A lot of the old threads, if they get necroed, the mods lock them forever. I don't know why. I hope it doesn't happen here. To add some actual value to this post, there is a guy I enjoy on youtube, vswitchzero, that has done repairs on a number of 3dfx cards. He was inspired to start his...
Thanks for the offer. I went over there with a tape measure and her current display is 17"...she wants 17", not smaller. I'm kind of surprised, been striking out here, plenty of 15.6 but nothing in 17.
Maybe I should start a new thread specifying screen size now that I have more information...
She is pretty adamant about a large screen laptop, she uses it on the couch. In fact I am scrapping out 2 desktop systems from the house. I would think we could find something suitable between $2-300 don't you think?
It seems like I'm on here every couple years looking for a "new" laptop for myself or a close friend. This one is for a friend's elderly mother. The one she has will not support Win11 and the nagging about that bothers her. It is also pretty slow, though that may have more to do with cruft...
I'm not arguing. The Teraractyl is still my primary battlestation. Overclocked xeon hex, 48GB of ram, nvme boot drive and a 1080ti in it these days...it does the business at 5760 x 1080 to this day.
I actually just negged an Ebay seller, and I don't do that lightly, I was shopping on Ebay to avoid feeding Bezos, paid $5 extra, and then the item arrived in Amazon bubblepack. The dude essentially pocketed my $5 and laughed at my attempt to resist...this fucking world man...
Yeah, thankfully easy to unbox, I have a 1U supply with bulged caps in the pile not so much easy to unbox.
I just have to document enough repairs at this point to justify a DigiKey order.
Yeah, since I figured this out I found another one in the pile with bad 5Vsb. It seems like a lot of these older supplies implement a single chip solution as the oscillator/switch that slapps the HV DC across a tiny little xfmr to generate the low voltage that is then rectified and regulated to...
Awwwwww, love you too. I'm just glad I was able to end up making a thread that might actually be useful to someone. I don't know if you guys have noticed, but the internet sort of sucks for this kind of stuff these days. All the good old hits are buried under mountains of vacuous "fixya"...
Aaaaaand, it's fixed. Get the thing out of the box. Follow the purple wire down to the board. Find 2 badly bulged little electrolytic caps right there, 330uF 10V, the little multi component tester thing doesn't even see them as caps...reports "no, damaged or unknown part". No 330uF in stock...
So digging a bit more into how this all works; the chip on a mobo that pulls ATX pin 16 (the green wire) low to start the supply is called the PCH (platform control hub). The PCH is powered by the 5V standby on ATX pin 9 (the purple wire). Since my supply works when pin 16 is manually pulled...