TrashPanda wrote on 2022-10-31, 09:54:

I might be able to source a new battery for it so its portability will be limited till I can get one.

Considering this machine is older than an armada m700, it should be possible to rebuild the battery since they do not have those annoying gas gauge integrated circuits which cut off the battery when the ic thinks the battery shouldn't be used anymore.
doesn't matter which chemistry the thing uses. Just replace the cells with the same ones, charge and all should be good... aside from the plastic case maybe a slight bit mangled from opening it up.

Reference, I managed to fix my m700 battery by replacing one cell which was feeding the battery indication circuit which drained that cell completely flat, which caused it to no longer be charged.

These idea you have is not recommended, and is not safe.

If you are working on battery, please prepare these items:

*NEVER use water!* Lithium element utilizes gaseous oxygen from air, also water is H2O means oxygen torn from water during lithium burn and free hydrogen helps with burn too. Fire extinguisher with C and D code will not stop lithium burn but will extinguish the other items external started fires started by the lithium fire.

Pail with dry sand in prefilled large metal cone prepared, just drop the flaming thing with the safety gloves in the cone then lift cone up, this automatically covers the battery, is what used to contain flaming lithium battery. Then carry by the pail handle outside then wait for battery to burn out. You must have insulated flameproof rubber gloves atop the pail too, ready at moment's notice.

Another way, partially filled sand in pail's bottom and a larger container of sand next to it and pair of safety gloves. Place burning battery with gloves in pail and pour sand over this.

Sand covered battery will keep smoking and burning but this safely keep fiery comets from flying out of control. Sand also prevents fiery lithium comets from landing on your skin.

This is only approved way and this is what fire depts prefers this way. You can make a cone out of smaller metal pail with bottom cut out.

We must have this items around at our devices repair shop.

Cheers,

weedeewee wrote on 2022-10-31, 19:56:

Reference, I managed to fix my m700 battery by replacing one cell which was feeding the battery indication circuit which drained that cell completely flat, which caused it to no longer be charged.

I believe there are safety implications for mixing cells that are in a different state of charge. I have no experience working with lithium cells, but this does not seem safe to me.

I don't understand the data presented, but you can find a white paper on the subject here:

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1149/19 … 7111/abc8c4/pdf

Kahenraz wrote on 2022-10-31, 20:46:

weedeewee wrote on 2022-10-31, 19:56:

Reference, I managed to fix my m700 battery by replacing one cell which was feeding the battery indication circuit which drained that cell completely flat, which caused it to no longer be charged.

I believe there are safety implications for mixing cells that are in a different state of charge.

Yes.
FYI, I fixed this battery more than 5 years ago. It's likely dead again due to the same reason. I'll likely fix it again using the same two hands and another cell which I salvaged from some other laptop battery.

pentiumspeed wrote on 2022-10-31, 19:56:

These idea you have is not recommended, and is not safe.

I guess you were referring this to my post? YMMV.

weedeewee wrote on 2022-10-31, 21:24:

Yes. FYI, I fixed this battery more than 5 years ago. It's likely dead again due to the same reason. I'll likely fix it again u […]
Show full quote

Kahenraz wrote on 2022-10-31, 20:46:

weedeewee wrote on 2022-10-31, 19:56:

Reference, I managed to fix my m700 battery by replacing one cell which was feeding the battery indication circuit which drained that cell completely flat, which caused it to no longer be charged.

I believe there are safety implications for mixing cells that are in a different state of charge.

Yes.
FYI, I fixed this battery more than 5 years ago. It's likely dead again due to the same reason. I'll likely fix it again using the same two hands and another cell which I salvaged from some other laptop battery.

pentiumspeed wrote on 2022-10-31, 19:56:

These idea you have is not recommended, and is not safe.

I guess you were referring this to my post? YMMV.

Lithium fire is not to be taken lightly, that empty pie tin is not enough. These stuff don't just burn quietly, sometimes burning battery also explodes and or erupts fireballs, hence the need for sand and pair of fireproof gloves.
These comes from collective experiences out in the repair field hence strenuously detailed training articles about controlling lithium fires due to insurance reasons and fire depts wanted us to have the knowledge about doing this safely, even our shop has seen a lithium fire once because of one accident by a careless tech.

I have healthy respect for lithium battery from what I had seen online videos about these.

