Gluing this T2150CDT back together, first with superglue to join the clean break of the front plastic, then epoxy behind to reinforce it. The black mark is where epoxy couldn't go because it'd block the capacitor by the CPU. I really hate working with epoxy, I got some under a fingernail this time 🙁

Then some really tiny soldering to repair all the scratched traces on this thing's motherboard, thankfully it worked after. I haven't had a good use for the microscope for ages but this copper enamel wire was small enough that I was having trouble even seeing it. I cleaned up any bridged traces and put solder mask on it and it looks pretty good now.

The external floppy drive had some interesting problems too, that's another EME278TB drive which is belt driven. The belt was okay but it wasn't possible to put a disk in, that turned out to be a tiny metal tab was bent over enough that it couldn't be moved by the nylon arm that moves when a disk is pushed in. Kind of amazed the belt is still good in this one and I'm the first person to have a go at fixing it, no alignment problems hooray.

Tested an Athlon XP 2800+ Barton core.
Installing XP SP3 was a horror, drivers was boring.

Cpu score on PCMArk:
2002 - 6111
2005 - 2743

No idea if it is good, but cpu is stable. I have a batch to go. 🙁

Replaced the totalled speakers on my trusty HP Pavilion dv8000.

Not the cleanest job, but with slight bits of hot glue to cover some of the holes that were left after replacing, you can't even tell the speakers aren't original.

Specs at this moment:

Intel Core Duo T2400 1.83Ghz (I think it's a Yonah...?)
Geforce Go 7400 GPU
2x60GB Fujitsu HDDs (original drives, both of them.)
2x1GB DDR2-667
Hitachi-LG DVDRW (originally had a Pioneer that was... kinda tired.)
17 inch 1440x900 display
Win XP SP3 Prio

I don't know about the GeForce Go 7000 series, but the 8000 series are a ticking time bomb and are known to be defective. NVIDIA lost a class action lawsuit on account of it.

Something to keep in mind as you decide how much money to put into those repairs.

The 8000 series GPU would be present on the 6000 and 9000 models, and even then that would be later in their run (the original dv6000 and 9000 also had 7xxx series GPU)

The dv8000 (and I think the dv1000 as well?) were all built with Geforce 7 series GPUs in mind - the "default" nV offering being the Go 7400, and the high-end (for this laptop) would be a Go 7600.

Long story short - the dv8000 predates the infamous Geforce 8 series GPUs by at least a year or so - lots of the datecodes I have been finding throughout the disassembly of the dv8000 were 2006.

The only time I had seen the GF7 series to fail was a dv6000 with the bad variant of the 6100 chipset - it was basically 6100 chipset + GF7200 GPU, but in that regard cooling of it wasn't anywhere near up to par. Besides HP, I've never had Geforce 7 fail in any mobile machine. (as a matter of fact, my other XP laptop is an Acer 9300 w/ Turion TL-58 and a GF7300.)

dormcat wrote on 2022-11-10, 18:10:

appiah4 wrote on 2022-11-10, 13:48:

I don't know what S370 board that was but it is entirely possible that the R9600 drew too much power from the AGP port for a Socket 370 era VRM to handle, particularly when it is 30 years old..

IIRC the very first Socket 370 CPU was the Mendocino Celeron released in August 1998 so even the oldest S370 MB is no more than 24 years old.

OK, 20 year old then 😀

New tool that I've never needed before - this makeshift one works well enough but is pretty unwieldy. I remember seeing a video on the 'mikeselectricstuff' channel years ago but haven't ever really needed to find this kind of thing before.

It did work though and let me figure out where the trace goes in this rather complex (and non-functional) little Thinkpad 240X motherboard. I'm trying to figure out how the backlight turns itself on since I broke that signal on my otherwise-functional Thinkpad 240Z. All this because I wanted to swap over the screen plastic and put on a cable cover that was missing, this all has gone very wrong but I can call it a 'learning experience' 😁

Oh yeah and in the process I found that another Thinkpad 240 mainboard I thought was dead was actually working - that and the dead Thinkpad 240X were in the 'box of shame' for a couple of years, along with a screen missing its backlight cable. I built up that Thinkpad 240 (celeron 300) into another working laptop and gave it an LED backlight, very nice upgrade for this little system 😀

I tried testing a GUS PnP without any success.

BIOS and Windows recognize it as "Gravis Ultrasound Plug'n'Pray". Apparently the previous owner has used EEPROM tools and that's why it got renamed to "Pray" instead of "Play"?
Neither the drivers on the original disks nor the drivers on Vogonsdrivers work.
Am I doing something wrong?

In the last few days I was entertained with my first Mac, an iBook (a 12'' opacque white late 2002 model). I've installed Mac OS 9.2.2 and OS X 10.4.11 in dual boot.
I like it very much, battery has still life too. Today I will replace the hard disk with a 128 GB ssd on a m2-ide adapter.

RaiderOfLostVoodoo wrote on 2022-11-11, 14:21:

I tried testing a GUS PnP without any success. […]
Show full quote

I tried testing a GUS PnP without any success.

BIOS and Windows recognize it as "Gravis Ultrasound Plug'n'Pray". Apparently the previous owner has used EEPROM tools and that's why it got renamed to "Pray" instead of "Play"?
Neither the drivers on the original disks nor the drivers on Vogonsdrivers work.
Am I doing something wrong?

I guess you should "pray" for a solution.

