Date: Tue, 04 Jul 2000 01:33:40 PDT From: "neil barnes" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: the saga continues... Okay, things are beginning to look up on my demolished libretto front... I think I mentioned that I had Rob's ex machine (Rob is now no longer reading the group so I can be rude about him :) working with an original 800M drive but that it wouldn't start with the 3.2G (and all the fun and games getting boot sectors onto it... So, just on the offchance, I had a look inside the case and discovered the spacers were still there. Damn. Rob's been running like that for a year...then discovered I could run it out of the case and crash it reliably if i prodded the pcb. Aha...dry joint somewhere... First try: the connectors on the IDE plug. They're easy cos they're on a millimetre spacing (40 thou for americans). Got better, particularly on starting after swapping discs, but I could still occasionally crash it. Second try: the motherboard ram. Half mil/20 thou spacing. But not too difficult. Lo and behold the damn thing ran and stayed running. Wouldn't crash if I kicked the board, stopped and started dos and windows and linux no problems on either of two discs. Yahoo! Only snag: I was using a gas powered iron (a) cos it has a very fine tip and (b) to avoid cable drag and possible electrostatic leakage. What I failed to observe was that after the tip catalyst there's an exhaust vent which throws out very hot gas...and while soldering the motherboard ram I managed to melt a small section of the expansion ram socket. The chip still goes in but something isn't contacting...it won't see the extra ram. So it looks like I'm stuck with 16M. Ah well :( Anyway, the beast has been pinging my desktop for a couple of days while running the linux screensaver in kde...lots of load and heat, and it hasn't missed a beat. Now I try this with my original machine...after all, I have nothing to lose! Regards, Neil ________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com ************************************************************** http://libretto.basiclink.com - Libretto mailing list http://libretto.basiclink.com/archive - Archives http://www.picante.com/~gtaylor/portable/faq.html - FAQ -------UNSUBSCRIBE------- mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?subject=cmd:unsubscribe --------UNSUBSCRIBE DIGEST------ Use above but add DIGEST to the subject line... **************************************************************