Cheers,

pentiumspeed wrote on 2022-10-31, 21:41:

Cheers,

The only lithium battery I destroyed by accident was by leaving it on a burning wood stove.
Those overheating batteries sure come close to fireworks, though they didn't catch on fire.
That was a makita 18v li ion battery pack, more than 7 yrs ago.

weedeewee wrote on 2022-10-31, 22:02:

The only lithium battery I destroyed by accident was by leaving it on a burning wood stove. Those overheating batteries sure co […]
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pentiumspeed wrote on 2022-10-31, 21:41:

Cheers,

The only lithium battery I destroyed by accident was by leaving it on a burning wood stove.
Those overheating batteries sure come close to fireworks, though they didn't catch on fire.
That was a makita 18v li ion battery pack, more than 7 yrs ago.

You was lucky. Usually we see this often on facebook videos when their shop had a lithium battery fire. Big flames shooting out.

What I seen is usually like this, and sometimes does not need to be pierced, short circuit can do that or failure of battery itself (customers').

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oieH2wwDGzo

Also lithium fire is common with e-bike and gravity scooters. Very often reported in large cities.

Cheers,

Intel 486SX 20Mhz

pentiumspeed wrote on 2022-10-31, 22:20:

You was lucky. Usually we see this often on facebook videos when their shop had a lithium battery fire. Big flames shooting […]
Show full quote

weedeewee wrote on 2022-10-31, 22:02:

The only lithium battery I destroyed by accident was by leaving it on a burning wood stove. Those overheating batteries sure co […]
Show full quote

pentiumspeed wrote on 2022-10-31, 21:41:

Cheers,

The only lithium battery I destroyed by accident was by leaving it on a burning wood stove.
Those overheating batteries sure come close to fireworks, though they didn't catch on fire.
That was a makita 18v li ion battery pack, more than 7 yrs ago.

You was lucky. Usually we see this often on facebook videos when their shop had a lithium battery fire. Big flames shooting out.

What I seen is usually like this, and sometimes does not need to be pierced, short circuit can do that or failure of battery itself (customers').

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oieH2wwDGzo

Also lithium fire is common with e-bike and gravity scooters. Very often reported in large cities.

Cheers,

Fires from Exploding E-Bike Batteries Nearly Doubled This Year in New York City
https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/22/10/30/ … n-new-york-city

pentiumspeed wrote on 2022-10-31, 22:20:

You was lucky.

Luck had nothing to do with it.

matze79 wrote on 2022-10-31, 22:39:

Intel 486SX 20Mhz

Is that brand new? Very cool.

Would not surprise me if there's boxes, crates, containers, warehouses full of SX20, 25, 33 around somewhere still. They were in huge surplus at computer fairs in the 95-98 era, in 95 it was like add an SX to your 486 board for $5... in 1996 it was like "Do you want an SX33 free with that?" Customer: "No!" 97 they taped them into the boards, 98 they were just sitting there forlornly with stacks on hand behind with a sign maybe, "Excess stock 486SX, make us an offer." .... I don't know if it was actually deliberate bottom end flooding by intel to try to kill AMD and Cyrix, but it was a bit late.

Edit: had half a dozen on hand and tried overclocking them at this juncture, they were so cheap after all. Anyway, a lot of the 33s did 40, but wouldn't even do 50 with a big sink on. Most of the 25s did 33 kinda hot.

I always thought that the DX was more interesting. I always found floating point arithmetic to be useful, unless all you needed was business software.

Yeah there was a break point somewhere in 95 where no-FPU didn't cut it any more with more multimedia and decoding demands, more games that made use of FPU. Well and of course the DX2-66 being seen as the entry level from early 95 so nobody wanted slower.

Kahenraz wrote on 2022-10-31, 20:46:

I believe there are safety implications for mixing cells that are in a different state of charge. I have no experience working w […]
Show full quote

weedeewee wrote on 2022-10-31, 19:56:

Reference, I managed to fix my m700 battery by replacing one cell which was feeding the battery indication circuit which drained that cell completely flat, which caused it to no longer be charged.

I believe there are safety implications for mixing cells that are in a different state of charge. I have no experience working with lithium cells, but this does not seem safe to me.

