VOGONS


Reply 120 of 222, by Vynix

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Well nevermind, remember the mobo I talked about? It seems that I have somehow brought it back from the dead (well in my defense it was half-dead)... I just have no idea how... And also why it works fine with a P133 but not with a P233 😦 (and before you ask, yes I set the jumpers according to both Stason and the mobo's manual, just to be sure)

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Reply 121 of 222, by HanJammer

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How about that: I comissioned hundreds of 386, 486, Pentium and Pentium II computers back in the ~2007 I think to be scrapped... some of them had very decent Abit, DTK and ASUS motherboards in them...

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Reply 122 of 222, by Lazar81

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How amusing....

I had a 486 back in the 90s payed with hard work in my uncle's animal shop. I was so proud. After one week I was switching it on and after a few minutes I sense some ugly stench and smoke coming up behind my monitor... And so my first 14" monitor passed because of melting the Isolation of the power cable - I still don't know how this could be.

Another time I was wondering how all the beautiful inner parts are assembled. So let's have a look. As I finally came to the CPU I pulled it out and had no idea about electrostatic discharge... Well after my nice 486 CPU with 66mhz did nothing anymore - I knew.

And I remember that I wanted to rearrange the drives in my case. So I unscrewed the HDD put it aside and when I put it back in, I turned it around. It was a Harddisk with jumpers on it. And I spent hours to find out why it wasn't working anymore. My father opened the case and made fun of me the rest of the day - all the jumpers lay on the bottom of the case and I had a rough time to reposition them the right way. But in the end the harddrive worked again - so no kill.

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Reply 123 of 222, by dionb

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486 CPUs and orientation in the socket... get it right or this happens:
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i486DX33 missing pin R14 (Vcc) and a FIC 486-GIO-VT2 with a pin melted into socket at location B4 (Vss). Yep, I can see why that shorted.

Turns out I shouldn't have even bothered testing with this board in the first place, after looking for secondary damage I spotted this:
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Hypothetically fixable, but I'm not even going to try - apart from whatever damage I added, there is residue of some sticky liquid over parts of the PCB, at least two other chips with marks looking like the magic smoke departed long ago and some very dodgy-looking tantalum caps. The fact I didn't see any of this while populating all the missing jumpers (previous owner had already stripped it all) and then inserted CPU wrong way round makes it pretty clear I'm in no fit state to be messing with vintage hardware today 😮

Reply 124 of 222, by assasincz

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Today I killed my MSI K3T Ultra2 mainboard intended for my Athlon XP build. Either by letting the boot sequence proceed without GPU in place after which it stopped posting, or by CMOS clear while system ran, or both. Oh well, lessons learmed

Reply 125 of 222, by Vincebus

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i once killed a really good 8088 PC long ago... an acer 500+ oem mobo XT clone, it happened 4-5 years ago and i was a total noob on electronics and old hardware at the time, the computer already had a dead non-standard PSU and i poked the wrong places eventually killing the integrated 8-BIT IDE controller, i gave up too fast and i salvaged it for parts...it was a pity because it was in pretty good shape, and had its own XT mechanical keyboard... i still cry for it to this day. 😢 😢 😢

I also killed my uncle's old celeron 266... i don't remember clearly but i'm pretty sure it was about wrong jumper settings and the thing started smoking 🤣

lo-fi fingers...

Reply 126 of 222, by bjwil1991

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The Toshiba CD drive for my Satellite Pro 410CDT has never worked and when I was attempting to reflow the solder on the ribbon cable that's on the laser assembly and I think I broke traces. I might attempt to repair it again or source a CD drive somewhere. I have an external, but, it's too loud and requires a special driver to be installed for DOS and Windows 95.

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Reply 127 of 222, by Miphee

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I just dropped a box of socket 3 & 7 CPUs because I'm a clumsy idiot.
None of them had protective packaging and two of them even had the heatsink stuck on top.
All 18 had bent legs and it took me 2 hours to fix and test them all, luckily all working OK.
Learn from my mistakes, use a &10/50pcs CPU tray and yeah, don't be clumsy. And don't store the CPUs on the top shelf like I did.
I fckin hate myself now.

Reply 129 of 222, by computerguy08

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Miphee wrote on 2020-05-02, 08:09:
I just dropped a box of socket 3 & 7 CPUs because I'm a clumsy idiot. None of them had protective packaging and two of them even […]
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I just dropped a box of socket 3 & 7 CPUs because I'm a clumsy idiot.
None of them had protective packaging and two of them even had the heatsink stuck on top.
All 18 had bent legs and it took me 2 hours to fix and test them all, luckily all working OK.
Learn from my mistakes, use a &10/50pcs CPU tray and yeah, don't be clumsy. And don't store the CPUs on the top shelf like I did.
I fckin hate myself now.

