Epic battles with Cisco 352 Aironet cards. That refuse to start. I've got to wonder if there was more than one model of those.

Spent most of the time with my minty M75 playing games and surfing the web. Discovered my other three Versa need more plastic repairs....40EC chassis cracked, V/50 still needs a hair more preemptive for the hinge, and P75 cracked through the battery cavity....will be easy though.

Swapped the Chips and Technologies 8D387-33 and the Intel i387 DX 16-33 FPUs around on my 386 build and moved my 386 to the center of the desk with my Packard Bell Pack-Mate 28 Plus to the right, the KVS switch box, and the monitor to the left on top of my MIDI boxes.

Also found out the Write-Back cache mode set to WB mode makes the 386 freeze up while WT mode is more reliable.

Oh. And I tested the newly acquired Jetway OPTI-495SX 3/486 board and it only POSTs with the original BIOS chip installed and the tin colored RAM chips and attempted to get the first one working without success yet.

The MR BIOS chip I made doesn't work for some reason (probably because of the EPROM speed being over the standard BIOS chip), especially the spare AMI BIOS chip I made.

Sat up this morning with the NEC Versa M/75 and noticed that the N.O.S. screen is finally coming into it's own, the yellow tint is going away. Now I'm wondering if there's a break-in period for LCD's, and if so, if I have some kind of goofey magic touch because that panel is as good as the P/75 and 40EC's panels (which are almost on par with a modern OLED panel in brightness and clairty).

More on the fight with WiFi cards....

So initially I bought two WiFi cards, a Lucent WaveLan Silver (Orinoco Silver), and a Cisco Aironet LMC-352. Decided to get 3 more LMC-352 for the other three Versa since I like that that card has support for every O/S I use on these old beasts, and I can close the PCMCIA door and use them.

Well, the new cards are either DOA, or I'm missing something here. The old card, it was pretty straightfoward......modify cscpkt.ini to suit my connectivity, then load cscpkt 0x60 and the card works like clockwork. But the new cards "Can't start packet driver" "Card won't start". Using the PCMCIA utility powers on the card, but it won't boot and immediatly shuts off if the -boot switch is used. radinfo.exe won't find any info from the card says "Card Won't Start". In WIndows 95, the cards are not recognized by PCMCIA manager, but oddly, I did find one thing.....they WILL work if I pull out the other LMC-352 that works (my old one) and slip the card into the same slot - then I get some connectivity, but it also causes the machine to randomly hang.......kind of a pain.

Worse comes to worse I can save the casings and use them for home-made PCMCIA cards....

So now thinking I might buy my cards one at a time, ones that look identical to my other one (says AIR-LMC-352, AMERICAS), and has the BIG WiFi Certified logo on it.Already got dibs on one with an external antenna.

Thanks for reminding me. I gotta fix the floppy drive in my M/75 since it doesn't read diskettes very well (probably needs a lot of cleaning).

And completed restoration of the T4400C. Just need to get those stickers to stay better.

And probably clean the floppy too. It likes to act flaky at times.

bjwil1991 wrote on 2021-04-06, 00:54:

Thanks for reminding me. I gotta fix the floppy drive in my M/75 since it doesn't read diskettes very well (probably needs a lot of cleaning).

That sounds like my 40EC, it gets cranky with floppies and likes a good "bap" once in awhile, probably needs the loading mechanism cleaned. My other three are fine.

That said, last night was a lot of time with these beasts. My P/75 is literally crumbling apart now - thankfully not anywhere I had repaired previously. So it's patched up in multiple spots on the bottom now. A few cracks forming on the bottom of the 40EC, ugly fix but that one is the beater anyway. The V/50 got it's pre-emptive baking-soda/superglue reinforcement work done for the screen hinge that's been cracking, however I found out that the NEC did a little extra to reinforce. The M/75 I have is probably the best machine of the lot, it looks brand new and only has one crack in the screen, plus I still have the digitizer assembly for it.

The wife expressed interest in me setting one up for her to fiddle around on. That was a pleasant surprise. I'm thinking about getting a new battery for the V/50 next and having her use that one since that's the other really nice one I have. The M/75 and V/50 look like they were dropped off for repairs in 94' and forgotten, the P/75 and 40EC though look like they have been to hell and back.

As a followup to recent pin soldering repair, I've been experimenting with broken CPU pad repair methots on a scrap P3 (cracked die, so won't be able to test) 😀

This is how I approached it:
besides of regular soldering stuff, microscope is mandatory, UV-curable soldermask is needed, thin as hair motor wire is needed (i used two of them in parallel), epoxy will probably be needed in the last step.

Broken pad can be scraped down to the internal microvia. VCC and GND planes will also be revealed, they need to be separated by scraping the surface and insulated with UV soldermask. Then a short piece of wire needs to be soldered between microvia and CPU pin (i trimmed it to around 6mm after soldering to one part). We don't want to directly solder CPU pin to microvia, because it would snap instantly. Then it probably needs to be glued with epoxy, didn't try that yet, but UV soldermask isn't good enough. I will try to also cover it with a 3D printed shim with holes for CPU pins to increase the strength further (at the cost of making pins a little bit shorter).