You can try doing the same thing I did with my Philips PCA761AW card to make it think it's a GUS. Use the PNPMAP program from the argus_final_doc.zip in the Argus thread's first post: ARGUS Project thread - Now with gerbers and documentation in initial post!
Run that in DOS to reset the PnP EEPROM to its original values. That might allow the drivers to work in Windows.
Before that, you should be able to use Unisound in DOS regardless and try some demos from the GuS PnP CD-ROM. If Unisound and demos don't work, maybe you have a resource conflict, the GuS PnP needs so many DMAs and IRQs.

--------
My Thinkpad 240Z is back up and running, traced the backlight enable signal back to a little AND gate, swapped that over from the donor 240X board and now the 240Z's backlight works again, yay.
One of the two little components circled in red was broken. While I was in there I found some previous work that wasn't me:

Well at least they fixed it, but that means someone put a lot of work in to bypass the supervisor password. The Atmel 24rf08 is where that's stored normally.

Currently working on a M321 - 386-40MHz PC-chips motherboard. -> https://theretroweb.com/motherboards/s/pcchips-m321-rev.-3.x
Leaking battery ... Have removed the keyboard controller, bios and the 6-way Schmitt trigger 74LS14. The 74LS14 is destroyed.

Bios-Dump M321 Rev. 3.1:

Tried to fire up my SGI 1600SW monitors today, but had a rude awakening: I had two SGI Multilink DVI-OpenLDI adapters. One was already dead, the other was fine - until now. It works for about 5 sec, then loses sync. Looks like bad cap in the Multilink adapter :'(

Consider yourself lucky. Capacitor replacements are cheap and easy, with the right equipment.

Spent a few hours with a retro related activity - using older/old phones & tablets to load games onto a ZX81 & ZX Spectrum via the cassette ports. Totally smooth sailing with an old HTC Desire Android phone (the phone I generally tend to use for this task), as well as an Amazon Fire 7 tablet from 2017 - was able to load everything perfectly.

But still to this day, I cannot get reliable operation out of any Samsung Galaxy device! Tried multiple old phones & even a newer S10e - all of them exhibit the same problem, random tape loading errors and loading failures. You can try the same game loading 3 times and it will work sometimes and others not.

I concentrated on the Galaxy S7 Edge, enabled Flight Mode and dug into the settings and found Mono Audio mode. This seemed to do the trick, I was now able to get 100% perfect loading on both computers. So I tried a different app for loading ZX Spectrum games, which was the whole purpose of attempting this as the newer app required a later Android OS. The app had the same random loading issues as before. So I gave up and went back to the original app and that too now had the same problem, so I gave up completely. No idea what it is with Samsung devices, they just don't seem to co-operate.

Fixed a Seagate ST31000524AS HDD that had bad TVS diodes. Probably my first TVS repair, and a successful one at that.

I indeed replaced them both, unlike some people that would just snip them off and run the drive like that.

Finally figured out how to keep my collection of sound and video cards properly while still being able to quickly access them. Now, all cards are instantly available to me and not hidden behind other cards or anything like it.
Until now, they were very disrespectfully held in bunch of shoe boxes without any bags or other kinds of protection. Now they've got an earned respectable place.

PTherapist wrote on 2022-11-13, 11:00:

I concentrated on the Galaxy S7 Edge, enabled Flight Mode and dug into the settings and found Mono Audio mode. This seemed to do the trick, I was now able to get 100% perfect loading on both computers. So I tried a different app for loading ZX Spectrum games, which was the whole purpose of attempting this as the newer app required a later Android OS. The app had the same random loading issues as before. So I gave up and went back to the original app and that too now had the same problem, so I gave up completely. No idea what it is with Samsung devices, they just don't seem to co-operate.

Yah, I've always found Samsung Androids a bit freaking weird in all matters, whether it's killing SD cards, not interoperating with other android gear correctly, having weird charging plugs and charger specs, or whatever. Every single model has something screwy about it, it has a standard micro port, but corrupts any cards you plug into it, it has the weird port, but may like 2 or 3 brands of SD unless the wind is in the wrong direction. That's probably what Apple was really suing them for, stealing the idea of making only Samsung things work with Samsung and screwing around with standard interfaces.

Dug my Pentium 180 MMX Overdrive out of storage and was pleasantly surprised to find out it actually works.

Even more surprised to find out it will run and bench at 200Mhz without problems.

The wife cant understand why that makes me happy, but shes happy Im happy 😀

This is not standard method plugging into charging port using SD adapter. The S7 does have SD micro in the sim tray use that instead. I know these S7 as I repair them from time to time.

You need quality charging block that supports samsung devices and a good standard cable fully wired internally, not only Samsung devices, this is true of all devices even Apple's. Not the cheap stuff from the convenience stores and from the hole in the wall stores. Same with SD cards, has to be good quality too. Were you buying cheap ones and generic brands? My mother had a older Samsung and lost the data on SD card which was generic brand.

Plus anything this is not Google or Samsung, other than that, for example LG Huawei, HTC, devices does have hardware issues as they age especially battery and motherboard and impossible to get *new* parts for them. Same true for Blackberries. Sometimes Google has goofs too. For example, pixel has audio issues and battery, pixel 3 and 4 with their half life battery life (wouldn't go past 50% charging and replacing the battery fixes it and Google sends us batteries factory floor seconds (like labelled bent, green stickers, never top grade brand new), pixel 6 series with hard OLED meant broken screens very easily.

Yes we are authorized from respective brands. Fire sure brand new batteries is Apple and Samsung if you visit authorized repair shops.

Cheers,

Build myself a few monitor stands for my retro setup this past week. Nothing fancy; cut and finished some plywood, then added Ikea Eket metal legs.