+1 for recapping the K7N2. I have the Delta-ILSR version (so the normal K7N2, but with onboard Fasttrak 375 SATA + RAID, 1394 and actively cooled Northbridge) and have recapped mine after the OSTs near the CPU dried out for no apparent reason. Simply put I want crazy and replaced almost every singe OST I found in there, including the little RAM buggers.

I have found a lot of parts lately that were perfectly fine except for bad caps. If you're not sure and still want to try salvaging it, start making a pile with copious notes and revisit the lot at some point later when you've built up some experience with board repair.

Many electronics from this era were built around the time of the capacitor plague and even good quality capacitors are drying out now simply due to age so this isn't an uncommon thing.

Well the K7N2 is actually behaving even weirder. Out of curiosity I tried a different CPU, an Athlon XP 2500+ (that originally was installed in this motherboard) and after manually configuring the correct bus speed & multiplier it ran perfectly stable with the 2500+. I ran Doom 3 on it for over an hour and then a round of Prime 95, rock solid!

I put the 3200+ back in and reconfigured it correctly and once again unstable. Either the board is indeed warped as I may have incorrectly guessed, or it could actually be like you've all been suggesting - bad capacitors. Either way it seems to like the 2500+ and hate the 3200+.

So I'll put it in the "working, but needs looking at" pile. I'm going to have to start practising soldering on a bunch of dead AM2 motherboards I acquired over the years, before I even attempt to try and fix one of these more valuable boards.

Not PC retro related, but today I tried to play a CD on my discman sony D-E406CK: (pic is not of not my actual discman, but it is identical to mine)

However it would not work. It turned on the screen for a second, turn the disc about 2 degrees and power off again. So I disassembled it, did some tests and found that the lens was not moving. I had to disassemble the whole lens assembly, lube the gears and re-assemble the discman. To my relief, after this it worked again without issues.

Formatted 27 floppy disks found in my parents' shelf. Two were completely dead ("Invalid media or Track 0 bad - disk unusable"), three had bad sectors, the rest will remain useful: flashing BIOS, customized startup, etc.

PTherapist wrote on 2021-10-01, 19:59:

Well the K7N2 is actually behaving even weirder.

What is the part number on those CPUs?

The added power draw on the 3200+ may be the tipping point that is causing the capacitors to fail in some way. I don't think there is a voltage difference between those two parts.

The warping isn't good either. How exactly is it warped? Was a heatsink pressing down on the socket or pulling it to one side?

Kahenraz wrote on 2021-10-02, 05:35:

What is the part number on those CPUs? […]
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PTherapist wrote on 2021-10-01, 19:59:

Well the K7N2 is actually behaving even weirder.

What is the part number on those CPUs?

The added power draw on the 3200+ may be the tipping point that is causing the capacitors to fail in some way. I don't think there is a voltage difference between those two parts.

The warping isn't good either. How exactly is it warped? Was a heatsink pressing down on the socket or pulling it to one side?

The 2500+ is AXDA2500DKV4D
the 3200+ is AXDA3200DKV4E

So clock speed aside, the only major difference between the 2 is bus speed, 333 for the 2500+ & 400 for the 3200+. Perhaps whatever is wrong with the K7N2 only rears it's head at 400Mhz.

It's interesting to note, when I originally started building this PC I assumed there was already a 3200+ installed as the BIOS had the CPU configured as such. In fact it was actually the 2500+ overclocked and I only noticed that after I removed the cooler to clean & apply fresh thermal paste. The 2500+ was also unstable at 400MHz FSB.

The warping is so small, barely distinguishable, that I'm not even sure it is warping that I'm seeing - could be normal. There's a very narrow gap between the board and the socket at the edge, think razor blade thin. I can only assume from years of a heavy cooler pulling at the socket. I only came to that conclusion after lifting the CPU cooler off the CPU would cause the PSU to cut off, but it hasn't done that again recently and the only thing I changed was to slightly bend back the little heat sensor located underneath the CPU, which may have simply been causing the CPU to not be correctly seated in the socket.

The SPP chip has also had fresh thermal paste applied in the past 12 months too, to rule out any overheating there. Though it's fan does groan a little if the motherboard hasn't been used for some time, so perhaps I'll look into a replacement.

