The coating is definitely coming off. There was a sticker on one of the corners that the original owner had attempted to remove, unsuccessfully, in the process scraping off some of the coating surrounding it. I removed it all the way and much of the coating in that area came off.
Basically, if you touch it wrong with a fingernail, it comes off 🤣
It will need work at some point, but for now, it is fine. It's not a museum piece, but it doesn't look horrible. After cleaning, it looks acceptable at least.
Last night I replaced the CMOS battery, upgraded the RAM to 544 MB (wow! 32 MB onboard, two 256 MB sticks of PC-100. All I had to do was limit Win98's file cache and swap file, although I'm not sure what it would actually do if it had to use ALL the memory), and finished installing some software.
It now has Windows 98, Office 97, RetroZilla, Outlook Express 5.5 for email (first OE that works with modern Gmail), KernelEx with the new "core updates" (not sure when I will use this; tried K-meleon 74 but it was absurdly slow even with JS turned off), PuTTY, FileZilla, etc. etc... basically all my "core" software that I always use. Haven't worked on media player stuff yet but that will happen today.
I tried some games on it. DOS games all seem to work fine - *except* for some 2D games when the screen is in scale-up mode. Commander Keen causes the screen scaler to go bonkers. Turning it off makes it work, but of course then you just get a tiny screen in the middle. In Jazz Jackrabbit you can see a couple "ghosts" of the rabbit each a couple pixels away from him as he moves around, another screen scaling issue. Epic Pinball needs MS-DOS mode. But then again I didn't really buy this computer specifically for playing DOS games. I have more compatible systems for that. I want it for maximum portable retro fun, good Internet connectivity, and productivity to the max.
The current version of Sonic Robo Blast II does not run with KernelEx, sadly. I know one of the developers released a binary for Windows 9x, which I was able to test back when it was released and it works - however, I cannot find the game files for that version anywhere (2.1.8 ). The current version is 2.1.23 and it definitely will not load. But version 2.0.6 DOES work, with vanilla 98SE too (as long as you update MSVCRT.DLL to version 6.1), as I remember from back in the day when I used to play this on an old Pentium III. 640x480 works, but you can tell it is struggling sometimes. 320x240 is zippy.
The battery repair may or may not happen today - I am going to bring it in to Batteries + Bulbs and see if they can do something about it. I heard somewhere that if all the battery needs is a "boost" (basically, if the voltage dropped below the protection circuits' threshold and now it won't charge but the cells are still good) then the word on the street is Batteries + Bulbs might do that for free, as they will have a "smart charger". Not sure if this is true or not. I do know that they offer battery rebuilds but I would rather do it myself, as I have some nice Samsung 18650 cells that I've been itching to use for something.
I just don't really like getting into these old batteries. They are so utterly cramped inside that you wonder how they were put back together in the first place. Plus you basically have to destroy the case in order to open it.
World's foremost 486 enjoyer.