Been messing with my Epson ActionNote 4SLC/33. The floppy had flaked out on and off, not sure why, anyway, when it's working it doesn't seem to read disks as well as a 486 board does on a desktop floppy drive. They're old disks, but desktop one has less errors and can get past most of them with a retry or two. Anyway, so I was trying various things, reading in non-turbo, reading with cache off, screaming out the window because it went "AWOL" again for a couple of boots... So I came to try two other drives, a slightly different version TEAC than the one that was in there, and 15 years younger, and a "this century" Panasonic JU-226 ... now while they were smoother and didn't seem to drop out yet, read performance might only have been a tad better but didn't approach desktop error tolerance.

Disks that I had formatted and written in the last 5 years were no problem. Guess I need to get an LS-120 machine back up for superb error recovery and rewrite all the old fading ones.

Anyway, I think it is going to go back together with the newer TEAC, but it requires a bit of vandalism, plastic removed to clear the eject button. Also oddly it's a couple mm narrower, so needs some padding to sit in the cradle right.

Next up, contemplating whether I will "ruin" the memory board that's in there by trying to solder a bunch more DRAM to it. Wondering whether I want an FPU in it to warm it up with another couple of watts and make it fast enough to be too slow to play anything that's 486DX required.