KCompRoom2000 wrote on 2021-09-29, 08:09:

The external floppy drive for my Toshiba Tecra 720CDT died a week ago and I ended up buying two Toshiba external floppy drives because the first one wasn't the correct one for this laptop, so here's to hoping that the second one is the right one this time. I've double-checked the seller's images this time and it looked like it would be compatible. I would've taken a floppy drive out of another laptop and placed it in the enclosure, but none of my other laptop floppy drives have the matching connector (and neither did the first Toshiba drive which I accidentally ordered).

Don't you hate it when your old laptop uses a proprietary floppy drive and you're struggling at finding a suitable replacement? If only they made Goteks for laptops.

There is a gotek for laptops, or a half-height one at least. But it's a weird 720K drive and useless without FlashFloppy / HxC. The connector doesn't work with most floppy drives I've tried yet. Sadly the connectors for laptops are so varied and non-standardised that it's a non starter for most folks, I Think.
You could make a PCB that goes into the Toshiba's external floppy port, or that goes into the multi-bay port that connects up to a Gotek, that's doable probably since the Gotek is just a microcontroller and doesn't need much power to work. If there's interest, I wonder if I could design one. The regular Gotek is certainly more expensive now.

You reminded me I have a belt to fix from one of my Toshibas though! You can 3d print out a belt in TPU and that'll get the drive running again. Needs to be printed with a 0.25mm nozzle in vase mode with no skirt. Once it's printed, use nail clippers to cut off the filament blobs on the belt, give it a stretch and it's ready to use.

I never thought about printing belts before. That's a good idea to keep in mind for the future.

Is there a plan I can use for printing out new W1D belts?

Cheers, Jason

Today I recapped my old Gygabyte GA-7N400 Pro.
Both motherboard and Athlon XP 2500 are doing well and looking forward to at least another decade (I hope) of service in good health.
Last week I replaced the 2 x 120 Gbytes RAID with a single 500Gbytes hard drive as one of the 120GBytes discs was failing and would only work in a certain physical position. I ended up adding a partition with devuan linux just because "why not?"
All great fun.

pentiumspeed wrote on 2021-10-02, 20:08:

Is there a plan I can use for printing out new W1D belts?

Cheers,

Was just talking about this on another forum, thought you guys might find it interesting too. I dug this out of my gear stash after seeing LGR's recent-ish video "Testing Two Nifty Old LCD Monitors".

Rough shot (sorry) of the rotation mechanism behind those 90-degree rotatable Viewsonic LCDs, which I kept after deconstructing one years ago.

pentiumspeed wrote on 2021-10-02, 21:49:

pentiumspeed wrote on 2021-10-02, 20:08:

Is there a plan I can use for printing out new W1D belts?

Cheers,

Probably, sorry for not getting back to you. Send another PM, covid messed up stuff for a while and I'm just kind of getting over it all now. I've found that 0.25mm nozzles are best over the regular 0.4mm nozzles, but TPU isn't supposed to support that, so it's on the edge of what 3d printing can do.

Can you detail which model / sub-model so I can work out what length is needed?

Shreddoc wrote on 2021-10-02, 22:58:

Was just talking about this on another forum, thought you guys might find it interesting too. I dug this out of my gear stash after seeing LGR's recent-ish video "Testing Two Nifty Old LCD Monitors".

mech.jpg

Rough shot (sorry) of the rotation mechanism behind those 90-degree rotatable Viewsonic LCDs, which I kept after deconstructing one years ago.

Wow OK. Similar to the ones on some more expensive BenQ and Dells. Have one similar sitting in the piles that with base plate was just too good a build to toss. Wonder how many of the better monitors it would fit ? just rambling...

Well, I got the second replacement floppy drive for my Toshiba Tecra 720CDT and unfortunately it doesn't work, it has the same slipping belt problem that my last one had. When I was opening up the drive to replace the belt, I accidentally broke off the connector that connects to one of the motors on the drive, and just like the last one the connector is too different to work with the drive inside the first substitute drive or the one in my Toshiba Satellite 315CDS. At this point, I'm considering just getting a different Pentium 1-era laptop and setting this one aside until I can manage to find yet another compatible floppy drive for it. AARGH! Why are laptop floppy drives SO goddamn proprietary? At the very least, I wish there was a pinout for the connector Toshiba used back in the day so I could hardwire a substitute drive in one of my enclosures.

