GigAHerZ wrote on 2026-01-11, 15:06:

Found these products with the help of AI - i asked for ingredients, searched what is locally available, and then described the i […]
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GigAHerZ wrote on 2026-01-10, 15:02:

...
I now need to go to find some things to weld back all other plastic clips that have broken off - the back case has nothing to hold on to. Thankfully i have all the broken pieces. Found some local products with the help of AI to actually weld and recreate ABS plastic. I hope i don't have to just glue the backside onto the monitor somehow...
...

Found these products with the help of AI - i asked for ingredients, searched what is locally available, and then described the ingredients of the products to the AI to confirm if these are the right tools for the job.

Just applied these products on some plastic pieces.
The yellow product is like water, but it makes the Compaq's plastic a bit smeary-pastey on the surface it was applied after 10-15 seconds. (I used cotton swab) Applied it to the both sides of the break.
Then i took the red bottle. This is thicker, like some rubber-glue. Applied a thin coat on one piece on the broken surface.
Then pushed the pieces together and as AI predicted, I could even see some plastic slightly bulging out as it was soft. (I hope I still am in the margin of error for the measurements 😀 )
Now i have to wait at least 24h before I could apply a second coat of the red one to build a bit more material on the pieces.
But so far it's promising - I've never had myself any chemistry that could "melt" the original plastics. I hope it works.

It would be amazing, if at last, i have some sort of procedure and approach to repairing plastics once and for all. I already have 2-part epoxy to create "hard rock, concrete" in places where i have room and don't need any flexibility. (Think of laptop's display hinge screw posts) I really-really hope i have found "the way" now for slightly flexible plastics.

In summary:
Yellow Arrow 901 - Used only initially to soften the original plastics.
Red Arrow 1108 - Used initially as well as later to build additional material. After the first steps, some tiny cracks may appear in plastic - these can also be filled with this 1108 after 24+h.

The original usage for those products is to "glue" together PVC piping for hot and cold water.

Well I hope the melting part did the trick because thanks to AI you're probably trying to rebuild ABS plastic with PVC with the other one, which might just flake off.

If you want to do it with ABS, normally you'd want to use acetone and methyl ethyl ketone, and make a filler with a grated lego brick or scrap drive covers, or odds and ends of ABS 3D printer filament grated up in MEK and left to melt and stirred up a lot. But this is also a significant fire hazard and risk of intoxication without good ventilation.

However, I didn't mention this before as you probably have brittle plastic from age and high stress and bend parts like clips will probably just break again, if not where you welded it, then somewhere near. So I thought you needed a better solution, or needed to brace with metal somewhere.

BitWrangler wrote on 2026-01-11, 15:42:

Well I hope the melting part did the trick because thanks to AI you're probably trying to rebuild ABS plastic with PVC with the […]
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GigAHerZ wrote on 2026-01-11, 15:06:

Found these products with the help of AI - i asked for ingredients, searched what is locally available, and then described the i […]
Show full quote

GigAHerZ wrote on 2026-01-10, 15:02:

...
I now need to go to find some things to weld back all other plastic clips that have broken off - the back case has nothing to hold on to. Thankfully i have all the broken pieces. Found some local products with the help of AI to actually weld and recreate ABS plastic. I hope i don't have to just glue the backside onto the monitor somehow...
...

Found these products with the help of AI - i asked for ingredients, searched what is locally available, and then described the ingredients of the products to the AI to confirm if these are the right tools for the job.

Just applied these products on some plastic pieces.
The yellow product is like water, but it makes the Compaq's plastic a bit smeary-pastey on the surface it was applied after 10-15 seconds. (I used cotton swab) Applied it to the both sides of the break.
Then i took the red bottle. This is thicker, like some rubber-glue. Applied a thin coat on one piece on the broken surface.
Then pushed the pieces together and as AI predicted, I could even see some plastic slightly bulging out as it was soft. (I hope I still am in the margin of error for the measurements 😀 )
Now i have to wait at least 24h before I could apply a second coat of the red one to build a bit more material on the pieces.
But so far it's promising - I've never had myself any chemistry that could "melt" the original plastics. I hope it works.

It would be amazing, if at last, i have some sort of procedure and approach to repairing plastics once and for all. I already have 2-part epoxy to create "hard rock, concrete" in places where i have room and don't need any flexibility. (Think of laptop's display hinge screw posts) I really-really hope i have found "the way" now for slightly flexible plastics.

In summary:
Yellow Arrow 901 - Used only initially to soften the original plastics.
Red Arrow 1108 - Used initially as well as later to build additional material. After the first steps, some tiny cracks may appear in plastic - these can also be filled with this 1108 after 24+h.

The original usage for those products is to "glue" together PVC piping for hot and cold water.

Well I hope the melting part did the trick because thanks to AI you're probably trying to rebuild ABS plastic with PVC with the other one, which might just flake off.

If you want to do it with ABS, normally you'd want to use acetone and methyl ethyl ketone, and make a filler with a grated lego brick or scrap drive covers, or odds and ends of ABS 3D printer filament grated up in MEK and left to melt and stirred up a lot. But this is also a significant fire hazard and risk of intoxication without good ventilation.

