A good friend of mine gave me a 486 laptop to play around with. I’ve been hunting these bad boys down to make myself a half decent DOS game machine.

I ended up with a CF-41 from Panasonic A.K.A. The ‘Toughbook’.

Nice little machine, from what I can tell in Windows 95 (Came pre-installed) it has:

• A 486 Processor ( probably an Intel 486DX50 )
• 12MB of ram (Upgrading later on! )
• 10″ 640×480 color screen
• Builtin CD Rom Drive
• 260MB Hard Disk (Going to attempt to CF )
• Chips & Technologies 65548 GPU (Seems to do 640x480x16 no problem, so I’m happy!)
• ESS Audio Drive 1688 (Sound Blaster Compatible!)

Of course, this laptop has issues. It’s battery is dying, CMOS battery needs replacement, Floppy drive needs replacement, Power Supply — you get what I’m saying. It needs a lot of love.

So, first things first! I want to get data in/ out of this thing. But sadly, since the floppy drive isn’t working, I might have to resort to the COM port (Seeing the CD Drivers aren’t installed).

For now, my to-do list:

1. Get data in/out
2. Fix CMOS battery
3. Fix Big Battery
4. Replace Floppy Drive / Attempt to fix it
5. Upgrade Ram
6. CF Hard drive replacement?

Wish me luck!