Recent content by mechaniputer

Well this was probably due to user upgrades. All four cards installed are long cards. I'll order some card guides.

I already removed the battery back on the day of the original posting. I'll try to clean up the corrosion with vinegar as suggested.

Yes, exactly right. This machine has particular nostalgic value and was the first computer I ever used. I'm now a computer science professor and would like to keep this exact machine going as long as I can. If the general concensus is that it's fine to wait until something blows and then...

Hi everyone, I was going over my 5160 to make sure there aren't any leaky components (there's a SixPakPlus card so I removed the battery). However I noticed that some of the cards wobble a bit much. Some cards have a black plastic bracket at the front end of the machine which prevents...

Successfully removed the battery, cleaned out the dust, and reassembled it. Everything seems to be mostly working. I did find that the IDE card is a bit finnicky. I had to re-seat it several times. I kept getting 2 high beeps, 8 low beeps and no graphical output. I tried cleaning the board...

Thanks everyone. PSU is a Fortron FS200-40. No idea if it is considered a good model. Supposedly money was tight when he built it, but computers were both a passion and a livelihood so who knows. Either way it sounds like there is a clear overwhelming consensus that I should let it be. I'm...

Decided to do a full disassembly for the sake of cleaning out all the dust and removing that battery. See attached pictures. Looks like it is soldered pretty tight against the board. Does it look like I should de-solder it or try cutting it? Thanks.

I don't know who Adrian is and I haven't been watching videos. I just have several friends that this has happened to. I don't think it's as rare as you say. It's well known that a bad PSU can damage other components. It might (possibly) be less than 50% of PSU failures, but PSU failures in...

Sure, but it would be nice if it fails in a repairable way. If the PSU blows and fries the board and CPU and RAM and ... etc then there's not much to do about it. On the other hand if the hard drive or RAM or BIOS ROM fail, or any of the individual boards, there are modern solutions to keep it...

And just for posterity, here is a picture of the machine.

Hi, I have a 386 desktop machine from around 1991 that currently works (as of last year). The machine was custom assembled by my dad around that time and was used as the family computer long enough to end up with Windows 95 and an ethernet NIC. I would like to make sure it keeps working for the...

I think I'm not alone in this forum when I say it seems like a shame to gut a working one, as they are rare and collectable these days. The one I'm working on was damaged beyond repair including the plastic case itself, which will need some epoxy. But I also have some semi-working ones that I...

For anyone else attempting to interface a Z-171 keyboard with a microcontroller, here's what I have so far to the best of my knowledge. I haven't tested this yet so follow at your own risk. On the 26-pin keyboard header, oriented such that pin 3 is the missing one, your outputs will be pins...

Actually I'm making some progress now. I think the connections don't work if the smaller board containing the function keys is disconnected. I've cleaned the connector and reinstalled that and I am finding some keys now.

Hi folks, I recently obtained three Z-171 portable computers. None of them currently work and I'm planning to repair two of them. However the third one has been badly damaged. Looks like it was dropped at some point with a shattered screen and several cracks in the case. I've saved all the...