my sc-55 psu died on me last night. ordered new D'Addario neg centre polarity 9V 500mA adapter that came today which works
imaging demo cds

Refurbished Radeon HD2900XT:

* disassembled and cleaned up
* replaced GPU thermal paste and VRM thermal pad
* replaced all backplate screws (stainless M2.5x8 with recessed head)

In case anybody is interested in thermal pads thickness:
* vram (GPU side) - 2mm
* vram (backplate) - 0.5mm
* VRM - 0.5mm

That beautiful, beautiful copper 😀

It certainly needed it 😀.

At work between repairs, was slow day, added 2x SOJ 256K x 4 to WDC90C11 ISA video card using preheater and hot air station, got this operation done in about 30 minutes. Wanted 512K in 16 bits mode, instead of 8 bit 256K.

Day work was replaced charging port flex on a ipad mini 2, near complete disassembly is required as speakers and antennas has to be stripped out to get charging port flex out of the frame, this was older design. ipad 5 through 9 is easier to work with, just peel the adhered antenna coax cables. Rebuilt the screen again with another from inventory after screen failed after redoing several mistakes the newbie tech's mess up on a iphone SE screen replacement. You have to address the camera and proximity sensor holders by removing them and glue them in in correct locations on these replacement screens so look correct, work properly (proximity) and also to able to assemble the screen.

Replaced HDMI port on a yet another PS5. What matter with people breaking HDMI ports on a PS5 that worth 600 to 700 dollars? By the way also PS5 contains about 67 screws total.

Cheers,

Received Latitude 3350 i5-5200U motherboard and swapped out the celeron based motherboard, kept all the parts. Activated windows 10 no issues and now burning through updates quicker. Transferred all the parts including wifi card, SSD, DDR3L-1600 16GB.

Celeron is a lackadaisical CPU. 😀 I have very rare uses for celeron even, I did not have any PC with celeron installed for years.

Cheers,

Win10 on a broadwell CPU must be kinda slow these days. My i7-4770k was definitely struggling with some of what I was doing (CAD stuff) before I moved up to a zen3 setup. But for browsing that's probably still fine.

I am pondering what to do next now that my Toshiba 400CS TFT upgrade is actually completed, I fixed all of the glitches by putting in some insulation and copper tape to protect the backlight's power wires from the parallel LCD wires. I was getting visible glitching when the laptop was doing stuff like accessing the hard drive. Hopefully I don't have to pull it apart again for a while since one of the display's 15-20 plastic clips already broke off.

I really wanna get this Compaq Armada 7350MT back up and running - it looks like this one but less corrosion: https://www.retrocomputing.co.uk/2020/02/comp … isassembly.html
Still no luck with finding the hard drive caddy pinout yet but I found an old laptop IDE optical drive to Sata HDD adapter and put that into the Compaq Multibay caddy, which works on my other Compaq N600C with a multibay. Heh, I thought the N600c's backlight was broken and was gonna upgrade it to LED backlighting but then found that I just needed to install the drivers so I could boost the backlight brightness in Windows.
I think tomorrow I'm going to put the 7350MT back together and see if it will allow booting from the Multibay, that will at least give me a usable system potentially.

I have no issues with Win 10 on haswell i7-4790k and i7-4790, one is at work (Elitedesk 800 G1, 4 years straight used daily), one at home both are 16GB, rest are SSD. My daily driver is Z220 with 32GB ECC, ssd with Xeon E3-1280 v2 in it's chassis.

Mother's lenovo semi consumer but quality type notebook is on i7-2640m running 10, also 16GB, going to replace hard drive with SSD if I remember to do so. Family PC is also haswell, 16GB, storage type forgotten.

The broadwell i5-5200U is what I exactly needed on this 3350 with Win 10. I also have ivy bridge i5-3337U in latitude 3330 notebooks, got two boards and upgraded two from celeron, running 10 as well.

My future plan is to get newer notebook with i7, around 35W or 15W, next year, that meets specs for windows 11 pro.

