Zenith Z-Note Flex - Cleaning, tweaking, installing MS-DOS and Windows 3.1

Hello everyone!

Today's review is about my new (24 year old) laptop form Zenith Data Systems!

This laptop truly is a technical wonder of the 20th century!

In its small (but very thick) form factor, it packs:

-A removable Intel 486SL 75mhz CPU.
-12 megabytes of ram. (only 4, originally, mine was upgraded when I got it)
-A very crisp and clear 640x480 LCD TFT display, with a brightness slider.
-A 1800mah battery. (mine is dead, after so many years)
-A standard 1.44 megabytes 3.5" floppy drive.
-A trackball.
-A membrane keyboard with some very interesting function keys. (pretty small, but ok)
-A 524 MB hard drive.

When I first opened its box, and I plugged it in, it didn't turn on. In fact, it doesn't turn on at the writing of this post either. Its power brick only works when it wants to, apparently. But fortunately, It worked long enough for me to install MS-DOS and windows 3.1

When I booted it up for the first time, after it prompted me to enter the time and date, I was kinda surprised to see the windows 95 logo appear on the screen.

(Silly me, forgot to take a photo of the actual logo while it was working)

 It was certainly a possibility, but I expected it to have windows 3.1 installed. One of my dreams since I was about 10 years old, when my passion for retro stuff started, was to own a windows 95 computer. Oh, and also, my passion for retro stuff started from seeing a video with windows 95 on youtube.

But now, my opinion has changed, pretty much. Windows 95 isn't for me such a big deal anymore, at least not as much as MS-DOS or Windows 3.1 are. And because windows 3.1 installs on top of MS-DOS (and yes, I am aware that all of the windows 9x operating systems are based on MS-DOS), I decided I should do a clean install of both.

The laptop also has a really, really nice feature: It has a little monochrome screen, right over the keyboard, on the left side, which shows things like hard drive activity, floppy drive activity, battery status, and others. As far as I've seen, this feature is pretty unique to this laptop.

I also absolutely love the trackball. It's just mindblowing.

The mouse which came with it is a cool old Microsoft two-button (no scrollwheel) mouse. I've always wanted one of these.

The keyboard shortcuts, as I've mentioned somewhere above (I think) are really cool, because they seem to be tied directly to the bios, rather than the operating system. For example, this laptop has turbo keys (which slow down, or speed up the clock speed) to assure compatibility with older software. This is extremely rare for a laptop to have.

What I like the most about this laptop is its modularity. You can pretty much replace anything without much effort. The hard drive is easily replaceable, as the only thing you need to do to remove the laptop's hdd bay is pushing a small switch to the left and pushing the bay towards that switch simultaneously. Voila. All you have to do now is unscrew the hard drive held by 4 little easily unscrewable screws, pull the 44pin IDE connector out, and you can install any other 44pin IDE HDD or CF adapter or whatever, which is exactly what I did.

 I had an old Texas Instruments laptop from around 1997, which didn't work, so I thought to myself: why not salvage its hard drive, which is 3 times larger anyway?

So bam, I did it.

This is it, much thinner than the other one, and three times greater in capacity, at 1.5 GB. While trying to install it, I accidentally bent some of the pins. I was lucky enough to be able to bend them back whit a screwdriver, and to still get everything working.










So, time to install!


But before installing, I formatted the new hard drive and put some games and drivers on it using my "ALL IN 1 HDD DOCKING". It would have taken ages to put everything on there on a single floppy disk, which is what I painfully used to install windows 3.1 and some software, which could not be installed directly by putting files on the hard drive.

But, of course, I'm kinda stupid because when I started the MS-DOS 6.22 setup from a floppy it formatted my hard drive, and I had to remove it again after setup just to put all of the files back on it.














Setup went fine. I already had the three MS-DOS 6.22 floppy disks prepared, waiting to be used, for a very long time. I used Winworldpc to download both windows 3.1 and dos. (and also some other software).

After setup, I quickly put the formatted files back on the hdd, and tested some games. They ran fine, but only with PC speaker sound, because the sound card of this laptop only supports digital sound in windows. The Windows Sound System software for windows 3.1, which I installed later, contained a tool for MS-DOS sound blaster emulation, although I didn't get it to work yet.

As soon as I finished testing some games, I moved on to writing the first windows 3.1 floppy image to a disk. I used this green floppy for pretty much all my software installs:

I had to use my early-2000s IBM windows XP and 2000 PC (the monitor is from 1994, like the laptop) to write the information to the floppy using winimage.

After a very long time, six floppy images later, windows 3.1 was up and running.

Before installing any drivers, I learned how to use a mouse.

After that, I played some minesweeper using my newly learned skill.

First driver I installed wasn't for windows 3.1, but for dos. I installed the mouse driver that windows 3.1 uses by adding the "LH C:\Windows\MOUSE.COM" line to AUTOEXEC.BAT and "DEVICE=C:\Windows\MOUSE.SYS" to CONFIG.SYS.

After that, as I've mentioned earlier, I installed WSS to get the sound and internal microphone (yes, it has an internal microphone, and it sounds amazing) working.

I wasted some time fooling around, and then it was time to install the video driver.
I had forgotten to put it on the internal hard drive directly, so I used the floppy disk to install it.
Windows looked much more colorful after that:

As you can see in this image, I also installed the Best of Windows entertainment pack, which I also downloaded from Winworldpc.

After many, many hours of work, and a going-outside-with-my-friends brake, the day was over, and today the power brick doesn't work. The only thing I did today was clean the trackball, which didn't really work properly:

Over all, this is a great retro machine, and, as I've said in a previous post, the laptop of my dreams.

I'll almost certainly do software reviews and other things with this laptop in the future. But for now, have a nice day! 😆

-Quick edit: I searched around on Google Books, and found out that this laptop's introductory price was 5499$, adjusted for inflation 9350$, or 37127 lei. And I got it for 300.

This is freaking awesome.