nice pickup on the 286.

From my experience, test the PSU on another system before this one. If this system cuts out when you try to start it, check for shorts across the tantalum capacitors, as one or more may have shorted from years in storage. If you are (un)lucky, one may explode on you in a shower of sparks and smoke.

appiah4 wrote:

I sure wish these icons were available in the 90s.

That would be nice for a great many reasons.

canthearu wrote:

test the PSU on another system before this one

I would recommend testing it outside of a computer if possible, and load test it if you have some dead hard drives or something lying around.

I upgrade my Pentium pro 1M system to Pentium ii Overdrive today
Everything looks fine,not encounter any problem

Ponjiayulady wrote:

I upgrade my Pentium pro 1M system to Pentium ii Overdrive today
Everything looks fine,not encounter any problem
<snip>

Cool, I like those Pentium II Overdrive CPU's.

That Pentium Pro has a bit more thermal paste than needed.

appiah4 wrote:

Rub with brake fluid? (Never had paint this can't remove) Soak in rubbing alcohol? Spray on oven cleaner all over and let it soa […]
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Rub with brake fluid? (Never had paint this can't remove)
Soak in rubbing alcohol?
Spray on oven cleaner all over and let it soak for a night? (This stuff's fumes are toxic, but works very well)
Try an industrial paint remover like Citristrip? (This stuff is magical)
Sand it down and repaint?

OK, I bought a bottle of the cheapest oven cleaner (not that eco stuff...!) and let it soak for 2 hours. Nothing. Its really clean now, but nothing of that paint removed. Also did a quick test with Alcohol and Benzine - same result.
Not surprised, the surface is very smooth and it really sticks. As written, its also not possible to remove a small part even with a screwdriver.

Well, that sucks.

If you're willing to try physical methods, you can look into carefully sanding out the plastics and sandblasting the metal. Of course, you'll need good painting skills (either yourself or someone who can spray the metal for you). I haven't sanded a case with a full coating like that, but I've had good luck removing problematic marks this way. Make sure you're using a very high grit paper to finish.

Of course, I'd probably test on something I didn't care too much about before attempting on an Amiga case.

canthearu wrote:

From my experience, test the PSU on another system before this one. If this system cuts out when you try to start it, check for shorts across the tantalum capacitors, as one or more may have shorted from years in storage. If you are (un)lucky, one may explode on you in a shower of sparks and smoke.

Absolutely, and been there. Have a 386 with blown caps I need to replace (one of these days).

I have a couple of working AT PSUs as well. Will test this one in... a bit.

Removed two of the 1000uF 10v capacitors off of my Radeon 9600XT card last night. Planning on getting 16V or 25V 1000uF capacitors with a 10000 hr rating for 105C. Which ones would suit better?

Gallery: https://imgur.com/gallery/905DE2Y

Digikey Item numbers:
1) 493-1527-ND
2) 493-1558-ND

If the links don't work, reply back.

25 is overkill, it's probably only 5v in that cap.

Having "fun" with 486 motherboards and vinegar. Far too much leaked battery juice over three boards.

One is a complete write-off, not only damaged traces, but once the green fuzz was gone, it became clear a whole set of components (mainly diodes) had burnt out, with scorch-marks to match.
Another two are at least worth the effort to attempt to resurrect. One has a single big trace (gnd?) very heavily damaged, but nothing else I can see. Will measure resistance once the water used to clean the vinegar off has dried. A second seems to have widespread very light damage, but nothing actually eaten into anything. Tomorrow this one also gets a test drive. For now, I just curse the engineers who thought leaky barrel batteries were a good idea.

Talking of that kind of idea - I was nosing around Reichelt.de for some stuff and came across this:
https://www.reichelt.de/rtc-dip-24-ds-12887-a … l?&trstct=pos_2
- what looks like actual new stock Dallas/Maxim RTC. Given the not too astronomical price, I ordered one, along with a pile of other stuff - of course forgetting the one MOSFET I actually needed when I started looking there 😜 We'll see how it works.