The real reason I got old notebooks with Celeron processor was donated to me.

Cheers,

Today, replaced the WDC90C30-LR chip that had legs sheared off, this was this way on this good quality 1MB video card I bought using one from a donor with lesser features, 512K that was low quality card.

Again that was easier on preheater and hot air station at work between repairs, and touched up the solder with micro hot tweezers.

SDRAM chips finally arrived when I got home that evening, going to replace the memory chips on voodoo3 3000 STB card tomorrow if I have time.

I was working on a ipad air 2 charging port replacement that got destroyed when metal bezel broke and distorted the aluminum that surrounds the metal bezel from action of plug bent backwards, her son is autistic and knowing this, I have to rebuild the same ipad with good quality condition, close to original so not to upset the kid if I used different color ipad frame, this one is gold. So I beat the distorted metal back down and from a donor a bezel piece. This bezel forms a port with rails that holds the actual weaker plastic charging port contacts held in place via screws. Bezel metal bit is typically glued into aluminum frame at manufacture time. I'll finish this tomorrow by gluing it in and finish replacing the charging port flex by soldering new one to motherboard. Soldered to motherboards is typical apple way for majority of ipads, iphone is made by connectors instead.

Aside, autistic people and mentally disabled people are very rough on devices and easy to blow up in violent tantrums. This came from my experience stemming from childhood background back when my mother sent me to a special school/care section devoted to mental disabled people of all ages, reserved in one floor level. Rest of the school is for deaf and blind school called Ross. McDonald in Brantford from around 4 and left there around 10 years old for regular school mainstreaming, which I wanted to do, in regular schools in my home town. Real reason sounds strange choice but according to mother knew that normal deaf schools back in the day was not nice and rough going (mid 1970), found out about this particular school in their conference hosted by that group mother attended and history is made.
Ross McDonald is not small school, nor boring, it is large school with several dorms, main dining halls, complete with large gym and a decent indoor swimming pool surrounded by very large land complete with forest, grass tract. And not to mention about this school does have large rec room too and mid-sized theatre complete with air organ.
Cheers,

1. Memtested a bunch of EDO sticks which I recently acquired.
2. Checked all my EDO sticks if there's any FPM in between them. Didn't find any.
3. Checked six Pentium 200 for good overclockers. Found two who can handle FSB increase without more voltage.
4. Checked four Pentium MMX 200 for unlocked multis. Found two unlocked ones.

Very productive day.

Today I had to do two completely unwanted repairs on my Zenith Z-Note GT 120mhz Pentium - which I was putting back together, giving its screen back (borrowed for tests) only to find that it wouldn't turn on. It was behaving like there was a short.
I tested between a component labelled BCxx near a component and both sides connected to ground, oh no. There was a dead short on the 5v power to ground. Had to take it all apart which is tough considering I was never able to find a service manual for this thing, here's how it looks in one piece - not mine but very similar: https://wiki.preterhuman.net/Zenith_Z-Note_GT
After probing around for about half an hour, I looked more closely at this metal shield that blocks the PCMCIA slot from the inner case, it screws and solders onto ground points but at the corner it's going over a trace that connects to a fuse... I desoldered that shield and the short was gone. What a relief, I don't want to do component level troubleshooting on this old thing. Resoldered that back into place with some Kapton tape underneath to give some insulation.

It now powers up though I'm not running it until the casing is back together since the crazy design means the top case is half of the heatsink and there's no fan. The way it's designed is pretty bad in my opinion, the heatpipe has to be carefully guided through a narrow hole and from my last work on it, the aluminium shield/heatsink got separated from the plastic top case. I broke all the plastic weld points - having these as two parts makes it even tougher to put back together, so I've fixed all of the plastic pegs with superglue and baking soda. The edge of the keyboard area on the top case is a thin part and that was broken in half, so I used some 2.54mm header pins and melted those into the ABS plastic after supergluing.
Beware if doing that, the fumes from superglue melted are quite bad for you, I had a fan running to avoid those.

