My girlfriend gave me a TS100 for New Year — my very first soldering iron. Today I went to an electronics market with my friend and got everything else needed for the job. By the end of the day here's what I've managed to do:


So maybe not the most impressive soldering job to be shown on Vogons, but it's the first I've ever done 😀 I've replaced barrel batteries on two 386 boards today.
Then I've proceeded to deal with this:


This is the original SoundBlaster, and the previous owner decided to mod the card to accept CD audio, I guess? Well, it's useless to me and looked very nasty, so I removed the wires. Also finally tested the card with the Ultima 6 intro — it works great!
So it's probably not my place to review the TS100, but I really liked working with this gadget. I've reflashed it with Ralim firmware, and the device became very user-friendly. I instantly got used to the controls, they feel pretty natural to me, and the device lies nicely in my hand.
Next steps: I still have some boards with barrel batteries and I would like to convert them to CR2032 using a battery holder and a diode. I would also like to mod some of my 386 boards to have sockets for an oscillator chip. Then I have some soundcards and motherboards that need new capacitors. Eventually I want to replace SIMM sockets on most of my AWE32 cards and then the ultimate challenge for me would be to build a card like an AdLib replica.