16V is really the highest voltage you'll feasibly see on a vid card. However, if higher voltage withstand gives you the ESR/ripple spec you need, there's really no reason to avoid it beyond cost and size.

After some lost hours I discovered that having a slave CF adapter on the primary IDE port can cause issues. I was getting corrupted data, drives not being recognised (the master was an original IDE drive), and partitions not being recognised. And more confusing was that it was sporadic - I had Windows 98 installed before it happened the first time.

This was on a S7 machine with a 4GB Transcend CF card - using a slower, 256MB card seemed to fix the problem initially and then I read (in a post from our old friend Phil) that moving the adapter to the secondary port fixed the problem for him on a SS7 machine, and so it did.

I wish I had those hours back.

Reminds me of the time I had hdd issues caused by an undervolted socket 7 cpu.

Removed the barrel batteries off of 7 motherboards I received about a week ago.

Also did a preliminary cleaning of all of them so at least no more damage should occur.

Damage ranges from nothing except a little bit of corrosion on one battery hole to one board having 4-5 traces eaten through.

I think all of them will be salvageable though. Most just had some of the trace insulation eaten away with the traces looking pretty much good.

I'll have to mess with them again after the new year. Was just mainly concerned about getting the batteries off of the boards.

I used my really old vacuum de-soldering station to suck the solder out of the holes where the batteries were soldered in. First time I actually used it for anything and it worked great.

I did learn that the battery acid reacts with the solder and pretty makes it not melt anymore so that was interesting on a few of them where I just had to wiggle them loose after sucking what solder I could out of the holes. What was left was crumbly junk that used to be solder.

Made backups of a couple more laptop IDE HDDs in an image format for my HP Pavilion N3350 and working Dell Inspiron 600m laptop. Also took the liberty of firing up the old HP and it still runs (removed the domain login and changed the workgroup back to what it was) and my ThinkPad R40 laptop and it still works (somewhat as the HDD isn't working very well, but, I made a backup image a while back). My future plan for the laptops is an SSD option (mSATA-IDE 2.5 and CF-IDE 2.5) for faster speeds.

I wish there were a pyramid or mountaintop monastery being built around here, so I could hide a few of these in the walls and confuse the hell out of future archaeologists.

xjas wrote:

I wish there were a pyramid or mountaintop monastery being built around here, so I could hide a few of these in the walls and confuse the hell out of future archaeologists.

CameraZOOM-20181220134311240.jpg

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voynich_manuscript

Went to a recycle center (sort of) called Ribbon Recyclers in Williston, VT. They even ship! Almost all of it was computer related items. Some prices were near market and some are really great. Fun to explore.

Wow, that looks like an interesting lot of well kept and varied computer hardware - I like the shelf with the current model optiplex just across from a late 70's machine 😁

The last few days I've been performing repairs on a couple of motherboards I got - the 386DX MA013 board I washed under the tap the other day isn't posting, no CPU activity at all, which is a shame.

The other one though - a late revision Asus PVI-486SP3 with a *ton* of damaged traces, that one has been slightly more fortunate. It took quite a while to repair but it's very tidy considering that those traces are pretty small, I probably couldn't fix a modern motherboard this way though.

The keyboard controller was bashed in, sitting at a bad angle with a broken pin. That appears to work after bending it back and soldering a replacement pin, then fixing all the damaged traces leading to the keyboard controller.

While looking close up at the CPU socket, it looks like the hit to the underside of the board that caused those deep scratches also caused loose joints on a lot of the pins so I went over those too with fresh solder.

I thought it was broken initially because I got no video output with a post code of "4E" which with an AWARD bios means POST error and I assumed it wasn't working? So I went to bed instead.

Today I had another go with another monitor and got display, the POST error was 'no keyboard' / 'bad CMOS values' - but it's working, which is wonderful, though maybe a PCI slot is dead or something. I should probably let some of the other 486 boards go now with this swiss army knife of a 486 board 😀
I had been using my AST Bravo 486 / 586 with the same SiS chipset but it's become so annoying, a well supported and standard board like this one is very preferable.