However, I didn't mention this before as you probably have brittle plastic from age and high stress and bend parts like clips will probably just break again, if not where you welded it, then somewhere near. So I thought you needed a better solution, or needed to brace with metal somewhere.

These products advertise themselves as suitable for PVC as well as ABS. The yellow one shouldn't even build anything, but just soften the existing ABS. (Which it seems to be very successful at)
The AI also suggested using lego brick shavings with these products if i would want to create more substantial amount of the material. But for amounts that are applied with the tip of toothpick, there is no need for that.
Adding some metal bars into the plastic or using some cotton threads along with the Arrow 1108 was also suggested by the AI. But for now, I was mostly interested in just some simple chemical solution that "welds" or "melts" stuff together. (I didn't want any glue-like solution)

Yep, old plastics is old plastics, unfortunately. I hope i can help it a little by making the clips stronger as a whole by adding additional layers on to them. We'll see. (I do currently like what I see, but it is very early yet... Let's see how it all goes back together in a few days)

Minutemanqvs wrote on 2026-01-11, 15:41:

I also have a similarly artifacting radeon 9600 XT and with the new diagnostic tool developed by necroware and the fact that a friend has invested in some BGA soldering gear, this one might well come out of the "for parts" box.

There is a tool called R3MEMID has been available for a long time. Can be used with a 9600XT with ease, schematics of the card are also available.

tehsiggi wrote on 2026-01-11, 17:59:

Minutemanqvs wrote on 2026-01-11, 15:41:

I also have a similarly artifacting radeon 9600 XT and with the new diagnostic tool developed by necroware and the fact that a friend has invested in some BGA soldering gear, this one might well come out of the "for parts" box.

There is a tool called R3MEMID has been available for a long time. Can be used with a 9600XT with ease, schematics of the card are also available.

Yes I have seen the thread on VGA Repair report collection but as I have other similar cards I never took the time to check it in detail. And soldering BGA was a no-go until recently.

I was debugging some code on my 286. It's funny how you can totally forget to load a segment register before accessing some variables and the code will still mostly work, with the occasional bizarre failure. The MS-DOS editor was starting to annoy me, as it only allows 80x25 or 80x50 and I'm not thrilled with either screen mode. I did a search online, just wondering if there was a secret way to get different screen modes, and there's wikipedia telling me that EDIT has a hex view mode. WTF, really!? No, it doesn't seem to be true. The wiki article is pretty bad overall. Maybe it's LLM slop.

My 286 has a WD90C00 VGA card, and modes 0x1C and 0x1D are larger text modes (looks like 132x25 and 132x50) but if I set one of these EDIT just switches back to 80 columns. It would be nice to see an editor with a hacked VGA text mode, perhaps 720x480 with the 8x14 EGA font, yielding 90 columns and 34 rows.

bakemono wrote on 2026-01-11, 21:10:

My 286 has a WD90C00 VGA card, and modes 0x1C and 0x1D are larger text modes (looks like 132x25 and 132x50) but if I set one of these EDIT just switches back to 80 columns. It would be nice to see an editor with a hacked VGA text mode, perhaps 720x480 with the 8x14 EGA font, yielding 90 columns and 34 rows.

My understanding is that EDIT uses the text mode the system is currently in when it starts. To get EDIT into a higher resolution do:

1MODE CON: COLS=80 LINES=43

Or

1MODE CON: COLS=80 LINES=50

To switch into either 43 or 50 lines. You need to have ANSI.SYS loaded on boot.

To switch back to normal text mode use:

1MODE CON: COLS=80 LINES=25

Began the task of replacing a faulty power switch on a Commodore 1084S-P monitor. The switch is out and I was hoping to use an AT power switch I had lying around, but looks like the prongs are too long.

Off to ordering one!

In the last few days, I've dedicated all my free time, on a 486 PCI motherboard, an SMT Terminator II (nothing to do with the Connors, maybe who knows with a Conner) 😀
I struggled a lot 😓 before I could make progress, I solved even if not completely a contact problem, between the PINs of the S.3 and the CPU, currently it manages to start even after a few hours that it was off, but there remained an instability problem, perhaps due to the non-optimal contacts, or something else, yes because I have L2 cache 0KB instead of 256 KB, and CR2032 battery charged, but RTC not working, the next restart it resets.
For those who want can see many other images, in my page on Vogons, on the Tests and repairs of the motherboards, if you like you can say yours, I gladly accept any comments or suggestions. Thanks a lot

Dug out my ABIT ST6-RAID that has a broken socket lug and a non-working CPU fan header (FAN1).

Apparently hooking up the cooler to the PWR header (FAN3) works just fine, but I'll look more into getting FAN1 to work again.

Otherwise, the board works absolutely great. Already dropped a 1133 P3-S Tualatin, and overclocked it to @166 FSB, running at 1.42GHz just well w/ 3D Prophet 4500 Kyro II.

More updates, so the ST6-RAID is capped to @ 183FSB. Nice still!

Also won a Gigabyte 6BX7+, the Socket 370 sibling to the BX2000+.

