Tim Locke
New Member
Hello. I purchased one of these machines today but it is not working properly. I am looking for suggestions how to figure out what is wrong with it.
When I turn it on, sometimes the screen is full of forward slashes with the cursor blinking in the top left corner. Other times the screen is full of forward slashes except there are some capital 'O's, question marks and left arrows on lines 4 and 5 with the cursor blinking in column 2 on row 6. The pattern of the characters on lines 4 and 5 do not seem to correlate to the expected boot up messages, although the "messages" seem to be consistent on every boot up.
Either way, typing produces either a forward slash, left arrow, capital 'O' or question mark. Shifted typing produces one of only 4-6 graphic characters. Some keys do not work, (eg. @, Z, X, V, N, M, Space). RVS, Shift, Cursor keys, Enter, Clr/Home and Ins/Del work normally. Pressing Enter displays a question mark and moves the cursor down one line. Typed commands don't seem to change the result of pressing Enter. I plan to clean the keyboard in hopes of getting the rest of the keys working.
Does anyone have suggestions on tests I should perform to determine what is wrong? It seems like a problem with the video chip, RAM or bus to me but it seems like there may be another issues as well. I have and can use a multi-meter but I do not have an oscilloscope.
Thank you for reading.
When I turn it on, sometimes the screen is full of forward slashes with the cursor blinking in the top left corner. Other times the screen is full of forward slashes except there are some capital 'O's, question marks and left arrows on lines 4 and 5 with the cursor blinking in column 2 on row 6. The pattern of the characters on lines 4 and 5 do not seem to correlate to the expected boot up messages, although the "messages" seem to be consistent on every boot up.
Either way, typing produces either a forward slash, left arrow, capital 'O' or question mark. Shifted typing produces one of only 4-6 graphic characters. Some keys do not work, (eg. @, Z, X, V, N, M, Space). RVS, Shift, Cursor keys, Enter, Clr/Home and Ins/Del work normally. Pressing Enter displays a question mark and moves the cursor down one line. Typed commands don't seem to change the result of pressing Enter. I plan to clean the keyboard in hopes of getting the rest of the keys working.
Does anyone have suggestions on tests I should perform to determine what is wrong? It seems like a problem with the video chip, RAM or bus to me but it seems like there may be another issues as well. I have and can use a multi-meter but I do not have an oscilloscope.
Thank you for reading.