I don't understand the data presented, but you can find a white paper on the subject here:

https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1149/19 … 7111/abc8c4/pdf

There are, really the cells in a lithium pack must be of a similar charging capacity and have similar charging profiles / operating temperatures. Mixing cells can result in one cell getting charged or discharged more than others, increasing the risk of individual cells being damaged by over discharging - which can cause shorts in the cell, or damaged by overcharging which can then cause a fire.
Every lithium pack with multiple cells should have balancing circuitry so that individual cells don't get overcharged / discharged but if the difference is enough then it won't be able to compensate. I put some time into rebuilding some battery packs for my Thinkpad 240s earlier this year and from what I learned I've decided that 3rd party battery packs & cheap lithium cells are often much less safe than original packs and that rebuilding battery packs is mostly just not worth it.
18650, 17670 cylinder cells and 103450 prismatic cells used in vintage laptops do pose less risk than modern lithium polymer packs - like Pentiumspeed said, fires can easily happen if lithium polymer cells / packs are pierced or bent, causing a short which runs through the cell's energy rather rapidly 😁 (box of sand for firecells is best afaik, but good luck moving a burning pack) At least phones, tablets and laptops pose less risk than e-bikes do.

UncleYong wrote on 2022-10-31, 05:33:

Oh, forgot to write down the board name: it's a Gigabyte GA5SMM. The manual book is around so it's even easier to set it up. 😀

Shuttle HOT-599 is another mATX example. Got this a while ago with a hardware bundle virtually for free after selling some other stuff from this lot.
Very nice and compact board with onboard VGA and Yamaha sound chip.

Bought this one recently for half a tenner (plus 3 for shipping):

Bad caps already removed. Still have to order replacement caps for testing this. Didn't want to power it on with the old caps which were really in the worst shape I have ever seen.
Some of them didn't even have a fourth of their specified capacitance, some even drained when desoldering.
This is my first Soltek board, don't know if these were more good or more bad quality back then.
When this works with new caps put in this will be my third board with native Tualatin support. Still unsure if I will keep it afterwards, since I generally favor mATX boards. Will see.

Also found a be quiet! Straight Power E9 400W power supply recently for the same price (shipping was more than this due to weight, though). Seller said it shuts off after some time but so far I couldn't find any issues while testing with an overclocked Phenom II X4 955 test rig although not squeezing all the spec'ed power out of it. Caps also look fine visually so don't know what was the problem.
I already have the exact same model in my main machine and really can recommend this for its very silent operation. So even if it is not a modular version for better cable management I'm quite happy with it.

Won this auction a few days ago for 45€:

Sellers picture.

Boards are untested, but seller is a decluttering service.
So I can return the boards for 14 days without any questions asked. EU law. Very little risk.

FIC PA-2000:
Socket 5. So as far as I know I can use any Socket 7 Pentium who isn't MMX, but it will be downclocked to 133MHz. Is this correct?
It's missing a chip next to the ISA slots. Manual says "8042" without further explanation. On other photos, which I have found around the net, the boards are missing the chip as well. What the hell is this?
It comes with 256KB cache socketed. The upper cache socket (M10) is always to be left empty if you follow the manual. Why is there a socket that has to be left empty?
It also seems to be missing all the jumpers. Luckily I scavenged dozens of jumpers from dead CD-ROM drives.

Asus PCI/I-486SP3:
At first I though it can handle DX4 CPUs. But that would be the 486SP3G. 🙁 So my DX4-120 has to remain untested for now.
I couldn't find a manual for the PCI/I-486SP3. I found the mainboard layout on stason.org, but everything else that popped up was either PCI/I-486SP3G (different layout, support for DX4) or PVI-486SP3 (with VLB). It's not even on the Asus website. This board seems to be really rare. Does anyone know anything about it?
There is an empty socket next to the BIOS which is labeled "SCSI BIOS". Onboard SCSI, neat! Anyone got a source for the SCSI BIOS? My buddy Hirsch has a programmer, so we can scavenge chips from dead boards/cards.
Sadly it doesn't come with any cache. I have FPM RAM, but no cache. What exactly do I need? I only know it supports 128/256/512KB cache.

FIC PT-2006:
Supports MMX CPUs. Neat! I have plenty off MMX200.
Voltage jumpers are set to P54C. FSB is set to 66MHz and Multi to 2x. So I assume the CPU was originally seated on the PA-2000. Kinda advantagous, cuz I'm short on coolers for Socket 7. So I'm gonna swap it back onto the PA-2000.
Why did the original owner swap the board? Wasn't he satisfied with the VIA chipset? Or is it broken? We will see in a few days.
The board doesn't have a socket for TAG SRAM, which makes sense, because the 430VX chipset can't cache more than 64MB RAM anyway. I have one COAST without TAG SRAM. Guess that would be ideal for this board?
The board supports up to 128MB RAM, but I think it would probably best to just use a single 64MB SDRAM stick?