Imagine dropping the entire CPU box on the floor (yeah, I did it a while ago), including Pentium 4s and Athlon 64s with their tiny legs and heavy heat spreaders.

Spent the rest of that day fixing about 50ish CPUs, one had a leg ripped off, but all of them survived.

Since then, I keep all of them in trays. Lesson learned.

Reply 130 of 222, by appiah4

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dionb wrote on 2019-10-20, 14:06:
486 CPUs and orientation in the socket... get it right or this happens: https://tweakers.net/ext/f/ZVUDh2VrgSgkqI12PXDrzDBp/full […]
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486 CPUs and orientation in the socket... get it right or this happens:
full.jpg

I have a board with this exact issue; I wonder if I can just replace the socket and it would work? Or does this mean traces/components on that pin's rail already got wrecked?

assasincz wrote on 2019-11-16, 21:34:

Today I killed my MSI K3T Ultra2 mainboard intended for my Athlon XP build. Either by letting the boot sequence proceed without GPU in place after which it stopped posting, or by CMOS clear while system ran, or both. Oh well, lessons learmed

Oh wait, is this a thing? I have an exact same of that board, I recapped it and proceeded to test it for POST without an AGP card in it and it no longer turns on at all...

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Reply 131 of 222, by creepingnet

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My series of casualties...

- Killed my Tandy 1000 SX by having to repeatedly reseat the Programmable Interrupt Timer (PIT, 8253), because from the factory Tandy got one pin bent and the air-gap that developed from aging made it unreliable. I then reseated the chip so much the pin broke off after I resolderd it on twice, so I used a jumper wire, then the wire broke off, leaving me with no choice but to scrap....it was my first computer.

- 1988 Dell 325SX Died because I failed to see the battery rot on the motherboard, the battery acid had leaked and it ate up ALL of the traces for the keyboard controller by setting them alight when it turned it on the first time.

- Killed at least 2 US Robotics 56K V90/V92 Faxmodems by leaving them plugged in during a thunderstorm. I remember being pissed because the third modem I bought was basically a USB Winmodem that only worked on Windows, and I had to use a proxy server for all my vintage and linux machines on Dialup until I moved and got broadband.

- I have a history of laptops getting destroyed by cats knocking them off my lap. Twinhead Slimnote 486C, Zenith SuperSport 286, AT&T Safari 3151. Not sure why those were so delicate when I now have 4 NEC Versa with cases that are made out of gray dried cookie dough that seem to be able to handle being treated like a modern laptop owned by an international executive.

- Cats got one desktop as well - ironically it was a CAT Computers 486 with a ASUS GX4 motherboard in it, that was the computer that came before my current 486 DX4-100 desktop system that I have now.

- Fried a memory module in the GEM 386 DX-20 Pentium III box by dropping a bolt from the AT-to-ATX modded case on the RAM by accident while trying to re-align some parts. $75 down the drain, had to go buy another one at Best Buy the next day for the same price, they looked at me funny.

- Destroyed a Northgate OmniKey 102 by having to resolder the spacebar keyswitch so many times. The solder pads had fallen right off, and it was starting to get electronically cantankerous by that point, not working half the time, so I scrapped it.

- I've been through three MicroSpeed PC-TRAC tracballs, my favorites, but unfortunatley they seem to reach a point where the mouse driver no longer detects them properly due to a severed wire inside the cable.

- Killed an Am486 DX4-100 CPU due to some faulty jumper settings I Found online for the 486-PVT motherboard. It worked at first, and my god did it work, it must have been running at 4x clock or something because it was faster than any 486 I'd ever used - I mean it went RIPPING into Windows For Workgroups 3.11 like it was booting bare DOS Without a Config.sys or Autoexec.bat - just rows of boot text running down the screen so fast I thought Morpheus himself was going to pop out of my closet! It then made it into Program Manager where I Started to load programs, and then it Hung and would no longer post. If only I could find adequate enough cooling for that - I would run it like that......holy crap. Were talking a 486 here that probably was punching in the Pentium 120 class at least. I don't know how the heck the VLB Bus was keeping up so well but it was - no problem.

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Reply 132 of 222, by assasincz

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appiah4 wrote on 2021-05-06, 11:57:
assasincz wrote on 2019-11-16, 21:34:

Today I killed my MSI K3T Ultra2 mainboard intended for my Athlon XP build. Either by letting the boot sequence proceed without GPU in place after which it stopped posting, or by CMOS clear while system ran, or both. Oh well, lessons learmed

Oh wait, is this a thing? I have an exact same of that board, I recapped it and proceeded to test it for POST without an AGP card in it and it no longer turns on at all...

