Just thought I'd share my latest score: The seemingly rare Compaq 486C.
My brother donated this PC, he rescued it from the trash at his work for me. Thanks bro!
It did now work when I received it. I turned it on and nothing happened. I did however notice a capacitor failure smell. I guessed it would be the power supply at this point. Sure enough after disassembly of the power supply, 4 leaky caps were found. None of them were bulging, but all of them were the same brand and value. Replaced them with new caps.
Now when turned on it appeared to be booting but the LCD was just white with some horizontal lines. I thought: Great a portable that can't be portable because the LCD is fried. I figured at this point I would be junking it but I had to at least make an attempt to find the issue. So, I carefully removed the LCD panel and disassembled it. To my amazement every single surface mount electrolytic capacitor (10 or so) on the boards in the LCD had leaked and 2 through hole caps on one of the mini boards that was attached to one of the boards. I replaced all of them. Easy to remove them by just twisting them off - Check Youtube. I only slightly pulled 1 pad and was able to epoxy it down. Epoxy stands up to the heat when soldered and the fix worked great.
Re-assembled, turned on and it worked! The screen was clear and crisp like it was new!
I just wanted to post my experience regarding the LCD panel so people know that it is easily fixable since I couldn't find anything online about it. This maybe why there are so few of these left in the wild and If this experience helps anyone it's all good.
In the end I upgraded the memory from 8mb to 24mb and the processor from 33mhz to 100mhz with an overdrive processor I had. I also added an internal sound card and The sound comes through the internal speaker because there was an existing input for just such a thing. Plus a 2GB hard drive was installed, upgrading from 200MB. This thing works great and was a fun restore.
My brother donated this PC, he rescued it from the trash at his work for me. Thanks bro!
It did now work when I received it. I turned it on and nothing happened. I did however notice a capacitor failure smell. I guessed it would be the power supply at this point. Sure enough after disassembly of the power supply, 4 leaky caps were found. None of them were bulging, but all of them were the same brand and value. Replaced them with new caps.
Now when turned on it appeared to be booting but the LCD was just white with some horizontal lines. I thought: Great a portable that can't be portable because the LCD is fried. I figured at this point I would be junking it but I had to at least make an attempt to find the issue. So, I carefully removed the LCD panel and disassembled it. To my amazement every single surface mount electrolytic capacitor (10 or so) on the boards in the LCD had leaked and 2 through hole caps on one of the mini boards that was attached to one of the boards. I replaced all of them. Easy to remove them by just twisting them off - Check Youtube. I only slightly pulled 1 pad and was able to epoxy it down. Epoxy stands up to the heat when soldered and the fix worked great.
Re-assembled, turned on and it worked! The screen was clear and crisp like it was new!
I just wanted to post my experience regarding the LCD panel so people know that it is easily fixable since I couldn't find anything online about it. This maybe why there are so few of these left in the wild and If this experience helps anyone it's all good.
In the end I upgraded the memory from 8mb to 24mb and the processor from 33mhz to 100mhz with an overdrive processor I had. I also added an internal sound card and The sound comes through the internal speaker because there was an existing input for just such a thing. Plus a 2GB hard drive was installed, upgrading from 200MB. This thing works great and was a fun restore.
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