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Yep, the fuses are good. The second board never gets it's 24VDC input power from the first board, so they aren't really doing anything at this point anyway, but I did check them. I also tried applying 24VDC directly to the second board to see if that would get me anywhere, but it didn't help.

I guess I lied. The LED that indicates it's receiving power from the A/C adapter lights, but nothing else. I suspect there's a common flaw with these systems as I haven't seen any for sale that say they power on. Nor have I seen anyone with a photo or video of one booting. The only one of...

When I was trying to get my Columbia Data Products VP working, we discovered I was getting 8V on the 12V rail when under load. They suggested capacitors as the likely culprit. Unfortunately I haven't revisited that machine yet, so I can't tell you if that was the solution. But I have noticed...

Hey everyone. I buy pretty much all of my vintage computers varying degrees of disrepair. Some I can handle and some are beyond my current knowledge. I enjoy the process of diagnosing and repairing. I'm actually a little bummed when there's no more left to do. Part of the thrill is pushing...

If I'm reading it right, the first line is the capacitance. You take the first two digits and then multiply them by 10 to the power of the third digit, which gives you its capacitance in picofarads. So 10 x 10⁶ = 10,000,000pf. Which is 10uf. The second line is the maximum voltage The...

Since reading the LCD connector got it working again, I wonder if a little deoxit might help clear up the hum. It's possible that it's getting enough connection to display, but not enough to work 100% properly. Otherwise I would suspect a problem with the backlight inverter, if it has CFLs...

Thanks :) I got lucky and found this one for pretty cheap while looking for parts for another one I have. Now the other one is my parts machine! The hinges on mine are good, but the spring doesn't seem to be working correctly. When you pull the screen out it doesn't hold its position. It just...

Here's the drive: And in case anyone's curious what's inside: Mine will need the capacitors replaced. They've leaked and caused the other components nearby to corrode. And just for fun, here's the drive riding on the back of my PowerMate SX.

I took it apart to clean it and relube everything. I'll put it back together after work and post some pictures.

I have another one that's the SX (Gas plasma display and 386) and I agree, these are great machines! I bought this one because it came with the external floppy and hadn't seen one with that before. It runs great now. The 20mb hard drive even works.

Huzzah! It was SW3. Mine were all "Off" which doesn't correspond to any of the valid options in the manual. Setting it to "OFF, ON, ON, OFF" as the the photo in the manual shows results in normal output. Thanks for the help everyone!

You know, I never considered that dirty dip switches would be a thing. Which is surprising because I use deoxit on my vintage stereo equipment and on connectors/card edges when putting computers back together. Not sure how I never put those two together. They are just switches after all! I'm...

I've never seen this before. The text is physically too big to even display the BIOS messages without going off the screen! I've done some cursory checks of the dip switches and looked through the manual, but nothing jumps out. I have to put it in 80 column mode just to be able to use it at...

I have a Compaq Portable that I recently revived. It had 2 bad tantalum caps, one on the mainboard and the other on the floppy controller. Once those were replaced, it booted fine, but the second floppy drive is not reading disks. I haven't torn it back apart to inspect the drive yet, but I...

I've thought about playing with Linux on it. Just to get a OS that might be able to actually handle going online without leaving me to open to attack. But from what I've read Linux doesn't play very nice with sis chipsets. I may play around with detecting the button presses and keyboard closure...

If you're anything like my brother, that means "near vintage" goes back a long long way. Lol

I don't either. I kinda get wanting to keep "vintage" truly vintage. But how old and difficult to maintain does something need to be before it's "vintage"? I'll give them a shot. I've seen a few threads while researching computers that put me off of trying them. Lots of "this is a gaming...

You know, I almost said electroluminescent, but I didn't know if EL would dim on one half like that. I don't don't much about EL backlights. I have a couple other portables with EL backlights and it definitely "feels" more like it's EL. Info on this model was very hard to come by. The only...

On the back of the unit, there's a healthy array of ports. From left to right: power switch, 25 pin parallel port, 25 pin LPT printer port, DB9 RGB video port, and composite video out. Additionally, there are two covered ports, one for an external floppy and the other for expansion. Datavue...

Another eBay find. I really just need to delete my account there. I have zero self control, apparently. This is by far the most fragile computer in my collection. You even think about putting pressure on it's sun-burnt plastic case and it'll snap. I had pieces breaking as I tried to move...