Apparently it is a thing, wow...

Reply 133 of 222, by bjwil1991

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Killed a floppy drive for my NEC Versa M/75 when I was lubricating the head shaft with machine oil (it was stuck) and thankfully the spare I got a while ago works after I fixed that drive.

Hope the drive I broke starts to work again and if not, then it'll be used for parts.

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Reply 134 of 222, by LewisRaz

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I slipped while fitting the socket 370 heatsink and destroyed a tiny IC next to the socket.

Pretty cool board too... Slot 1 and socket 370.

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Reply 135 of 222, by PcBytes

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That looks like a resistor array. Not unfixable but I think you'd need a very fine tip soldering iron. (IIRC T12 tips are usually the finest?)

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Reply 136 of 222, by LewisRaz

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PcBytes wrote on 2021-05-07, 07:46:

That looks like a resistor array. Not unfixable but I think you'd need a very fine tip soldering iron. (IIRC T12 tips are usually the finest?)

The entire resistor pack is smaller than the tip of my iron!

I am sending it to someone and if he can fix it its his to keep! Well out of my skill range to repair and I was fortunate enough to find a decent replacement at a good price.

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Reply 137 of 222, by enaiel

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I killed my Compaq Deskpro EXD P866 S370 motherboard when I tried to replace the Pentium III 866 MHz CPU with my new VIA C3-1.0AGHz CPU. I forgot to check for bent CPU pins, and it seems one of them ended up shorting. I could smell burning plastic when I turned it on, and when I took out the CPU, the S370 socket plastic had melted in one corner. I had already bought a new motherboard because this one did not have an ISA slot, so I was not too heartbroken, but I had planned to keep this one as a backup. Thankfully the CPU was fine, and after straightening the bent pins, it worked fine in the new board. I still have the old board as I'm planning to use it for bad cap removal practice...

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Reply 138 of 222, by shamino

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Fried the mouse port on a motherboard and an attached mouse when I plugged the bracket in backwards. I knew something was wrong when I reached for the mouse and it was hot...

When hotflashing a Flash ROM, I burned a chip by putting it in backwards. It was immediately obvious when it burned my finger. Motherboard survived though.

Many years ago (before they were expensive) I bought an early style model-M. Disassembled and cleaned it. Then I put the keyboard assembly precariously on a lamp so that the heat of the light bulb would help it dry. You can guess what happened next. I knocked it over and broke the ESC key. It only works if I stuff some foam down into the switch to hold the spring a certain way.
A few months after that I found a later style model-M (the "Lexmark" version with the drainage channels) at a thrift store. Disassembled it to clean. I put the plastic pieces in a dishwasher. Warped the upper bezel.
Nowadays both of my model-Ms have dead keys. I have to guess the membranes never fully dried and have corroded.
I'm a model-M killer. But after using my bezel-less example for 1-2 years, I decided I really don't like them anyway.

Had an accident with an i875P motherboard where a power supply fell on top of the graphics card. The AGP slot got severely bent. I carefully bent it back and it still works.. so I guess I didn't kill it.

I've broken three socket-370 and one socket-7 retaining hook. I think I'm now cautious enough that it *probably* won't happen again, but I'm still afraid of those sockets.
Never had a problem with socket-A though. I think the difference is that socket-7/370 clips typically aren't designed to hold a screwdriver so you have to install them by hand, which is clumsy-prone.

Bought a Voodoo2 in a bulk/junk lot with no guarantees. It might have been a good card but I failed to notice that some of the pins on one of the major chips had been mangled and were touching each other. I powered it up and tried to figure out why it wasn't acting right. Took me forever to notice the problem with the pins. Maybe it will still work if I straighten them but I might have ruined it.
Those pins are vulnerable, lots of posts about them getting bent on this forum. *Always* inspect Voodoo2 cards before plugging them in.

Reply 139 of 222, by appiah4

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LewisRaz wrote on 2021-05-07, 07:58:
PcBytes wrote on 2021-05-07, 07:46:

That looks like a resistor array. Not unfixable but I think you'd need a very fine tip soldering iron. (IIRC T12 tips are usually the finest?)

The entire resistor pack is smaller than the tip of my iron!

I am sending it to someone and if he can fix it its his to keep! Well out of my skill range to repair and I was fortunate enough to find a decent replacement at a good price.

It's easier to fix than you think, the pads look fine. Just use a lot of solder paste and very little solder. I would repair it for you but I live in the ass end of nowhere.

Retronautics: A digital gallery of my retro computers, hardware and projects.