That is some messy wiring. Stupid ribbon cables.

I had this awesome little 486 laptop. I think it was a Compaq Contura 410cx. It used a 486DX2 @ 50mhz and had a 640x480 color screen that was just incredible. In comparison to my later Compaq Armada 1571dm which had a terribly slow screen, the Contura was crystal clear with fast screen response. The …

I wonder if the solder joints on the input plug may be bad? You could try touching them up with some new solder where it meets the board. As far as the crashing, I have no clue. Is anything overclocked? Maybe there's bad memory somewhere.

Also, my 1.2ghz slot 1 Pentium 3 is running off a new 350w power supply which lacks the -5v, and it does fine. The only reason I noticed it doesn't have -5v is because it complains in the bios if you monitor voltages.

I don't see why that wouldn't handle a Pentium 2. 28A sounds like plenty. True, modern power supplies dedicate less wattage to the 5v rail, but that's compared to 12v output. If you have a 450w power supply, it may only put out as much 5v amps as an old 200w unit, but with more more amperage in the …

Not a sound card per se, but I had an old Sega Gamegear with leaky caps that had really low sound output and hissing. Replacing the capacitors made a huge difference. If you can find the capacitors cheap on ebay or some supplier, it's definitely worth it, otherwise you can often find a donor PCB for …

I can highly back the new AMD APUs. They run cool, and provide great performance at low resolutions (up to 800x600 or so). Girlfriend has an AMD A6 series and it runs Dead Island well.

If you're any good at soldering, you could see if the board has solder points for a mini-din connector. On my 486-PIO3, I removed the old AT connector and soldered the mouse and keyboard mini-din connectors in place. Everything was in place for the hardware to work (didn't need any resistors or …