I think this is the right forum, if there is a right forum for this. A friend of a friend asked me to check out his laptop and see if I could do anything with it. I checked it out. Laptop turns out to be a Tandy 2800 HD, with a 12 mhz processor! Runs MS-DOS 6.22. On startup, the screen reads thus: BIOS ROM version 01.00.02 Copyright (C) 1985,1986,1987 Phoenix Technologies Ltd. All Rights Reserved Licensed to Tandy Corp. 640K Base Memory, 00000K Extended (note: Here's the problem) Diskette drive 0 seek failure Invalid configuration information - please run SETUP program Starting MS-DOS EGA Device Driver Version 2.11.09 (blah blah copyright copyright) Using default values of BCH for interrupt 2FH calls. A copy of the EGA Device Driver is being installed. C:\> Hello Matt! C:\> Thats the whole startup thing, all the way to C:\>. Does anybody know what this seek error means? I think it's a single density floppy drive, since its a very short connector on the cable. Either that, or its serial or something. It's got a hard drive, so it would work as a word processor, but otherwise, it's dead in the water. Anybody know what the problem is, and/or how I can fix it?

It sounds like a 286. You are still able to (eventually) get to the C:> though? You may need to reset the CMOS values - could prove to be a little tricky, some of them required their own setup disk. Phoenix's often open the CMOS by pressing CTRL-ALT-S , not so sure about the older ones tho'. If you do get to the setup screen, you'll probably need to know the hard drive geometry (cylinders, heads, etc), to reset the values (battery's probably weak). Also, the CMOS can get corrupted, I had to use a CMOS editor to repair a faulty memory entry - it caused the same problems that you seem to be having. If you need the utility let me know.

It is also possible that the setup requires a floppy disk. This is a good place to post messages on older computers; http://www.obsoletecomputermuseum.org/cgi-bin/helpline.pl

OK, the laptop boots fine and runs fine. Its got a 20 meg HD, and it runs DOS 6.22. The only problem is the floppy drive. It doesnt work, so I can't get anything to/from the laptop. I would like to try something, though. I have a serial cable between the laptop and my Windows PC. I downloaded Procomm to my PC (It was already on the laptop) and tried to start a chat session, but all i get on the PC is "xxx~x!xxxxx~~xx" and variations on that. How can I do a serial connection between the two?

I found Microsoft Interlink! I ran Interlink Server on my PC and ran interlnk client on the laptop. It sees the hard drives, but as soon as I try to go to one of them on the laptop, it crashes interlnk server on my PC! I would like to run the server on the laptop, and client on my PC, but I have to add the interlnk client to the config.sys, which I don't know how to access, since I'm using Windows 2000. Any help?

OK, I finally found out how to do the serial network. It works great! I'm copying a lot of shareware/freeware onto the laptop, since it's hard to find, install, and run all the Interlink stuff. Sorry for wasting space in the forum. I have discovered a strange phenomenon: As soon as I post a question on a message board, the answer makes itself apparent and I realize that I was overlooking it all the time.

can you say quit talking to your self