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I appreciate your worry. I drilled a huge circular hole in the top of the case and put the machine outside the 5th floor window to ensure it's got a breeze. I also installed water cooling using sugarwater.

I got a small ATX power supply with it's newer 24-pin ATX adaptor and bought an adaptor to downsize it's power connector to the older 20-pin ATX standard, which has exactly the same keying on the pins as the 16-pin FM-Towns HR (just with 2 pairs chopped off one end). It was £9.45 here. Using...

Hi I definitely got the polarity the right way around on all the caps. I checked before and after and it's clearly marked on the PCB itself. When I wrote backwards, I mean C58 and C52 are 1000uf and 2200uf caps and as I noted them all down I may have mixed them up in my notes. I did replace...

Hey Everyone I bought an FM Towns II-HR which was powering up fine and then just decided not to do anything. I disassembled the machine and completely recapped the power supply with new RS-Components caps and it still doesn't power on. There is about a 10% chance that on the PSU, I got...

Sorry for trying to warn everyone that at least one of those caps is known to be poorly manufactured and very close to a bunch of tiny tracks that will destroy your board. I mean why bother taking anyone's advice ever? Why not learn that the motorway isn't suitable for yoga practice without...

Cool. Why bother to diffuse a time bomb that hasn't gone off?

Hi everyone. I'm still trying to source a replacement 'graphyc-1' daughterboard - is this board found in the MZ-80A or any other of the MZ machines? Thanks!

You're looking at the wrong caps. You have to completely remove the video card from the system (which means removing the ISA cards and riser) to see the most dangerous through-hole caps. There aren't very many but if you look at my earlier pics, you'll see one right in the centre of the board...

Caps on the video board: C1 10uf 50v C3 47uf 25v C4 10uf 25v C6 22uf 25v All standard, through-hole electrolytics.

Sorry, I was in a stress because time was passing and I only meant to do the floppy and then was in a hurry going by a few ideas given to me at the time that the video board was the issue. The video board most of the way across the top and has the external SVGA connector on it. You have to pull...

Ok so word of warning to anyone with a P70. I originally only had a fault with my floppy drive, which was fixed by replacing the 5 capacitors with ceramic sm ones, lubricating the corkscrew thing and cleaning the head with IPA. All 5 surface mounted caps on my floppy were leaking and crusty. I...

I'm about to restore a P70. I've got a couple of them but one of them is distinctly unloved so I'm going to start next week. I've ordered a McIDE-CF like you, and hoping it'll be a simple setup - any additional notes after you've been thrpough it? I should be able to restore and service the...

RPM did seem slow, although I don't know how fast it should be. I'll google ImageDisk.... Thanks

Hi Everyone The Compaq Portable III has a slimline canon 5.25" 1.2Mb floppy disk drive. I have one that doesn't work and I've checked several things and it still won't read a (tested) disks. I've greased the corkscrew that drives the magnetic heads(s) backwards and forwards across the disk -...

Hi Everyone I've been tearing my hair out over this -virtually worthless- 486SX machine. It's a relatively boring laptop but I just wanted to get it working because it has such a lovely keyboard. It was originally cursed with a Conner CP30104H 3.5" IDE hard drive which has totally failed - not...

I've got an IBM Thinkpad 700C PS/2 which has a dead ESDI hard drive. But it's 2.5" with a 44 pin 'IDE style' connector.... Anyone have any suggestions as to how to make this fit!? Or of anyone knows of a 2.5" variant....? Thanks!

Sorry, it's been a while. I want to say thanks to jafir because part of the problem was definitely my jumpers. That got me halfway there. I couldn't find a source of the weird dallas clock chip anywhere (it's a low profile 4-terminal battery module - not a DS1287) anywhere, so I used PCBway to...

Hi Everyone I've got a Gridcase 286 laptop and both the hard drive and the FDD are faulty. It's a really cool design machine but they've essentially integrated fairly standard looking IDE and floppy drives directly onto a flat riser board with no cables between them. Which makes it really hard...

Ok if you can give me any clues what to look for, I'll set the scope and prod a few pins! Thanks

Yes I've got a really good scope. I just don't know what to look for and even if I found it what it would tell me!