Unless you need it specifically, (you would know about it, if you need it) leave those regions disabled. 😉

Spent bits and pieces of the weekend recording retro-console Youtubes. Finally got the NEC Versa P/75 and Docking Station videos up. Also started writing out what I"m going to do to go over the entire product line as a last piece. I'm wanting to buy several more examples for this video so we can see the PC-4xx models in action and see the pros, cons, mods, plastic fixes (all that other stuff will be separate videos though).

Tested the self-soldered ISA slot in my Asus CUBX I worked on here and it works perfectly. (OPL3-SAX is the ISA sound card)

I just repaired (again) a Frankenstein laptop that was bad when it was new and still is today.
The issue was that the network card would only connect if manually set to 10Mbps. Auto and 100Mbps wouldn't negotiate a link. In the past I tried replacing the jack (MagJack) hoping it was just a dodgy transformer but it made no change. I then ordered a replacement crab from China and today it finally arrived.

Looks the same to me

Replaced

Did it work?

For those interested, here follows the story of this piece of shite impressive artifact of computing history.

Very impressive and a really nice story. Congratulations ! 😀

I wish I had those skills. I have a Packard Bell Chroma laptop for which new batteries (or even old batteries) are impossible to find. It runs fine and I don't intend to use it outside or something, but I'm curious how it performed back in the day.
Guess I'll never know.

xcomcmdr wrote on 2021-01-04, 22:18:

Very impressive and a really nice story. Congratulations ! 😀

I wish I had those skills. I have a Packard Bell Chroma laptop for which new batteries (or even old batteries) are impossible to find. It runs fine and I don't intend to use it outside or something, but I'm curious how it performed back in the day.
Guess I'll never know.

Thanks 😀
What about recelling the current battery?

Came to the conclusion that I just cannot be bothered with Socket A anymore. Researching Socket 754 as a replacement.

Yeah, I'm fond of it, I was using one when I first joined this forum in fact! It's just too much hassle for me now though.

Duouk2000 wrote on 2021-01-04, 23:45:

Came to the conclusion that I just cannot be bothered with Socket A anymore. Researching Socket 754 as a replacement.

Yeah, I'm fond of it, I was using one when I first joined this forum in fact! It's just too much hassle for me now though.

What is the hassle? With support for 3.3v AGP on some boards, DDR400, and very fast CPUs, I would think it remains the prime socket for late-Win98 builds.

kolderman wrote on 2021-01-05, 00:14:

Duouk2000 wrote on 2021-01-04, 23:45:

Came to the conclusion that I just cannot be bothered with Socket A anymore. Researching Socket 754 as a replacement.

Yeah, I'm fond of it, I was using one when I first joined this forum in fact! It's just too much hassle for me now though.

What is the hassle? With support for 3.3v AGP on some boards, DDR400, and very fast CPUs, I would think it remains the prime socket for late-Win98 builds.

PSU needs replacing as do the mobo caps.

jheronimus wrote on 2021-01-04, 04:29:

I've been messing around with my newly restored Supermicro P54VL-PCI board: […]
Show full quote

I've been messing around with my newly restored Supermicro P54VL-PCI board:

Still doing some repairs on my board. I got a lot of corrosion off of the board, but there's a bit still that needs to be addressed, but it's getting close.

I also have a capacitor that needs to be replaced sometime as it's not in the best shape and the 13MHz crystal broke off and the 14.318MHz isn't too far behind. My board's design is a bit different (has 3 quartz crystals vs 2) than your board.

Installed the HardMPU card in my 386 machine along with the 386 DX-33 CPU, 387-33 FPU, and 66MHz clock crystal, but I haven't tested the HardMPU card yet since I have to plug in the newly acquired MIDI Y cable so I can have both my 386 and 486 machines share the same MIDI synthesizers (MT-32, DB50XG, and FB-01).

Also found a burnt trace on the newly acquired EISA SCSI card (DPT 2022) and no bad caps since they are all SMD tantalums and patched that by soldering a 30AWG wire from one end to the other to fix it.

Going to dig deeper by inserting the card and see if it springs to life and do some inspections on the card to make sure other traces weren't affected.

Just set up the memory card for my Atari 2600 UNO cartridge, but I have yet to actually test it in one of my systems. Also received a BASIC cart for my XE GS, so I can determine if the onboard BASIC is borked. The system halts if you press RETURN while in the BASIC environment, but the RETURN key works fine in the keyboard test, or at any other point in its operation.
As far as traditional PCs go, I just glanced at my 486, but I'm still too worn out to bother rearranging the cards, or restoring it from a backup and chucking the drive controller card I bought to try to get a CDROM drive working in it. It apparently eats up too many resources and disables most of my other ISA cards in the slot where it won't flex due to having a cable jutting out of it at a right angle. May have to buy a right angle connector for the card. Clearly, too much effort to deal with.

andrea wrote on 2021-01-04, 22:35:

What about recelling the current battery?

What's that ?
Intriguing !
Does it involve opening it ?

Anybody ever seen laptop LCD damage like this? There are a bunch of these spots with the same snowflake pattern, almost identical. The spots look brown against a white background. This laptop has been sitting on a shelf for 2-3 months, was fine last I checked. The only thing ontop was a 12 inch IBM Thinkpad and I know for a fact I stored more weight on this laptop for longer previously so I doubt these are pressure spots. Whatever this is its in between the different screen layers. Its stored high enough out I can 100 percent rule out chemical damage unless its residual from the last time I had it out and cleaned the screen but I've used that screen cleaner on everything without issue so that doesn't make sense either.

