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Yeah they suck too. I couldn't sleep at night knowing they're in there. I would be swapping them out for flat plates, or better yet real drives at 3 AM.

A IBM thinkpad 300 of 700 series is nice. Great keyboard, nice screen if you get a model with a TFT screen, and a floppy drive that works. I would recommend a Toshiba but the Citizen floppy drive is a pain and will need a new belt to be reliable. If you're up to doing that repair, they can be...

Mine included. It would have been nice to have a backlight on it. At least mine has the high contrast LCD. My Brother Powernote has a EL backlight and it's sure nice when the lighting is low. With all the advances in LED it should be pretty easy to backlight something. Back in the 90's there...

Considering the prices delusional ebay sellers are asking for rusted, dented cases with chipped plastics this actually is a good idea. Those fake floppy block off panels are tacky AF though. I would prefer a color matched flat plate.

How big of CF Card are you using? I found I had better luck with industrial cards and especially ones under 1 gb. I installed a IDE to CF into an AST Advantage NB and the bios vlaims to not see it but it still works.

100% this. Some irons do not have much metal between the tip and the ceramic part of the element. You'll get a brief bit of heat that's hot enough for good flow, and then the tip will go cold on heavy wire or terminal strips. I have a cheap Taiwan made 35 watt iron I bought from Radio Shack in...

It sounds a lot like a capacitor related issue. Those SMD electolytics caps from that era have a high failure rate. The board with the 4 SMD electrolytics looks like some sort of inverter or DC to DC converter. I would be careful leaving that yellow battery pack in there. In the picture it...

Good point Milen about dim bulbing it. That poor thing looks like it's been under water. It wouldn't hurt to bake it for weeks on end in a trunk of a car in the heat of the summer or somewhere else cooking hot.

In 35 years of soldering, for general purpose my favorite is a Weller SP23 25 watt. The heat transfer to the tip is excellent and it's hot enough for any through hole component soldering, and about 90% of point to point wiring I deal with in tube gear. I have even used it for SMD work and it...

Sad they haven't made a decent OS since XP, or maybe 7. Vista was so horrible I "downgraded" to XP and I'm still running it. MS DOS I use every day. Day in day out. 5.0 and 6.22 is my favorite OS. From what I've seen of Windows 10 I'm not impressed.

Here's a less often seen collection of 3000 shareware floppies. I ran across this last week and having a lot of fun going through these. https://archive.org/details/frostbyte_1980s_DOS_collection#reviews

I'm not sure how you change the setting in the RPI as I still dont own one. But if it's sync pulse is 50hz then it somehow set itself to PAL. The interference looks like some sort of digital signal that is being picked up. Does it change if you move the tv farther away from the RPI. Also is your...

Well that looks not bad for NTSC and about what I'd expect. There is a bit of interference that looks like it's also picking up some background oscillation ( the Z shaped pattern on the screen). I notice the same issues with the TV box too when displaying android's default text. Even the large...

I use extra fine steel wool with dish soap and water. Rinse with hot water. Solder flows excellent afterwards.

Glad to help out!