1994 Compaq Deskpro XE 466 - Overview

My most recent computer related acquisition is this 486 based Compaq Deskpro XE. Given to me as an early birthday present, this is immediately my first personal 486 machine, which is awesome.

[tourrocker]

I just got one of these and mine is also in great shape. I pried off the CMOS coin battery and jumpered the motherboard to accept an external BIOS battery, it's working well.

[HighTreason]

These were solid machines, we had a few left where I worked and not once did I have to fix any significant problem with one, even then the only things that did go wrong were generally user error. Not sure if these were the ones with the BIOS setup on a drive partition though, might want to watch out for that because if you lose it, you'll have a hard time getting it put back.
Either way, nice system.

[fachhers]

This was my first computer. If you are interested in selling it please contact me.

[georgemaragos]

Hi All - re the battery they should be able to be purchased, while it is no help i am in Australia and some of the larger chemist shops and supermarkets have about 4-6 versions of those batteries, then there is always ebay. But the easy way is to buy a standard CR2032 with holder ( there are some cheap rubber yellow ones ) and they have some solder leg on them, you can run small wires to the original battery. They other option is to just use 2 x AAA or 3xAAA ( or AA's ) in a battery holder and run the 2 wires, they do not need to be rechargeable as the motherboard does not send power to it like it does with those rechargeable lithium that typically leak -AKA Varta.
A cdrom is best, there are many compilations CD's with 100 dos games ready to run of cd.

A cheap alternative is to use a null modem serial cable, you can make your own as it is 4 or 5 wires, or even better buy a lap link null / paralllel cable and use fastlynx / laplink 5, you can also install that older combo lan card, load the drives and use those 2 file transfer programs as they work / serial / parallel / lan card. If you dont have the software you can use shareware telix bbs / comms program but it will take some time with say a zmodem transfer via serial

Finally check ebay, you can buy a SD or compact flash to ide adapter for @ $5, SD cards are easier and cheaper to find, but dos 6.22 max's out at 2gig, i purchased last year 2x of these adapters, and a 256meg and 4g card CF card at @ $5 each as well - i have a Pentium 100 that is suffering the dallas RTC chip problem as the CMOS will not hold hard drive settings - bu tit holds date and time. So at the moment i am forced to use it as a floppy based machine, it has 16meg ram, so i use dos 6.22 and set the config for a 12meg ram drive, then floppy copy games to the ram drive, works good for wolf3d, doom16 etc

You should not really have any problems with a second IDE, most late 486 PC have 2 IDE ports on the mother board or 2 on the IO multi card, plus anyway even with one physical connector most ca run 2 devices, but you wont know until you check your bios

Nice well built machine all of those compaqs until they were taken over by HP

[hamidgghader]

Cool or maybe strange thing is that the front panel logo is the new Compaq logo, but in the back it's the old logo

[evildiesel]

Your girlfriend is a keeper! Nice machine.

[gentuxable]

Your skills are definately not "I'm too you to die!" but rather "Nightmare" or "Ultra Violence" since you're not in Doom II.

[kbhasi]

10:35 I never seen a version of Doom that had a floppy disk icon flash when it's accessing the hard drive...
13:04 I can already tell that game is a cracked copy, but hey, it's probably considered abandonware anyway.