First post, by TechieDude
So, I was wondering if anyone here has worked on repairing old or weird hardware for a job or a client, either back when it was new or now that it's already old. I didn't find any such thread, so I figured I would make my own. Feel free to merge it if there is.
To get it started, let's begin with four of my own stories at a store I had an internship at a few months before you-know-what screwed everything up:
1) An old PC was sent to us from the Police to fix it because they needed it in order to operate an X-Ray machine. It was a Slot-1 Pentium 2 on a 440BX board, in a thick rackmount case, basically a desktop case with rails, handles and extra security (read: more of a pain in the ass to open, even with the key). Unfortunately, I don't remember the rest of the specs, but I do remember it had 2 big ISA cards that connected to the X-Ray machine. It also had Win98 installed, but it was configured to boot straight to DOS and a specific program that needed a password.
So, the issue (other than it was full of dust): NO POST. The other guys at the store tried everything: clean the DIMMs, remove the extra cards, swap the RAM, CPU, PSU, video card, even bought another motherboard, that was not compatible because it had a VIA Apollo chipset. They were about to give up, until I noticed something: the casing of a capacitor was loose in the case. Clearly, there was an explosion there, and indeed, it was a capacitor that failed spectacularly and nobody noticed anything. After replacing the cap, the PC worked just fine, and there were no other blown or bulging caps.
2) A lady came and brought her Compaq Presario 1700 for repairs. It needed servicing, a shell replacement, a keyboard and I think hinges? My boss knew I had a thing for old hardware, so he had me work on it. Luckily, since he has had the store for years, he had two (!) laptops that were the same model for parts, so the whole thing was very easy to fix, and I was done within 30 minutes.
3) Some guy brought an old 486 board for recapping. I didn't touch it. Not out of disgust or anything, I just wasn't the one that worked on it. The guy who did work on it, however, didn't fix it after all. He said he couldn't figure it out. Maybe I could have, if I worked on it now, but It doesn't really matter anymore.
4) A kid who seemed to be in his mid-teens asked if we had any Wi-Fi cards for his laptop. It was an old P3-era Compaq, though my memory might be failing me here. I think it did have a miniPCI slot, or we could have just added a PCMCIA USB 2.0 card and a USB Wi-Fi adapter, we ended up just saying no, considering it wouldn't be of much use on the Internet anyway.