Amstrad PC-2×86
Amstrad replaced the PC1512 and PC1640 models with the 2000 Series of machine.
The PC-2086 used an 8Mhz Intel 8086 CPU with 640kb RAM, The PC-2286 used a 12.5Mhz 80286 and 1Mb RAM, and the PC-2386 used … well an Intel 80386DX processor and 4Mb RAM. All used VGA Graphics, enabling 640x480x16, modes including 320x200x256.
I remember two friends that had one of these at the time, and I was most jealous!
One peculiarity about this entire range of Amstrad machines was that the Power lead fed in to the Monitor, and this in turn fed the Base unit somehow, so if you ever managed to do anything silly to your screen, your PC was actually useless too!
The screen was actually a full VGA screen on this model too, which was a big step up from the earlier machines!
They came equipped with a 3.5″ Floppy Disk as standard, with other variants having “DD” or Double Drives, and even “HD” models with a Hard Drive. I seem to remember one of my friends even managed to add a second hard drive to his model.
I also seem to remember these used MS-DOS 4.10 out of the box.
I used to have the Amstrad PC2-286 with a 40MB Hard Drive, I spent so many hours on it playing games and programming basic, I upgrading DOS to 6.22 and put windows 3.1 on it, it ran 6.22 fine but it did slow down extremely when I tried to run Win 3.1, I also had with mine a really large Amstrad A3 B/W Dot Matrix Printer, it was really fast I think it was my best computer I have ever had. it died in the end the screen went down and by that time I had a 486