I'm f****** PISSED right now. This was one of my favs, its an early Toshiba gaming laptop with a 1.1GHZ P3 Coppermine and a GF2 Go, and I will never f*cking find another display for this thing and I consider any amount of display damage to qualify a device as unusable, I demand 100 percent perfect displays.

This is not a good week, killed a Athlon XP and then the next day find out a gaming laptop I considered irreplacable has somehow acquired damage. Craps dying faster than I can replace it.

xcomcmdr wrote on 2021-01-05, 07:11:

What's that ? Intriguing ! Does it involve opening it ? […]
Show full quote

andrea wrote on 2021-01-04, 22:35:

What about recelling the current battery?

What's that ?
Intriguing !
Does it involve opening it ?

Yes, it's basically replacing the actual battery cells (99% of the time just regular 18650s) inside the battery pack.

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote on 2021-01-05, 08:37:

Anybody ever seen laptop LCD damage like this? There are a bunch of these spots with the same snowflake pattern, almost identica […]
Show full quote

Anybody ever seen laptop LCD damage like this? There are a bunch of these spots with the same snowflake pattern, almost identical. The spots look brown against a white background. This laptop has been sitting on a shelf for 2-3 months, was fine last I checked. The only thing ontop was a 12 inch IBM Thinkpad and I know for a fact I stored more weight on this laptop for longer previously so I doubt these are pressure spots. Whatever this is its in between the different screen layers. Its stored high enough out I can 100 percent rule out chemical damage unless its residual from the last time I had it out and cleaned the screen but I've used that screen cleaner on everything without issue so that doesn't make sense either.

I'm f****** PISSED right now. This was one of my favs, its an early Toshiba gaming laptop with a 1.1GHZ P3 Coppermine and a GF2 Go, and I will never f*cking find another display for this thing and I consider any amount of display damage to qualify a device as unusable, I demand 100 percent perfect displays.

This is not a good week, killed a Athlon XP and then the next day find out a gaming laptop I considered irreplacable has somehow acquired damage. Craps dying faster than I can replace it.

While a replacement lcd for a Toshiba model xyz would be pretty hard to find, try opening up the screen assembly and see what model the actual panel is, it'll probably be heaps easier to find a matching or compatible replacement this way.

i feel you man, i was doing some cleaning in my appartment and look what happend to my Thinkpad 760ED after 1 year in storage:

it smells like some type of glue and now its shorted (no power/no lights)

the other laptops are fine, i dont know what was the problem

Got the TNDLPT to work on my 386 DX-33 machine since dummy me forgot to put the TNDLPT TSR files on the hard drive and the HardMPU connected to my MT-32, FB-01, and DB50XG after connecting the MIDI Y splitter to the MIDI in for the MT-32, which is the main unit and the FB-01 along with the DB50XG are daisy chained to the MT-32 (MT-32 MIDI in Y splitter and 2 computers, MIDI thru to the FB-01's MIDI in, MIDI thru from the FB-01 to the DB50XG CHiLL MIDI in).

Next on my list is to get another RCA Y adapter so I can connect the two PCs sound cards to the same AV port on the speakers I have installed and smoke test the EISA SCSI card.

Fixed the CD-ROM Drivers for the Dock since hte stock NEC drive is back in. Had to switch to NEC_IDE.SYS. What's hilarious is that 30 year old NEC 2x CD-ROM is working better than the 15 year old IDE DVD-RW that I was using in the dock before. That DVD-RW has trouble reading disks, carriage is slow, that whole mess. Might take longer when ripping ISOS for SHUCDX, but that's fine.

Found out a bunch of stuff on the 40EC;s Windows 3.11 drive is corrupt....thinking about taking the second 80GB drive and putting that in the 40EC and putting FreeDOS back on it. As much as I like Windows For Workgroups 3.11, it's getting increasingly more annoying to use year after year as things about internet access keep getting changed. Also, on these old laptops, I'm getting 2 Hours+ Battery life in FreeDOS with no APM and that's bloody impressive for NiMH batteries on almost 30 year old Laptops.

Also did a bunch of backing up and organizing of retro-related files on my LInux box. Lately, all I've been using for my modern O/S is a mixture of Linux and Mac OS with a little bit of Windows 10 here and there. I'm getting more and more into using FreeDOS and Linux as a daily driver. I've got the entire NEC FTP on there, tons of drivers, tons of games and iSO files for old DOS stuff like the 7th Guest and Under a Killing Moon. I had such a mess on there. I do all my backups to WD 1TB Externals.

Similar experience here : sometimes, 15 years old IDE DVD-RW drives read 20/25 years old CDs just fine, while a 5 years old DVD-RW SATA drive read it so slowly it's virtually unusable.

Also other times, Windows 9X will accept to read some glitched ISO filesystem on a CD-ROM (tipically a weird PC/MAC hybrid game), while Windows 10 says that there is nothing here (drive not ready).

Don't know what's that about.

I reorganized my spare parts. As an advantage, I have less clutter in my storage. As a disadvantage, I have much less clutter in my storage.

Today I repaired Soyo SY-5EAS motherboard. Voltage level on Vcore was very low, 0.7-1.1V after MOSFET.
Found broken shorted MOSFET by measuring voltage drop of gate resistor. Because MOSFET gate impedance is very high, there should be very low voltage drop. This one had several volts due to gate(1) pin was shoted to drain(2).

After MOSFET replaced this motherboard posts fine. Wonderful feeling...