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So, I am still looking for ways to resurrect the two computers that died. I picked up some old boards from a guy in San Jose. Two motherboards, a bunch of other miscellaneous cards and drives, an old computer that looked like it had been in a garage for years. Man, I've never seen so much dirt in and on a computer before.

Here is the computer. This is a staged photo that I sent to a friend of mine as a joke, but it is MUCH cleaner in this shot than it was when I got it. I wish I took a picture of it before I cleaned it off. Along with the dust, there were also quite a bit of spider webs inside.



There were a couple of cards plugged into the main board. Here's one of them.



Now that's something you don't want in your computer!

Anyway, I pulled the main board out of the computer - it was surprisingly clean in comparison (mostly because it was mounted vertically). So that gave me a third motherboard that I got from this guy.

So I did some testing and some troubleshooting. I was hoping to find a motherboard to replace the motherboard in the second computer that died (refer to the first entry in this blog). It turns out, I have verified that my motherboard is, indeed, fried. It's not the BIOS chip that is dead. The BIOS in the server is dead, but this other computer has a dead main board.

Of course, none of the three boards I got from this guy were any good. One would have been a perfect replacement for my dead one. But the 64K base memory is dead. And, unfortunately, the memory is surface-mount soldered to the board. No way to recover there. The other two boards didn't have any base memory. It was all socketed chips that someone had removed. They might work if I put some memory in there, but they wouldn't be good replacement boards for the dead computer.

So, I'm still standing on square one. Two dead computers, and a piling heap of new junk to clutter my shop with. I am determined to do something artistic with all these dead boards.