First post, by rasva
After years of lurking around I finally decided to register and post something, let me start with this not so ordinary PC
Current spec is:
AMD 486DX4/100MHz
32MB RAM
1GB CF Card instead of the original 2.5" HDD
Cirrus Logic 1MB VGA card, 10Mbit Ethernet,
3.5" 26-pin slim notebook FDD
and an OPL3LPT (Yes I use a PS2-USB adapter to power it, because why not).
There is a header under the HDD that I believe contains all the pins of a standard ISA slot. Cpu support is at least from 25MHz SX to 100MHz DX4, but I guess 133MHz will also work, need to find some CPU to test.
Some background: I got three of these many years ago (2xWS3100, 1xWS-325X which is older and only supports 25 and 33MHz CPUs). Recently, I decided to take a look at them and the nightmare started.
The PSU was dead and most of the capacitors leaked. The PWM controllers inside the PSU were also dead. By the way, the glue used by PSU manufacturers to hold the various parts together during vibrations became slightly conductive, which caused some weird behavior even after I replaced all the dead parts. Once I got rid of the glue, the PSU started working normally.
The floppy drive was dead, but luckily, it only needed the rubber belt replaced. This wasn't trivial if I wanted to avoid removing the heads, but I managed. Unfortunately, I could only guess the size of the belt and I only had ones used in tape players (with a square profile), while the original belt was flat and wide. As a result, some floppies sometimes don't start to spin on the first try.
The Dallas RTC chip is in the socket, so bringing it back to life was quite easy.
It was also called a "pizza box PC" for obvious reasons; it doesn't take up much space on my table.