Reviving a "bricked" PC

[target2019]

OK, this is the ultimate recovery boot program on the BIOS that is protected from being overwritten, as Joe Wras talked about earlier. You need some basic firmware on the BIOS chip in order to bring in the rescue program from the USB dongle.

I never had a Dell computer, only "special-deal" motherboards from Fry's Electronics, which do not have this feature.

For some inexplicable reason I thought you mentioned Dell. Ok, the reason is I think everyone has Dell PCs. LOL.

 

[NW-Bound]

Speaking of creating work for oneself on rainy days, let me tell you another story.

In the early 1980s, when IBM came out with the XT PC, I bought a PC compatible built by Mitsubishi. Instead of running at 4.77MHz like the XT, my PC ran at 7.17MHz or 50% faster. Yay!

Then, I read about the NEC V20 CPU, which executed the same instruction set as the Intel 8088, but with fewer clock cycles and gained another 50%. I just got to have that.

One Saturday morning, I sat down to unsolder the 8088 CPU from the motherboard. Then, I put on a socket before plugging in the V20 chip. Turned it on. Yeah, it still ran.

I could have damaged this machine by unsoldering the CPU. My very first PC cost me $1580 back then, when that was still real money. Yes, I like to play with fire.

 

[NW-Bound]

For some inexplicable reason I thought you mentioned Dell. Ok, the reason is I think everyone has Dell PCs. LOL.

Yes, I did mention that if I could not revive this machine, I would get my wife a used Dell computer for $200, which is faster than this machine even after the latter gets souped up with a quad-core CPU.

 

[target2019]

Yes, I did mention that if I could not revive this machine, I would get my wife a used Dell computer for $200, which is faster than this machine even after the latter gets souped up with a quad-core CPU.

I would have bailed at "brick" and spent the $200. But you have more time...

 

[target2019]

Speaking of creating work for oneself on rainy days, let me tell you another story.

In the early 1980s, when IBM came out with the XT PC, I bought a PC compatible built by Mitsubishi. Instead of running at 4.77MHz like the XT, my PC ran at 7.17MHz or 50% faster. Yay!

Then, I read about the NEC V20 CPU, which executed the same instruction set as the Intel 8088, but with fewer clock cycles and gained another 50%. I just got to have that.

One Saturday morning, I sat down to unsolder the 8088 CPU from the motherboard. Then, I put on a socket before plugging in the V20 chip. Turned it on. Yeah, it still ran.

I could have damaged this machine by unsoldering the CPU. My very first PC cost me $1580 back then, when that was still real money. Yes, I like to play with fire.

My first was a 512K Mac with external floppy. Over two grand at the time. Of course I had to join a group and learn about the interesting things one could do to a "closed" piece of hardware, at significantly more cost.

 

[misshathaway]

Dug out my trusty chip programmer, the ChipMaster 6000, that I bought 20 years ago (paid $1500 for it). OK, I had to find the software, and installed that on a PC running Windows XP to be sure that the old software would work. I can go back to Win 2K, or even Win NT if necessary.

That is one of the first good reasons I have seen for keeping old tech around. It sounds like you had fun doing this project, even if you didn't get to use the original chip programmer.

I am learning electronics at the baby level now and when something does not work, which is often, I love the challenge of figuring out why and trying to fix it.

 

[NW-Bound]

I would have bailed at "brick" and spent the $200. But you have more time...

As mentioned, my wife does not care for me to get her another machine, even if that's a refurbished machine for only $200.

And I am the obstinate type who would fix this machine before I stop using it. I broke it, I will fix it.

Tomorrow, when the used CPU comes in the mail and I install it to improve the speed by a factor of 2.5x, my wife will know what she has been missing, and I am happy to keep another piece of electronics out of the landfill.

It's not the money, but the principle of things. I can add the $200 to the donation I give to St Mary's Food Bank at this time of year.

 

[target2019]

We're fortunate to have annual electronics recycling nearby. After sanitizing drives, etc., I drive a few miles, and they unload my boxes and devices. It takes a few years of non-use beofre I discard components.

AFAIK, none of this goes into a landfill. But maybe I'm naive.

 

[NW-Bound]

That is one of the first good reasons I have seen for keeping old tech around. It sounds like you had fun doing this project, even if you didn't get to use the original chip programmer.

I am learning electronics at the baby level now and when something does not work, which is often, I love the challenge of figuring out why and trying to fix it.

I have quite a few pieces of engineering software that cost a few $K each, and being old they will not run under Win 10. They work fine for me, and I do not need or can justify new versions for a hobby, now that I no longer w*rk.

Some of the new machines, you cannot even install the old Windows versions on them. Supposedly, you can mount a virtual machine (VM) under Win 10, then install the old Windows or any OS like Linux or even old MS-DOS on the VM, but I have not gotten around to play with that. There's so much stuff to play with.

 

[travelover]

I'm impressed. I thought I was clever pulling the plug out of the wall and reinserting it.

 

[NW-Bound]

^^^^^^^^^^^^

Be careful NOT to watch that Surgical UV Eprom Eraser in operation. I switched to the fusible link Eproms when they became cheap.

The EPROMs you describe are really UV EPROM, but without a window to allow them to be erased with UV light. This happened at the end of the life cycle of EPROM, and they were cheap enough to be used for mass production and the end users are not going to be able to pull the chips, erase them with UV light, then reprogram them with a chip programmer. These non-windowed EPROMS are call OTP (one-time-programmable). You do not update their content, and just discard them.

