I recently tried my first Slot1 build with a dead Abit AB-BH6. That board came to live again after a recap but it produced so many errors and crashes that I gave up. Now I have another try - this time with a BioStar Board. After a full clean and new battery it works flawlesly. In houses a Celeron 300 which I intent to replace with a PII 400 and a simple CD drive which will be replaced with a SCSI PlextWriter. I have a feling this is going to be an awesome time machine (Late DOS to early Win9x ca 1996 - 1998). This machine probably deserves a Voodoo 2 card - but alas - I dont have one.

Spent the last couple of weeks going through my AGP GPU collection and have managed to isolate 6 dead ones that wont be returning to service. One was a nice HIS 2600XT which promptly let out the angry pixie dust when supplied with power, just glad it didn't take anything else with it. Physically doesn't look at have anything wrong with it aside from burnt traces next to the molex socket and a ferrite choke type part that is totally toast. Im not even going to attempt any repairs on these dead cards, they have already had long lives and now get to rest and they are also pretty easy to replace being rather common variants.

Another was a 7300 GT AGP which hard reset the PC when I fired it up and promptly stank the room out, cant see any burst caps on it but the GPU core looks like its burnt I'm assuming the core got a few to many angry pixies trying to book a room and failed with style.

I did salvage the coolers from them and was going to spares the boards but I really want to get away from having to do repairs so these boards will go into the local e-waste bin.

Trashbytes wrote on Today, 07:07:

but I really want to get away from having to do repairs

you just cant in this hobby especially with old hardware, something always gonna break

Today I socketed and fitted a new 464 RAM chip to an Amstrad GX4000 games console that I got about a week or so ago "untested" from eBay. The original RAM chip (a Sanyo LM33464G-12) was getting too hot to touch after only seconds of applying power to the console, so I knew it was definitely dead. I replaced it with a TMS4464-12NL. I didn't remove the other Sanyo RAM chip, as it wasn't getting hot.

This console also has a broken Player 1 controller port, with missing pins for all of the fire buttons, so I had no idea what other damage it might have, nor did I know if the other RAM chip was faulty. But I connected the console back up, put in the Burnin' Rubber cartridge and powered it on. Immediately it sprang to life playing the game music, but there was absolutely no video from the Scart output. I tested via the RGB DIN output and it was indeed outputting video fine, so this console apparently also has a dead Sony CXA1145P RGB encoder chip too.

I'm not too bothered about the broken RGB encoder for now, as I can use the DIN & I don't need the RF output, so I won't bother replacing that just yet. But tomorrow I'm going to attempt a simple bodge repair for the controller port, with jumper wires & a 9-pin extension cable.