luckybob wrote:

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

Thanks, I just spent 20 minutes reading about that and looking at the online copy. Fascinating!

Scribbled benchmark results and computer specs would definitely be pretty unidentifiable 600 years from now. Hard to even imagine what will happen to all of this data we're typing now. If this all ends up being archived, its strange to think that someone could find a several-century-old piece of computer equipment somewhere, do the 27th century equivalent of a Google search for the markings on it and read about our struggles to make it play obscure old PC games.

A few more icons, two at the request of St1ka (Dune and Kyndaria 2).

Ozzuneoj wrote:

luckybob wrote:

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

Thanks, I just spent 20 minutes reading about that and looking at the online copy. Fascinating!

Scribbled benchmark results and computer specs would definitely be pretty unidentifiable 600 years from now. Hard to even imagine what will happen to all of this data we're typing now. If this all ends up being archived, its strange to think that someone could find a several-century-old piece of computer equipment somewhere, do the 27th century equivalent of a Google search for the markings on it and read about our struggles to make it play obscure old PC games.

Preservation of data will only get better from now on, and considering we have an archive of almost everything that was ever online even today I would think 600 years from now would be.. an amazin future to live in..

..if we don't destroy the Earth or ourselves by then, of course.

Thermalwrong wrote:

Wow, that looks like an interesting lot of well kept and varied computer hardware - I like the shelf with the current model opti […]
Show full quote

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.

As a last chance you can desolder the BIOS, replace with socket and insert a Supersoft. The scrathces doesnt look like they have damaged a trace? Also check if some bend pins on the bottom side are touching each other?

When washing a board with water you should not wait until the water is evaporated but support with a hairdryer? Without, you have to wait (very) long and the water will cause damage, too.

My opinion: I have given up repairing traces on the upper side but solder wires to the bottom side. Fixing the upper side doesnt look good. You will not see the wires when the board is installed and can undo your repair without problems.

When I wash a motherboard with soap and water, it goes into the oven for a few hours at 70-80C. I used an external k-type thermal probe to check the real temperature, not the oven dial.

Getting it to 70-80C isn't hot enough to melt solder or damage plastic parts, but any left over water is quickly dried out very effectively

One thing I definitely don't recommend washing are power supplies. The transformers in them are much more difficult to dry and you can easily end up with nasty fireworks.

canthearu wrote:

When I wash a motherboard with soap and water, it goes into the oven for a few hours at 70-80C. I used an external k-type thermal probe to check the real temperature, not the oven dial.

Getting it to 70-80C isn't hot enough to melt solder or damage plastic parts, but any left over water is quickly dried out very effectively

One thing I definitely don't recommend washing are power supplies. The transformers in them are much more difficult to dry and you can easily end up with nasty fireworks.

Yes, also good procedure. I think its the same temperature you get with a hairdryer. But I dont want to distribute all the metal and plastic vapors in the same oven I use for preparing my food afterwards 🤣 And hairdryer is much faster as you can blow out the water. Not that long expsoure to the heat.

I suppose I did forget to say that I gave the 386 board a good drying off after its rinse, with a hairdryer 😀
And I'm careful to test for shorts before I apply power to anything, and clean up flux after soldering because some Youtube people doing electronics have shown me that it can cause real problems if not cleaned off.

I'll have to find out more about what a Supersoft is, is that a diagnostic BIOS? I do need to get a socket for the BIOS chip and I'd like to see if it still has its BIOS in there. Time to get an eeprom reader of some sort.

On the Asus board, the scratches did go through quite a few traces unfortunately - I tested each of the connections before and after for continuity and they had no connection prior to being resoldered. The main problem causing scratches were around the cache chips, the other scratches are mostly damage to the VLB slot's traces, but the cache had deep scratches on the top and bottom of the board (2 bad traces topside, maybe 20 bad traces underneath).

Got this bad boy up and running with a fresh Windows 98SE installation. Now I just need to get Voodoo drivers and stuff in which will take a while until I can get them onto a cd or such.

get an IDE to USB adapter... saves a ton of time

Thermalwrong wrote:

I suppose I did forget to say that I gave the 386 board a good drying off after its rinse, with a hairdryer :) And I'm careful t […]
Show full quote

I suppose I did forget to say that I gave the 386 board a good drying off after its rinse, with a hairdryer 😀
And I'm careful to test for shorts before I apply power to anything, and clean up flux after soldering because some Youtube people doing electronics have shown me that it can cause real problems if not cleaned off.

I'll have to find out more about what a Supersoft is, is that a diagnostic BIOS? I do need to get a socket for the BIOS chip and I'd like to see if it still has its BIOS in there. Time to get an eeprom reader of some sort.

On the Asus board, the scratches did go through quite a few traces unfortunately - I tested each of the connections before and after for continuity and they had no connection prior to being resoldered. The main problem causing scratches were around the cache chips, the other scratches are mostly damage to the VLB slot's traces, but the cache had deep scratches on the top and bottom of the board (2 bad traces topside, maybe 20 bad traces underneath).

Perfect 😉

Supersoft:
http://www.minuszerodegrees.net/supersoft_lan … dmark%20ROM.htm

Really useful. Had many boards that were dead with the installed bios (also nothing on POST card) but with Supersoft showed the error.

Get a TL866 from China 😉

oeuvre wrote:

get an IDE to USB adapter... saves a ton of time

Thanks for the tip, I'll look into those!

Predator99 wrote:

Yes, also good procedure. I think its the same temperature you get with a hairdryer. But I dont want to distribute all the metal and plastic vapors in the same oven I use for preparing my food afterwards 🤣 And hairdryer is much faster as you can blow out the water. Not that long expsoure to the heat.

Problem with hair dryer is that it is difficult to sit there for 2 hours keeping the board hot to really get to water out of all the places airflow won't reach (under chips and other components), inside slots and plugs.

Picking thru a relatives massive collection of crap software disks (think they might offer me the whole lot for a few beers), so for no particular reason I'll share these

the Compaq ones are still factory shrink-wrapped 😲

PGA Golf Tour? Was more of a Fuji Golf guy. Regardless, nice!

Fixed a PS1 model SCPH-5552.

Took me about 2 hours. Had to install a new BIOS chip and CD drive.

So I got around to testing this early model 1993 Matrox PCI graphics card I picked up. It works just fine, but man is it slow. It benches slower than some of my ISA video cards.

fill 'er up those empty slots!

PCI was created in 1992 so that is a very early PCI card.

Errius wrote:

PCI was created in 1992 so that is a very early PCI card.

hence why I said "early model", but still was surprising how slow she was

Check the bios for an option called umcw or something like that. I don't remember the exact 4 letters but it started with 'u'.

It graded my slow Matrox 250 100% better scores on my Pentium pro