First post, by athlon-power
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I want to first address this by saying that I am aware of just how bad I've managed to mess up, multiple times. I'm also aware of how iffy I've been with the forums, starting threads and never replying to them. I apologize both for what I've managed to destroy, and how I've been on here lately.
I destroyed a Packard Bell Pack-Mate 7130 in perfect condition, for one. I paid $100 for it. The secondary IDE channel had suddenly went out, and I was going through and checking and double-checking things such as BIOS settings, jumpers on the motherboard, etc. When I went to double-check the RAM, which I had found was very hard to remove due to the little metal clips on the EDO slots being a particular pain, I slipped while using a screwdriver to undo the clip and it went straight into one of the Intel PCIset chip pins. Bent three or four of them together. I have tried unsuccessfully to bend them back, meaning it had shorted pins permanently. It was a Pentium 120 with 16MB of RAM, a great little PC. Oh, well. The case is in nearly flawless condition, no yellowing, etc., and it ran great(ish), and I ended up killing it. I should have left well enough alone.
I bought a Dell Dimension XPS P100C for $5, however, the case is severely rusted at the bottom where the expansion slots are. It's got other issues as well, but there's really so much rust that I don't have the equipment to deal with it right now. The CPU is apparently glued to the heatsink, because it wouldn't remove from it, and when I tried to put a small screwdriver in between the CPU and the heatsink and twist it slowly, it chipped a corner off of the ceramic. The CPU still works, and it doesn't appear that anything but the ceramic itself was damaged, but this is now the second time I've done something stupid to hardware like this.
I don't even know what to do now. I have US$180 to figure out how to get at least one Pentium machine that runs at 133MHz or below running.
Option A is to try and get the motherboard in the Packard Bell replaced, as the CPU is fine, the PSU is fine, it's just the motherboard that's gone. The problem is that I can't find the exact motherboard for this model, all of them have less VRAM on the S3 chipset, and they don't have the TV-out and S-Video out ports on them. The motherboard has a generic model of E139761, a more detailed number on a small pink sticker (181410), and a third number on a yellow sticker, but searching that one yielded no results (PSOR62907956).
Option B was to try and get a new case/CPU for the Dell Dimension, but that's not likely to happen.
Option C is to build an entirely new system out of the parts from the Dell and PB, but I'm unsure as to how I would have enough money to even get an AT case from eBay, let alone a motherboard. If I wouldn't have been such a flaming idiot, I wouldn't even be in this situation, and would be humming along happily with the PB, but no, I'm not the brightest bulb in the box, and I have now destroyed a very good mid-era Pentium system. Great. I greatly appreciate any help you can give me, this has been a royal pain for me. Knock on wood, I'm now very, very, very thankful for the Pentium 200 Gateway I have to use in the meantime while all of this garbage goes on.
I am also very open to suggestions as to how I could possibly put that money towards a different kind of retro system, because being buried in Socket 7 and Socket 5 motherboards has started to slowly drive me insane (or more so, breaking various parts of systems that use those sockets).
Where am I?