Worked on some cards.. that one 9700Pro with issues has also witnessed a slight thermal compound massacre in it's past.

Cloth + naphtha time.

Was the Silver Surfer applying it? Man...

PD2JK wrote on Yesterday, 21:27:

Cloth + naphtha time.

Was the Silver Surfer applying it? Man...

🤣 this is a good one!

I saw a lot of cpus, mainly s.462 Athlons, like that.
Like it was on discount and the right amount was "at own discretion".

Even my X800GTO (yes, that one whose Rialto got a heatsink. The heat coming out that bridge is nowhere near what I consider safe ranges of running without a heatsink.) and 9800Pro didn't look THAT messy.

Someone figured the temps must've been bad and decided to go "I paid for the whole speedometer" meme, but with an AS5 tube instead. 🤣

When I saw this I remembered that the 2000s where differently wild from today. I lifted the cooler and was like "ohh no.. arctic silver" - that thought alone showed me how long it has been since I've used that stuff myself.

I assume someone used AS on it, then later an attempt was made to remove it. Some of it spilled over the die due to cooler pressure and then it was surrounding it. First attempt was taking a cloth or something "to remove it" and thus it was just smeared all over the place.

I do not think it's related to the cards fault, however I can't stand GPUs messy like that. So I'll have to show it some love in the upcoming time. I also used that as an excuse for myself to buy a larger ultrasonic cleaner that can house all of my wife's glasses, my glasses and any jewelry we have at once 😉 Ohh and full graphics cards.

In 1998 I bought a K6 233.
It got so hot I used thermal paste between the cpu and the dissipator. Since I knew electronic, it was a rationnal choice for me. This kind of paste has been used for decades.
It wasn't enough, the K6 keep on getting so hot the PC had random reboot. It was summer and hot.
I went back to the store and asked to change it for a Pentim MMX.
They accepted, of course I had to pay the difference, but the guy asked me what was the remain of white paste he saw 😀
It seems almost nobody knew thermal paste yet ...
At least in the computers world.

Oof... yeah, that's probably not good.

In high school a friend gave me a PNY Geforce 2 MX200 PCI card he said was toast. When he gave it to me it had so much arctic silver squishing out around the edges of the HEATSINK (!) that it looked like it was melting. I asked him what the heck that was about and he said he tried to make it cooler by using arctic silver... apparently he thought that you used one tube per application, so he used the entire thing.

Funny thing, I cleaned it up really well and it worked fine after that. I still have it over 20 years later. I honestly never tried powering it on with the paste gushing out, so I don't know if it was shorted or if there was just so much paste that the card overheated quickly. In either case, it's hard to believe that it didn't suffer permanent damage.

nali wrote on Today, 06:37:

In 1998 I bought a K6 233. It got so hot I used thermal paste between the cpu and the dissipator. Since I knew electronic, it w […]
Show full quote

In 1998 I bought a K6 233.
It got so hot I used thermal paste between the cpu and the dissipator. Since I knew electronic, it was a rationnal choice for me. This kind of paste has been used for decades.
It wasn't enough, the K6 keep on getting so hot the PC had random reboot. It was summer and hot.
I went back to the store and asked to change it for a Pentim MMX.
They accepted, of course I had to pay the difference, but the guy asked me what was the remain of white paste he saw 😀
It seems almost nobody knew thermal paste yet ...
At least in the computers world.

That's weird. My 486 had thermal paste.

nali wrote on Today, 06:37:

... It seems almost nobody knew thermal paste yet ...
At least in the computers world.

That is really weird - I've been working in the computing industry for almost 50 years (since 1978) - lots of various types of hardware/processors - lots of PC hardware and *many* other types before and after the PC - I've seen/used LOTS of thermal paste over the years (since the beginning) ...

If you are using a computing shop that doesn't know what thermal paste is - might want to look for another shop!

DaveDDS wrote on Today, 08:31:

nali wrote on Today, 06:37:

... It seems almost nobody knew thermal paste yet ...
At least in the computers world.

That is really weird - I've been working in the computing industry for almost 50 years (since 1978) - lots of various types of hardware/processors - lots of PC hardware and *many* other types before and after the PC - I've seen/used LOTS of thermal paste over the years (since the beginning) ...

If you are using a computing shop that doesn't know what thermal paste is - might want to look for another shop!

My first PC was a Pentium 200 MMX and it was assembled for me without any thermal paste. I didn't know.

I replaced the CPU and cooler at the same time - I don't know what the cooler was but it had a pad built into it. I remember pressing my thumb nail into it and leaving a mark, then realising I wasn't supposed to have done that.

Only after that I read about overclocking and thermal paste. The magazine was not commenting on stock clocks, so it was implied that thermal paste was necessary for overclocking.

So I bought some thermal paste. I then disassembled and reassembled, with a surprise: That pad had behaved like a soft metal (maybe lead?) and when the CPU got hot the metal melted and stuck to the CPU. When it cooled solid and hard to detach. The thumb nail cut had melted out.

That strange cooler worked really well, mechanically and thermally - the paste never did match that. I spent years looking for coolers like it and never found one again.