Don't know if it will actually work because that CPU was toast earlier (i ripped that pad afterwards to play around with it, it also has several desoldered pins - it was a 'donor' CPU). I want to keep the wire as short as possible to keep the signal integrity. I bought cheap Tualatin with broken pad and will try later to see if I am able to get it to work.

Wow! That is one hell of a soldering job good show. I'm lucky if I can get a 2 gauge lug soldered on to a 2 gauge wire. I really need to get better at soldering. I sure do hope you can get that Tually working again.

In phone repair, when I was fixing one of these iphones, I counted the exposed layers visible on the edge of the PCB and is 10 layers in total, Some people do this for data recovery dig deep and carefully, then use fine tip and finest wires to jump broken buried tracks, commonly happens when someone used long screw in one of these soldered standoff. This one is not for me.

Ditto digging at a corner of a CPU to jump two wires to the anti-rollback eeprom. That involves cutting through one corner of ram layer (it is PoP package with two die ram stacked on top of CPU with some of connections not used), down to the correct layer of the CPU's layer to expose two points for the two wire jumpers.

Touch ID flex is very delicate and I tried to expose one of these and I find this impossible since the copper layer is very thin and very delicate foil-like copper.

Cheers,

After seeing what Adalbert accomplished, what I'm about to share is horrendous in comparison.

Luckily I didn't electrocute myself while hacking together a PSU to test if the Amiga 500 works -- which glad to find out it does!!! 😀

I poorly soldered some wires to some nails that fit snuggly into the Amiga's power port, and elegantly taped them to the PSU's cables. Then with much majesty shoved them into the back of the Amiga.

Anyways, all is good, so I'm going to order an actual PSU, some kind of VGA cable, a Gotek, and a PI-to-HDIM kit.

The Amiga 500's expansion card was corroded. Not sure if I have the skills to fix it, but I'm going to try. It's been cleaned up some, but still needs more work. Fortunately there was no corrosion on the Amiga's main board, only a tiny bit on the pins that connected to the expansion card, which was easy to clean up.

Started cleaning up and organizing my removable drive with all my vintage stuff on it. Starting to store things as ISO, EXE, and ZIP so I Can send it over FTP easier. Seems every time I use FTPSRV and FileZilla to move over Ultima VI, it gets corrupted in the same darned way. Started planning to outfit a Versa for my wife.

Then spent the rest of the night playing Tetris Queen, and found 2 new favorite DOS games in my pile......Street Fighting Man......a hilarious EGA hot-mess where you play what looks like the Brawny Towel dude who has to rescue his girlfriend from punks, bikers, and bald middle aged guys by beating the crap out of them, looks like I might LP this on YouTube soon. Then Theme Hospital which I totally forgot was a ancestor to The Sims, and my Wife wants that on hers now after seeing it.

Theme hospital was a ton of fun I remember when I first got it. If you can believe it I got it from a scholastic book Fair flyer through my school. Honestly I got almost all of my maxis games from the book fair

Broke down the 12 years old trashy pentium E6500 (not K) computer for parts. Kept mATX G41 board, cpu with intel cooler and ram, Seagate 7200.12 500GB (2 heads) hard drive and card reader usb adapter. And snipped good wires with plugs from feather-weight PSU, Case and PSU is very cheap quality and style is not in my taste and will not be missed.

I have C2D E8600 Optiplex 780 and modded P5K board and don't want more 775 socket stuff.

Cheers,

Next project arrived today.
This is probably going to be the most difficult laptop to restore. The seller wanted 250USD, however I talked them down much less than that.
Just looking over the documents and figuring the best way to tackle this unit.

That's a nice looking laptop. Is the screen all scratched up or just a weird artifact from the picture?

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2021-04-07, 22:53:

That's a nice looking laptop. Is the screen all scratched up or just a weird artifact from the picture?

I have a laptop with the same issue, not artifacts 😉
Basically the glue that is between the lcd and the outside layer (protective?) alters in time and has a lift up/ bubbly effect.

There's a video on yt that explains removal and replacement.
You can see perfectly through but it's only gonna get worse in time.
If I'm not wrong of course.

That makes sence thank you for the explanation.

Yeah, pretty much a form of delamination, but not the one that makes it non-functional.
Pretty much, if you can see the pixels underneath it's fine.
It just looks like Toshiba made a poor design choice with plastic cover on this panel, because the older TFT panels used glass over the panel.

I put together a machine for testing my old 3D PCI cards and some SDK stuff with them, because my Dolch is having issues. Just a dual Abit BP6 board I had. Dual is wasted for its current use but I installed it into a motherboard tray that makes it handy. Found out that with the S3D SDK for ViRGE, perspective corrected texture mapping is optional. Explains part of why S3D Descent looks like crap.

I tested some RAM in a few different Sony Vaio Pentium III laptops.

Some use regular SDRAM SO-DIMMs and some use SDRAM Micro DIMMs.

Sadly none of the sticks I purchased play nice with either type of laptop. The Micro DIMMs give me no boot. The SO-DIMMs give me no boot unless one of the original sticks was installed in slot 1. It detects the second stick fine, but then crashes when trying to load Windows.

I was hoping to max out the Micro DIMM laptop with 2x 128MB sticks and the SO-DIMM laptop with 2 x 256MB sticks.

Bleh.