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Help recovering a Bull Micral 30 and a Macintosh LC

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First post, by Freakill

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Hello everybody,

First time interacting in these forums and it is because I need help with some computers I recently saved from going to the dumpster. They are a complete Bull Micral 30, an 8088 XT format computer, a Macintosh LC and an IBM Aptiva, both with their monitors. Yesterday I opened them to check their internal status and in general is in great condition, except for what can be seen in the attached images (where you can also see a little bit the 8087 math co-processor the computer has).

Bull Micral 30: In some capacitors I can see these little white crystals, which I never have seen before, and I would like to know if this is corrosion and how to proceed before even trying to turn it on.
Macintosh LC: I found out the battery had corrosion, which I removed instantly. But more worrisome is the white/green corrosion I can see in the back chips.

Thanks for your help!

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Reply 1 of 2, by Vynix

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The LC will definitely need a through wash and recap, no exception, Macintoshes from this era are NOTORIOUS for leaky SMD caps (and that reminds me, I've got a LC II I've got to recap... But for now I'm being kept busy by a Power Macintosh 7500), both the logic board and the PSU will need to be recapped.

As for the battery corrosion, it doesn't look like it had the time to leak out, so on this aspect it should clean up easily.

For the Bull, I've got no idea what this kind of deposit is.. See if you can scrape it off and check if there is a battery in the system to keep the time and date in memory... If there's a battery in the system it probably has leaked out... So you'll need to most likely clean up the mess left by the battery and patch up any eaten traces...

Just my two cents..

Proud owner of a Shuttle HOT-555A 430VX motherboard and two wonderful retro laptops, namely a Compaq Armada 1700 [nonfunctional] and a HP Omnibook XE3-GC [fully working :p]

Reply 2 of 2, by Freakill

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Vynix wrote on 2022-07-27, 04:20:
The LC will definitely need a through wash and recap, no exception, Macintoshes from this era are NOTORIOUS for leaky SMD caps ( […]
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The LC will definitely need a through wash and recap, no exception, Macintoshes from this era are NOTORIOUS for leaky SMD caps (and that reminds me, I've got a LC II I've got to recap... But for now I'm being kept busy by a Power Macintosh 7500), both the logic board and the PSU will need to be recapped.

As for the battery corrosion, it doesn't look like it had the time to leak out, so on this aspect it should clean up easily.

For the Bull, I've got no idea what this kind of deposit is.. See if you can scrape it off and check if there is a battery in the system to keep the time and date in memory... If there's a battery in the system it probably has leaked out... So you'll need to most likely clean up the mess left by the battery and patch up any eaten traces...

Just my two cents..

Hello Vynix,

Thank you very much for your comments. Regarding the Macintosh, I will search for new caps, I am sure given the type of machine it should be easy to find sets to recap the whole board.

Regarding the Bull, I was pointed out recently by somebody that it could be, given the time period of the machine, polymer capacitors which have leaked, and to be honest, I never heard before about polymer caps, so... I guess I will thoroughly clean it and recap also.

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