Sharp PC-7100

Portable/luggable PC – Sharp 8088 @ 10MHz(??), 640kB RAM, 20MB hard drive, 360kB floppy drive

I found this machine many years ago while walking home from school (around 1998-1999 as a rough guess). Sitting on the nature strip left out for the hard rubbish collection, covered in dust and looking very sad. I was curious what sort of machine it was having never seen a clamshell portable computer, I picked it up and took the poor little guy home. After a quick clean I turned it on and up came a long forgotten DOS 3.3 install, including the previous owners documents and programs.

Today it’s looking a little bit tired, it could do with a clean and perhaps a few sessions of retr0bright. Sadly I think the hard drive has died as the last time I powered it up it hung on the BIOS POST screen for a long time and eventually showed a hard drive error. A few power cycles did eventually manage to get it booted but trying to run a program or do any file manipulation on the hard drive resulted in an error. The floppy drive also seems to be playing up a bit with the typical repetition of seeks and errors, hopefully only requiring a clean?