When back in one piece, it's a pretty nice albeit quirky laptop. Similar in spec to the Toshiba Tecra 500CDT, or the Satellite 430CDT but with L2 cache. Mine has a smashed screen but one day I'll resolve that too.

Was making backup image of a demo cd yesterday and it smashed into pieces in my dvd drive. Wowsers!

Wow, that's unfortunate - I wonder what speed it was going at?
Long ago my little brother playing Red Alert 2 for long enough lead to the CD exploding in the drive 😀

Me and my dad got some nice scars back around 2005 (and yes, I admit I was 5 at the time) when we tried to play NFS Porsche 2000 of a very worn out BTC branded drive.

Good times, lmao.

Ouch, thankfully the drive contained the whole CD when it exploded by my little brother's head, just made a really loud bang. I think maybe it was an LG drive which wasn't a very fast DVD drive but was fast for CDs. It even still worked after I fished out all of the CD shards.

I had a disk explode in a drive before, must have been during the early 2000's. Scared the bejesus out of me, the bang was so loud. 😀

gmaverick2k wrote on 2022-11-03, 19:46:

Was making backup image of a demo cd yesterday and it smashed into pieces in my dvd drive. Wowsers!

I've never had a CD explode. Although I've had several Iomega Jaz disks break apart from their caddies inside the drive. These disks were stored in very poor environmental conditions (a damp basement with no climate control), and my guess is that the plastic went soft, sheering the platters free at the center.

I don't use Jaz disks anymore, because of this. It was extremely disappointing to see disk after disks implode in the drive, as I tried to recover old backups.

Thermalwrong wrote on 2022-11-03, 20:10:

Wow, that's unfortunate - I wonder what speed it was going at?
Long ago my little brother playing Red Alert 2 for long enough lead to the CD exploding in the drive 😀

it was a generic DVD-RW drive running at standard speed in my thinkcentre e72 win10 main pc
PLDS DVD-RW DH16ACSH

Found a 14" crt and a set of genius speakers at the local scrap heap today. Weird place to find old electronics, but the owner told me he's starting to collect and recycle electronics as well. Usually I go there once every two or three months to deliver scrap and bad car parts / batteries and wiring that piles up in the garage, but I guess now I'll have to visit more often.

Here they are - pretty bad shape. They've been out in the rain for god knows how long.

Took it apart and cleaned it. It had dried up mud on the electronics board, but I didn't spot any signs of damage. Tried turning it on - the indicator light would turn green when I powered on the PC, but no image and the tube made a scary crackling noise. I turned it off and used a long screwdriver grounded with a thick car battery cable to discharge the tube and flyback transformer. (don't try this at home, I'm an idiot and lost my CRT discharge tool). Then I removed the suction cup looking thing that goes into the tube and cleaned both the hole it goes into and the exposed part of the wire which was blackened and covered in what looks like soot.

It works!!! Kind of scary to turn these things on without the rear cover, but I wanted to do adjustments if needed. Two of the buttons weren't working, so I had to pull the board out completely to get to them. I sprayed all of them with a bit of contact cleaner and compressed air, and resembled. Now all buttons work perfectly.

It cleaned up really nicely too!

I recapped one of the floppy drives for the IBM PS/2 Model 80 i picked a couple of months ago. Both a Mitsubishi and an ALPS drive came with the machine, but the Mitsubishi was first up for service. These machines will not boot without first being configured with an reference disk. Anyway I changed the proposed caps from the guide on "Ardent Tool of Capitalism" but no dice. I could hear it seeking for a second when starting the machine but i got no further than that. I also tried several floppies in case they were corrupt, but it made no difference. As a final attempt before sending the piece of &#%@ drive to Valhalla I changed the caps on the motor drive (even thou they looked perfect compared to the ones on the signal side), and of course the drive now works perfectly!

The next project will be to get a SCSI-emulator of some sort like the BlueSCSI, RaSCSI or SCSI2SD working since I dont have a HDD. I have a feeling that will be easier said than done.