Restored a Compaq Contura Aero 4/25--first time doing a hinge repair and really happy with how it turned out :)
Posted by kidryano@reddit | retrobattlestations | View on Reddit | 6 comments
compu85@reddit
Did you have to re-cap the LCD?
kidryano@reddit (OP)
I didn’t—is that something that’s expected? The screens look OK but the black and white one has some wicked vertical ghosting, it’s not awful but is this due to the caps aging on the LCD board ?
compu85@reddit
On my color Contura the screen contrast got so bad it was invisible. After replacing the surface mount caps it got a lot better. I'd suspect that's the cause of the ghosting on your B&W model.
kidryano@reddit (OP)
Album with more photos, including a shot of my dodgy hinge repair. Got this guy with an Aero 4/33C in a lot on eBay and both arrived with hinge issues. I've had a lot of experience with vintage hardware, but I've never had to do a repair as extensive as this. Basically grabbed a bracket off an old GPU and sliced it to size so it could fit inside the shell of the display--then drilled a hole into the bottom half of the hinge and screwed in the bracket piece I had made. Then drilled another hole and screwed it into a standoff on the top case. I'm awful at explaining things--but hopefully that illustrates what I did. It opens and closes perfectly now. Of course--I'm still careful when handling it.
I did an identical repair on the 4/33C and restored both machines with these restore disks. Nothing like swapping in and out 21 floppy disks.. :D The restore worked perfectly with both machines and all hardware is detected as expected. They're certainly fun little machines--a lot smaller than I was expecting (theyre around 10-inches wide) and very lightweight without the battery. They both have SD-to-IDE adapters inside so getting data on them is a cakewalk (if you consider having to open the entire machine up a cakewalk, which actually gets pretty easy when you have to do it over and over again lol). I like to refer to both of them as my Compaq siamese twins haha
Sea_Worldliness_7525@reddit
That's the exact same machine I had in 1995, and the hinge also broke. I failed to fix it several times.
kidryano@reddit (OP)
Ahh man. It really does seem like the hinges are the biggest downside of these machines--even on one of the ones I fixed, the previous owner had even tried before me. It's staying together ... for now.