GRiD Gridcase 1520 Laptop (LCD)
My GRiDCASE 1520 Laptop (Added to my collection in 2022)
- 80286 10Mhz
- 1MB RAM
- 20MB HD
- 1.44MB Floppy
- Backlit LCD Screen (640×400)
I had a GRiD 1520 with the Gas-Plasma display back in late middle school/early high school that I had bought from a 2nd hand shop, it was my first “laptop” (at 13lbs it kinda hurt your lap though lol), I really wish I had kept it, the Plasma variants are quite expensive and hard to find. I eventually replaced this laptop with my Zeos 486 “sub-notebook” laptop, quite the difference in size and weight.
- GRiDCase 1520
- GRiDCase 1520
- LCD Screen
- GRiD 1520 booted to DOS 3.3 from HD
- Grid 1520 configuration report
This laptop was working, however, it needed some restoration, first power up complained about failed RTC battery and it stunk of the fishy smell of leaking capacitors.
I installed a new Dallas RTC chip, and re-capped the DC-DC board and cleaned up the leaked capacitor electrolyte from the PCB.
- Cracking it open
- Keyboard made by Honeywell
- Motherboard
- Motherboard
- DC-DC board
- New vacuum desoldering station
- Dallas RTC removed and cleaned up.
After replacing the Dallas RTC module, the laptop booted up asking for a BIOS boot password, after some research I found this site dedicated to this very issue, I guess the new Dallas chip has FF’s in the memory location that GRiD used for the password storage, I was able to enter the upper ASCII chars and get past it, but the setpass utility would not take the upper ASCII password. luckily the person who made the site documenting this issue, also made a utility to generate a type-able backdoor password, which I used with the setpass utility to then clear the password.