The fusible-link ROM came before the UV EPROM, and did not have the same high density.

When I bought the ChipMaster programmer 20 years ago, I was working with EEPROM, which was electrically erasable. A big improvement over the UV erasable EPROM. However, in-circuit reprogramming was not easy to do like the modern flash memory.

Nobody uses anything other than flash memory now. This talk reminds me that I still have a UV light for EPROM erasing somewhere on my shelves.

I have older stuff like vacuum tubes, but they have been up in my attic for 30+ years.

 

[HFWR]

I would have bailed at "brick" and spent the $200. But you have more time...

Back in the day, I worked on stuff, both as part of my j*b, and out of necessity.

Now, I just want to hit the frickin’ ON switch, and have whatever gadget “work”. If not, outtahere!

 

[camfused]

A new CPU may not speed up as much as you think. An SSD drive or more RAM may make more of an impact.

 

[target2019]

Back in the day, I worked on stuff, both as part of my j*b, and out of necessity.

Now, I just want to hit the frickin’ ON switch, and have whatever gadget “work”. If not, outtahere!

In 2020 I hope to start a new computer project of some type, just to keep up with the tech. Not sure what I'll pick or will go forward with. Probably a good idea just ot upgrade home network for newer standards. Something of interest might grow out of that.

 

[MRG]

A new CPU may not speed up as much as you think. An SSD drive or more RAM may make more of an impact.

All computers wait at the same speed.

 

[target2019]

All computers wait at the same speed.

Sometimes you just wanna change to keep your chops up.

 

[NW-Bound]

In 2020 I hope to start a new computer project of some type, just to keep up with the tech. Not sure what I'll pick or will go forward with. Probably a good idea just ot upgrade home network for newer standards. Something of interest might grow out of that.

One thing I have in mind, but have not had the free time to do it, is to build a NAS with the Raspberry Pi 4 and SSDs.

I currently have 4 NAS:

1) Iomega 1TB
2) Buffalo, RAID-5 (parity), 1TB
3) Windows Home Server 2007, RAID-1 (mirror), 3TB
4) Windows Home Server 2011, 1TB

Only NAS 1 above is left on 24/7. The other 3 are turned on as needed, because they are power hungry.

I could convert 1) and 2) to SSD, but that takes some real work, not just swapping out drives.

NAS 3) and 4) are built from old PCs, so converting to SSD is trivial, but would not save that much power. I use them for archival storage, and to run whole-system backups for all the PCs in the household, so only turn them on as needed.

A NAS with Raspberry and SSD should be very low-power, and takes just a few watts compared to the servers I have now. And SSD will eventually get cheap enough that I will do mirroring throughout.

 

[target2019]

I looked at Raspberry Pi last week. What stood out were complaints about the level of heat without adding cooling fan.

 

[dvalley]

Nice work! You took me back to the mid to late 90s when I did that sort of stuff in college and then at my first job, mostly burning assembly programs into micro-controllers and then programming PLCs. It's been a loooong time now. Oh and my first PC was an XT with 256k RAM and a Turbo button that went from 5MHz to 7MHz...and it cost a lot of money because my dad (RIP) told me I'd better put it to good use. I learnt BASIC on my own, then took up CS as my major...so I did put it to good use. Thanks dad.

Lots of fellow geeks around here

 

[sailor]

I looked at Raspberry Pi last week. What stood out were complaints about the level of heat without adding cooling fan.

I have one Pi 3B+ and one Pi Zero running 24x7 for over 2 years with no noticeable heat with avg CPU load around 20%.

What are you planning to use it for? Anywhere close to 100% CPU?

 

[target2019]

I have one Pi 3B+ and one Pi Zero running 24x7 for over 2 years with no noticeable heat with avg CPU load around 20%.

What are you planning to use it for? Anywhere close to 100% CPU?

Meant the Pi 4. Watched a youtube about how to install latest update for the thermal problem, and alternative cooling methods. Mildly interested in this, for now.

 

[sailor]

Meant the Pi 4. Watched a youtube about how to install latest update for the thermal problem, and alternative cooling methods. Mildly interested in this, for now.

I also have a PI4 on the bench and it's warm, but not hot. But I use mine in a vertical position, which explains why I have not run into problems described.
I honestly would probably not notice with the use I have, it went into thermal cutoff.
But your comments gave me a boost to install new firmware thanks!

https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/thermal-testing-raspberry-pi-4/

 

[misshathaway]

Oh and my first PC was an XT with 256k RAM and a Turbo button that went from 5MHz to 7MHz...and it cost a lot of money

That was my first work computer!

format c:

No! Don't do that!

 

[Ferd]

Why update a bios? If it's been working for years, what possible advantage could there be? I've never updated a bios in my life & I've used some pretty old PC's. I am very skeptical of updates and never let PC's auto update. I've had far more problems caused by updates than fixed by updates.


Glad you got the problem fixed but after all this did it make one bit of difference?

 

[DougJohnson]

...I built one in 2011 that still smokes

Every PC I've built that smoked, did not smoke very long before it died.

On the other hand, I just retired my 2009 homebuilt. Never thought it would last 10 years. But I do love my new iMac.

-- Doug