Matt Bowes Saves an Amstrad ALT-286 From the Scrapheap, Turns It Into a Beast of a Sleeper Build

Matt Bowes has turned lemons into lemonade, after being unable to repair a faulty Amstrad ALT-286 laptop manufactured back in 1990 — turning it into a luggable sleeper build with considerably more power under the hood than Amstrad could have ever imagined.

"A while ago I made a video where I tried to repair this the Amstrad ALT-286," Bowes explains by way of background, "and in that video we didn't quite get to the resolution that I had in mind. So yes, I've gone ahead and created myself an awesome little retro sleeper [build] using this amazing Amstrad laptop. And why wouldn't you? The design of this thing just screams '80s cyberdeck."

The design might date back to the very late 1980s, but the Amstrad ALT-286 hit the market at the turn of the decade in 1990 — launching with an Intel 80286 processor, up to 4MB of memory, a 720kB floppy drive and 60MB hard disk, and a 640×480 monochrome LCD. Like many portables of the era, though, the hardware wasn't designed to last for quite this long, and it's no surprise to find that Bowes' grey luggable had computed its last.

Rather than scrap the whole thing, Bowes decided to gut its faulty internals and repurpose as much of the chassis as possible to put together a sleeper build with considerably improved specifications courtesy of a MINISFORUM UM890 Pro compact computer. This provides an AMD Ryzen 9 8945HS CPU, many orders of magnitude more powerful than the faulty motherboard's 80286. The monochrome display is replaced with a modern color model, chosen to fit behind the original bezel and held in place with 3D-printed brackets.

The laptop's original keyboard was based around IBM's AT standard, which is easily adapted to a slightly more modern PS/2 — then from PS/2 to the ubiquitous USB. The mini-PC lives in what was originally the battery and expansion bay, fitted with 32GB of DDR5 memory and 1TB of NVMe storage. Finally, some modern ports are added — and the laptop's original serial and parallel ports converted to connect to dongles that adapt them to a pair of gigabit Ethernet connections. The only missing feature: the ability to run on battery power.

The project is documented in full in the video embedded above and on Bowes' YouTube channel; STL files for the 3D-printed parts have been uploaded to Dropbox under an unspecified license.