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I usually buy a vertical PCB mount battery, solder individually heat shrink sleeved leads (usually recovered from the old battery) to pos and neg pins, and if one side has two pins I cut back the spare pin. Shrink the insulation over the terminals, then slide a wide piece of heat shrink over the...

C58 may have gone "dead short" - power supply trips before the capacitor receives enough energy to get hot. Fires start where the resistance is low enough to draw enough current to get hot, but not enough to trigger protection (fuse/PTC/foldback) so that energy keeps on flowing until the short...

XTIDE can handle the 3c503 0x8080 checksum - it just modifies a spare byte so that the calculated checksum equals 0x8080. I'm not sure if this is done automagically or requires a deliberate action when configuring, hence my suggestion to check. If you aren't using the socket, it isn't a problem.

A 3C503 will work in an 8bit slot. (Care required if you use a XTIDE ROM in the ROM socket, as the card intercepts the checksum bytes and hard coded to 0x8080) I read somewhere that 3c509/509b has 8086/8088 issues as the standard Crynwr packet driver uses some 286 instructions. This is not...

The obvious option is to buy a new keyswitch+key. The next option (especially for switches with 3 or more positions) is to replace with a rotary switch, however you might struggle for space behind the panel.

The "dremel attack" is my standard strategy for soldered in Dallas devices (don't think I've come across a socketed Dallas device in a PC yet). The dremel ticks two boxes - minimal cost (CR2032+holder = dirt cheap) + minimum potential for damage (given my skill set+tools).

Personally, I'd look at fixing the NVRAM battery first (do it sooner rather than later) and netboot, but that's because I've already done the weeping/grinding of teeth getting SPARC boxes to netboot old versions of Solaris from a Linux server. Note that I have not setup a Jumpstart server - my...

Thanks for pointing out the NVRAM gotcha @glitch . The only "interference" between host and RAM I've seen from a "turn SRAM into NVRAM" device was to block writes as the main +5v supply starts to fail.

I think it's the 48T02 where the Dremel solution is mandatory. (Sun: IPC, SS1, SS2 + others). There's also a number of Dallas devices which have a hard coded serial number (seen on a number of HP-UX boxes, not sure if the serial number=hostid). Otherwise for RTC/RTC+NVRAM devices the choice of...

For "production" Ultra 5, Ultra 10 and E3500 boxes I've been using new devices. For testing/lab stuff it's been Dremel+CR2032. If the "new" devices start dying early or are DOA, then even the production kit will get Dremel+battery holder. (Yes one of my end customers is still using this stuff...

Please read the MSDS/COSHH sheet for Lithium Thionyl Chloride batteries. IMHO they are potentially the nastiest battery you'll find out there. Yeah there's the lithium, but the electrolyte is worse. (Google "lithium thionyl chloride msds") I've so far replaced 8 of them in recent months where...

Try a smaller hard drive, or restricting the size of your slices. I've had issues with the package tools getting confused with loadsa free space. (In my case it was installing packages on an nfs export - the installer spat out its dummy when it had 4TB of free space...). There are workarounds...

I can't help you, but it might be worth posting your question on stardot.co.uk which normally deals with Acorn stuff, but you might get a response if you post on the "other vintage stuff" forum at https://stardot.org.uk/forums/viewforum.php?f=45

You can buy 120mmx120mm (around 4.5" square) 12v fans off the shelf - power off a hard drive connector. Note that cheap fans that size won't have the tacho wire.

Two pronged NEMA sockets are generally crap - the insert/extract force is ridiculously low, so double insulated (no earth pin required) DC power adaptors/wallwarts can easily fall out of the socket (for UK visitors this is compounded by the crap quality of travel adaptors which tend to have thin...

My rule for noisy fans is to replace a smaller fan with a bigger fan with a similar or greater air flow. Another alternative I used once was to use two fans one front/one back, one sucking air into the case, the other exhausting air from it (although I'm not 100% certain how effective that was).

I don't think the volume of messages justifies a change, it's not as if one has to spend a lot of time separating the wheat from the chaff in this forum.

If you have a box with what I call a "soft" on/off button*, and want it to turn on when power automagically when power is applied, the simple answer is to wire a 100nF capacitor across the contacts. When you power on the capacitor charges up and to whatever is looking at the button it looks like...

The disc change detection in the floppy drive isn't working. Have you swapped the drive from another system? - you may need to change a link on the drive to swap the DISK CHANGE/READY line function (See https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/fdc-pin-34-ready-vs-disk-change.41371/) If you...

Are the masts for the two stations in line? If not maybe look for a more directional antenna (e.g. a yagi rather than rabbit ears) so you can increase the signal to noise ratio between the two channels. (more signal from Ch16, less noise from Ch18). I have vague memories that stacking two yagi...