BitWrangler wrote on 2022-10-31, 23:58:

Would not surprise me if there's boxes, crates, containers, warehouses full of SX20, 25, 33 around somewhere still. They were in huge surplus at computer fairs in the 95-98 era, in 95 it was like add an SX to your 486 board for $5... in 1996 it was like "Do you want an SX33 free with that?" Customer: "No!" 97 they taped them into the boards, 98 they were just sitting there forlornly with stacks on hand behind with a sign maybe, "Excess stock 486SX, make us an offer." .... I don't know if it was actually deliberate bottom end flooding by intel to try to kill AMD and Cyrix, but it was a bit late.

OMG, I just made myself mental images of this, extrapolating to using 486SX's as theft protection, throwing them after trespassers or angry mobs 🤣 thanks for that image 😁

RaiderOfLostVoodoo wrote on 2022-11-01, 11:33:

Won this auction a few days ago for 45€: 3boards.jpg Sellers picture. […]
Show full quote

Won this auction a few days ago for 45€:
3boards.jpg
Sellers picture.

Boards are untested, but seller is a decluttering service.
So I can return the boards for 14 days without any questions asked. EU law. Very little risk.

FIC PA-2000:
Socket 5. So as far as I know I can use any Socket 7 Pentium who isn't MMX, but it will be downclocked to 133MHz. Is this correct?
It's missing a chip next to the ISA slots. Manual says "8042" without further explanation. On other photos, which I have found around the net, the boards are missing the chip as well. What the hell is this?
It comes with 256KB cache socketed. The upper cache socket (M10) is always to be left empty if you follow the manual. Why is there a socket that has to be left empty?
It also seems to be missing all the jumpers. Luckily I scavenged dozens of jumpers from dead CD-ROM drives.

Asus PCI/I-486SP3:
At first I though it can handle DX4 CPUs. But that would be the 486SP3G. 🙁 So my DX4-120 has to remain untested for now.
I couldn't find a manual for the PCI/I-486SP3. I found the mainboard layout on stason.org, but everything else that popped up was either PCI/I-486SP3G (different layout, support for DX4) or PVI-486SP3 (with VLB). It's not even on the Asus website. This board seems to be really rare. Does anyone know anything about it?
There is an empty socket next to the BIOS which is labeled "SCSI BIOS". Onboard SCSI, neat! Anyone got a source for the SCSI BIOS? My buddy Hirsch has a programmer, so we can scavenge chips from dead boards/cards.
Sadly it doesn't come with any cache. I have FPM RAM, but no cache. What exactly do I need? I only know it supports 128/256/512KB cache.

FIC PT-2006:
Supports MMX CPUs. Neat! I have plenty off MMX200.
Voltage jumpers are set to P54C. FSB is set to 66MHz and Multi to 2x. So I assume the CPU was originally seated on the PA-2000. Kinda advantagous, cuz I'm short on coolers for Socket 7. So I'm gonna swap it back onto the PA-2000.
Why did the original owner swap the board? Wasn't he satisfied with the VIA chipset? Or is it broken? We will see in a few days.
The board doesn't have a socket for TAG SRAM, which makes sense, because the 430VX chipset can't cache more than 64MB RAM anyway. I have one COAST without TAG SRAM. Guess that would be ideal for this board?
The board supports up to 128MB RAM, but I think it would probably best to just use a single 64MB SDRAM stick?

I have a suspicion that 486 board will be a kettle of fish to get running, will also have to get rid of that RTC even if its not dead yet it will soon be.

Kahenraz wrote on 2022-11-01, 00:05:

I always thought that the DX was more interesting. I always found floating point arithmetic to be useful, unless all you needed was business software.

My first gaming PC was a DX-33 and I had really insisted on getting the DX vs the SX at the time (this must be around 1993). In hindsight, my dad should have said no and bought the SX-33.. I don't recall playing a single game other than Ocean/DID's Inferno that actually leveraged the FPU, and even then that game was pretty crap. By the time such games were more common we had upgraded to a DX4-100. Ultimately we paid a premium for something we never used.