Intel Pentium MMX and AMD K6-2 based laptops, released in 1998.
These laptops are a whole lot of confusion. CTX refers to these two series as whole separate models, but they're actually near about identical aside from the CPU and factory configuration. The 800 series models were all Pentium MMX-based, while the F Series had AMD K6-2 CPUs. CTX's website states the F series have either K6 or Pentium II processors, but the two model configs they show only mention "K6 MMX 300MHz". They're actually K6-2s though. In any case, the laptop has a Socket 7 socket on it, so any compatible CPU should work I'd think. It's got a bunch of jumpers though, for adjusting clock speed and voltage. Luckily, the jumper configs are silkscreened onto the motherboard.
And yes, I own one of these. Specifically an FC3A300, which is a K6-2 300MHz with a 3.2GB HDD and 64MB of EDO RAM. Still, mine is labeled as an 800 series everywhere! The manual, bottom of the laptop, driver CD, everything. This makes sense as they are the same, but was confusing when researching these. The only place where the FC3A300 model number was mentioned was in the serial number.
Mine is unfortunately dead, the CMOS battery leaked. More on that on the faults page.
It's a very feature-rich system. It's got all the I/O in the world and dual modular bays. Left side bay fits a floppy drive or a battery, right side bay fits a battery or a CD-ROM drive. The floppy drive module does not fit in the right side bay. Despite the fact that it can hold both the floppy drive and the CD-ROM drive at once, they also included an external floppy port, so you can have a CD-ROM, Floppy drive, and battery all connected at once. That's if you track down the floppy cable. If you can find one that works and get the battery out, they'd make a great Windows 98-era system. I mean, it's got full modularity, TWO USB ports, a composite video port, game port, all the things you wouldn't normally expect to see in a laptop from this time. It also has video IN, so in theory you could use it for video capture from anything that outputs composite. I'm pretty sure the batteries they use are also that one duracell standard they tried to push, which might possibly make them easier to replace?
The main downside with these is that they unfortunately use NeoMagic graphics, which have especially bad DOS screen scaling when compared to video chipsets from Chips & Technologies, Cirrus Logic, or other vendors. I haven't been able to do any DOS gaming tests as I only had mine working for about a day.
Have additional information on this laptop? Want to send me photos to use on the site? Send me an email: macdatnet@gmail.com
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