traces underneath the socket had been eaten - half of them failed multimeter tests. These were easily fixed with short bodge wires, and the keyboard socket was buzzed out OK. F10 worked! I was in the BIOS and could set the parameters it needed to boot (the clock isn't Y2K compatible) which it then did, into Compaq Windows 3.1. Amazing. I immediately dug out my disk imaging PC and copied the drive so I have a bootable image of it now. Keyboard and case need a bit of a clean, but otherwise it's 100% working and I finally managed to copy a 1.2MB floppy disk I had from a project 2 years ago. Happy me.

Cheers Aus! Hopefully your Dad would've been chuffed with what I did.