· P · R · 3 · S · E · N · 7 · i · N · G ·

486 4LCH3My

· S · T · 4 · R · R · i · N · G ·

[·———————————- ASUS ISA486SV2 / iNTEL 486 DX2-66 / TEAC CD56E ———————————–·]

·4·L·S·O· · S · T · 4 · R · R · i · N · G ·
‘——————— Trident 8900 / Asound AS400 ———————–‘

Following the current state of The Albatross as … non responsive, shall we say? We also have another specimen that also came by way of being disposed of by someone.

Oh, don’t feel sorry for this one. It is a mess of a Little Bird. When we say mess, well, let the picture show you.

Look at the lovely emerald coloration in those ISA slots!! It’s not just in the ISA slots. It is also under the BIOS chip and we have a Varta battery.

The Varta didn’t do this though. In fact that Varta is not leaking. Upon extracting this from it’s case there is a white residue below the back portion of the board. Yes, it is the dreaded sugary drink spill. From the looks it was never cleaned up. The board did indeed post twice then nothing. Letting it sit for a long time and then some more time, it would repeat and post twice then not post.

I am not sure if I can save it but I am going to try to do what I can.

Step one: Take pictures of what is plugged into the board.

Step two: Remove the board, cpu, ram, bios chip. Cut battery off, because Varta.

Step three: Grab the apple cider vinegar and a toothbrush.
Begin to neutralize the contaminant with gentle vinegar bath. Soak well.

Step four: rinse with distilled water

Step five: more precise cleaning with 91% iso

Step six: allow days to dry completely

Step seven: put BIOS, CPU and half ram back in and prepare to bench test.

Step eight: Flip the frigging switch!!!

Cross fingers!

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Now to see if I can post more than twice.

I chose to us the trusty Trident card from The Albatross and the external clock battery. I populated only one bank of 30 pin ram for 4 megabytes.

Test posting….

That worked 4 times in a row so I added the rest of the ram and that worked for a dozen posts!! That’s certainly good news!

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Somewhere around this time I decided to put this in the case The Albatross had occupied. The case had been repainted and nice now so why not, eh?

I had forgotten how little room there was where the ram part of the board is. It is partly underneath the power supply mount. These old steel AT cases were more about function than easy of access!

Out came the 5.25 floppy drive and in went the TEAC CD56E 6x IDE CDRom. It was also not that simple. The process requires removing the 1.44 floppy drive to access the screws on the 5.25 drive. The 3.5 inch mounting bracket cannot be removed.