KCompRoom2000 wrote on 2021-10-03, 08:06:

At the very least, I wish there was a pinout for the connector Toshiba used back in the day so I could hardwire a substitute drive in one of my enclosures.

There's a service manual for the 720CDT here http://www.minuszerodegrees.net/manuals/Toshi … ce%20Manual.pdf

Page 201 has the pinout for the external floppy, page 205 has the pinout for what I think is the internal drive bay. On the external, most of the pins look like standard PC floppy drives, except for FREADY, IHMEDB, SLFDLD. I guess FREADY is a floppy ready signal that is available on some drives. I suspect a typo in the manual as it says the signal is an output to the drive. SLFDLD might be some self diagnostic result, or just a detect pin to say the external drive is connected. No idea about the IHMED (on the internal connector)/ IHMEDB (on the external connector).

aha2940 wrote on 2021-10-02, 03:42:

Not PC retro related, but today I tried to play a CD on my discman sony D-E406CK: (pic is not of not my actual discman, but it i […]
Show full quote

Not PC retro related, but today I tried to play a CD on my discman sony D-E406CK: (pic is not of not my actual discman, but it is identical to mine)

However it would not work. It turned on the screen for a second, turn the disc about 2 degrees and power off again. So I disassembled it, did some tests and found that the lens was not moving. I had to disassemble the whole lens assembly, lube the gears and re-assemble the discman. To my relief, after this it worked again without issues.

🤣,…..Back in 1980’s I had one of those in my truck. It had a cassette deck so I had to use the cassette deck adapter for the Sony CD player.

I have a Q6600 that runs at 3GHz @ 1.3v on a G41 board with 1333MHz DDR3 RAM. It's quiet, stable and completely perfect for Windows XP (and later) gaming.

So I had big plans this weekend to make an unusual XP PC to 'replace' this, at least for a bit. Introducing the AMD A6 3670k on Socket FM1 and the ASUS F1A55 Something Something:

I added 8GB of DDR3 2133MHz RAM on the basis that it's fast even if only 3.5GB is used. I was going to pair this with crossfire Radeon 4650s, mostly because they're cheap and don't require external power which is always a bonus:

Finally I thought I'd have a go at a RAID0 array. I've never used RAID before so I thought I'd see what it was like! I used a pair of 10 year old 250GB SATAII HDDs from Maxtor. Oh and I threw in my Audigy 2 ZS as well.

Windows XP installed fine, eventually. My previously n-lite'd XP install had the right RAID drivers but it kept crashing with memory errors. dropping the RAM from 1866 to 1333MHz solved this (annoyingly). Also, one of the cards was dead (the Smoker brown/orange one) so I swapped it for a 4670 which is crossfire compatible with the 4650. Then tested out some games at 1024 and 1280 res:

• Brothers in Arms Road to Hill 30 worked fine with 60+fps, albeit with very little scaling
• Crysis actually scaled wel (61% and 73% GPU utilisation) with 40fps on medium settings and also worked the CPU pretty hard (in the GPU benchmark!)
• Far Cry 1 scaled very well (90% and 81%) when the CPU wasn't having to do much. As soon as I went outside the framerate and GPU utilisation dropped as the CPU struggled to keep up.
• Doom 3 BFG Edition I could not turn off V-sync but it turned out that the 4560 is plenty powerful enough with utilisation at 20 and 30%.
• I also benched the RAID array - I have no idea if this is good or bad...

I was surprised by how powerful the 4650 was, could be. I was surprised by how weak the CPU was though!

I have similar FM1 socket but made by HP but I have options of using A10-5800K or A10-6800K on it and tested using quality Micron 16GB ECC DDR3-1866 dimms borrowed from my Xeon PC and does run at 1866 perfectly. Have not found quality 2133 outside of Crucial Ballistix sticks that I have not bought yet.

Cheers,