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Compaq Prolinea 4/66

Theretrogamingroom

Well-known member
My Grandmother has had an old Compaq Prolinea 4/66 for about 20 years and I haven't taken much interest in it until very recently even though for a long time I have needed a DOS computer to run my hundreds of PC DOS formatted 5 1/4 inch Floppy Disks that I found in the garage.

Fast Foward to about a week ago. I decided to turn it on and look around on it. During the exploration I found many old games that I hadn't played in years such as Simcity, Commander Keen, Streetfighter II and Lure of the Temptress. I wanted to play the games at my house (And again, I already needed a DOS machine with a 5 1/4 inch FDD. So I decided to do a trade: The Compaq Prolinea 4/66 (With the original monitor, keyboard and mouse as well as manuals and a few programs) for one of my XP setups (Because A: Who needs 5 XP computers and B: my grandmothers computer was slow and buggy and she wanted a new one but didn't want to buy one).

Anyways, here are some specs: A 66 MHz 486 processor, 6144K of Ram, a 3.5 inch FDD and a 5 1/4 inch FDD. The computer is running Windows 3.1 and MS DOS 5 which I don't plan on updating. Unfortunately, it sounds like the HD will soon die and I haven't made any backups yet. What is the best method? 3.5 inch Floppies or sticking a CD Drive in to make a Backup, removing it so the 5 1/4 inch FDD could be used and then putting it back in when the HD dies? And what good programs/games will run on this machine? I would like for this to be my main vintage PC and would like for it to be as useful as possible. And how do I turn it off? There is no Shutdown menu from what I can tell and the only way I see is flipping the Power Switch while the computer is on. There must be a better way (For the Hard Drive's sake).

Thanks

 
There were no shutdown options back then, just exit windows to dos and shutdown..

That should take a regular IDE Hard Drive.. I have one that you can have for the cost of shipping, I think its a 500mb drive.. Find an old DOS copy of Norton Ghost and set the drive up as slave and you can ghost the failing drive to the new one. Then you wont have to do anything..

That should run Windows 95 fairly well.. If you want a CD, I have one, yours for shipping.. I probably have some old PC ram around here too, and maybe an old soundblaster card with the soundblaster CD-ROM drive..

Another good way to get the info off is find a Parallel port zip drive.. they made Iomega Guest for DOS. So you can mount a zip disk in DOS 5

Hope this helps

 

LCGuy

LC Doctor/Hot Rodder
Some machines did have a "shutdown" utility that parked the drive's heads, but on the majority of PCs back in the day you would just exit windows and turn the power off at the C:\ prompt. Regardless of whether you upgrade to Windows 95 or not, I would still look at upgrading the RAM in that machine - an upgrade to 16MB would be cheap and easy, and would be quite an improvement over what you have in there now.

 

trag

Well-known member
What kind of slots does it have? Being a 486, I'm guessing ISA. You could get an old SCSI card (Adaptec 1540 probably) and then if you have any old Mac storage peripherals such as a SCSI ZIP or MO or external CDRW drive you could use that for backup.

 

theos911

Well-known member
(Adaptec 1540 probably)
On that note:

I have one of those if you need it. Adaptec AHA - 1540/42CP. PM me if you are interested. When Windows 7 decided it didn't like my Jaz Traveler anymore, I had intended to set it up with one of my older PCs. However, that never happened, and I'm back on xp again... so it is available.

 

trag

Well-known member
Keep in mind that if the card is actually a 1542, instead of a 1540, then it also has a floppy controller on board which might conflict with the motherboard or I/O Card floppy controller. I think it can be easily disabled by using the ctrl-A option at boot time to enter the Adaptec utilities where the option to disable the floppy controller is available.

Windows XP is a mystery to me, but I knew the hardware world of 3.1 and '95. :) Kind of like, 68K and PPC I understand but drag me into OSX and I'm (mostly) lost.

 

theos911

Well-known member
There is a chip on it with a sticker reading AHA-1542CP. However on the back of the card it has all of the switch setting and sw5 toggles the Floppy drive enabled/disabled.

 

Cory5412

Daring Pioneer of the Future
Staff member
Oh man, I had a 4/66 as a younger Cory. It was a great little machine. (And proves that I tend toward business desktops most of the time. There were plenty of consumer-focused 486s to choose from, but the Prolinea was what I got and enjoyed.)

I ran NT4 on mine most of the time, it definitely has a regular IDE controller up on in there, and I alternated between a CD drive and a 5.25" floppy drive. The video is pretty standard, I think it's the C&T 65525 or whatever, NT4 supported it fairly well anyway.

 

Theretrogamingroom

Well-known member
@CompactMacLover: Thanks for the info. I probaby won't be installing a CD Drive because I need the 5 1/4 Inch Disk Drive. I also probably wont be upgrading to 95 because I already have a few 95 and 98 machines. I like to have a wide varity of OS's (And this is my only 3.1 Machine, so I wouldn't want to change it). However, I am interested in the 95 Disk for some other machines that had their HD die.

@LCGuy: I agree. 16 or 32 Mb would make this machine fly!

@theos911: That sounds interesting. PM sent.

@Cory5412: Yeah, it is a nice machine. I installed a few more games from some of the old 3.5 and 5 1/4 inch disks that I found such as Lemmings and Doom (Which runs surprisingly fast). Unfortunately, a lot of the programs that I found either don't work (Disk Error) or I don't know the command to get them started (Although I have gotten a few programs to work by guessing).

Oh yeah I almost forgot. I tryed the Shutdown Command but it says that the Utility isn't installed. Can/How do I fix this?

Thanks

 
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