First post, by Runicen
- Rank
- Newbie
Alright, so I've been lurking on the forums for the past few weeks as the rubber has hit the road on this "restoring old hardware" thing I'm dabbling in. What can I say? Watch a few Lazy Game Review videos and you start to remember the pleasant smell of big box PC games at a Babbages or Electronics Boutique and start to wonder if, just maybe, something joyful was left behind when all that old hardware and all those old games ended up in the trash heap.
Well, so far, my results have been less than spectacular.
I scored an old Dell Optiplex running a P200, so we're alright there, but it needs work and is on the bench as we speak. The real oddity (which I picked up with the Dell strictly for the oddity factor) is a Laser 486 box. It was sold "as-is" because it lacked a CPU fan. Well, clearly they didn't do much research as it's a 486SX-25, which apparently never needed one. Thanks to Google for providing me with that information.
Now, where this starts getting ugly is that, upon removing the front plate of the case, I found an enclosure which held what used to be three AA batteries (CMOS battery, I presume) which had long since exploded, leaked and corroded all over the damn place. So, I dutifully cleaned everything up with vinegar to neutralize the goo and then a solid wipe-down to clear the residue. Up to this point, I hadn't even tried to plug the thing in. Now that it was cleaned, I gave it a whirl and... nothing. Not so much as a chirp or a cheep out of the thing.
I managed to resist the urge to chuck the box out of the window and took everything apart, checking to see if the motherboard had been hit with any of the battery nastiness (there was corrosion on the leads connecting that battery box to the motherboard header). The motherboard is immaculate and so are all of the cards and RAM connected to it. The thing has an ISA board with four add-on ports which doubles as the floppy/hard drive controller (came with a 3.5" floppy, no hard drive) as well as an ISA graphics card. The motherboard itself has a pretty large assortment of ports and that surprised the hell out of me when I first opened it up. Apparently, this was a common late 80s/early 90s design. I'm counting 6 ISA 16-bit ports, 1 ISA 8-bit port, 2 VLB slots (I'm still a bit vague on what those are for) and 8 ram slots, four of which are occupied with 1MB (if I'm reading the labels correctly) chips.
I'm attaching pictures to this post because I have very little idea what I'm looking at here short of what I've delved up via the oracle (Google). I used 486 machines long before I started tinkering with and upgrading them as a kid, so the innards of this thing are totally alien to me. My suspicion is that the power supply died a death ages ago and that's the source of the problem - hence no activity whatsoever when it's plugged in and switched on. Surprisingly given the battery ugliness, everything else in the case is immaculate.
So, what I'm looking at now, assuming it can be done, is to replace the CMOS battery (that enclosure was fouled beyond recognition and had to be removed and thrown out) and the power supply (AT). Can this be done in a cost-effective way or have I already lost before I started? Also, if it's not worth saving the box, is there any merit to trying to part it out on eBay and the like? Any chance I'd recoup any kind of money doing that between the ISA controller card, graphics card, or 4MB of ram installed in the box, or is this just more junk silicon?
Thanks in advance for any answers. This forum has been a tremendous resource just picking through old threads and I figured that if anyone could give me a conclusive answer on this beast of a machine, they'd be on here. Let me know if I missed any pertinent info on the box and I'll see if I can't provide it.
