Refurbishing old VIP 286 I bought for my parents in late 80's

[seaken]

I have been struggling on a refurbish of a MicroLab 286 that I had in my collection but had never tried to get working. That computer ended up with a bad battery corrosion episode and I have so far been unsuccessful in getting it working. I have been getting some hlep with that over here:

https://forum.vcfed.org/index.php?threads/how-do-i-get-the-battery-corrosion-completely-neutralized.1239025/

But in the middle of that project, which is not going well, I ended up with a small victory. While cleaning up that MicroLab board I pulled out a couple of other boards from my shelf to see if they needed any cleaning while I had all the cleaning stuff out. One of these boards was from another old 286 computer, one that I had purchased for my parents back in the late 80's or early 90's (can't remember exactly). I had pulled it out of the computer several years becasue it also had a battery leak. I did some cleaning back then and it has been sitting untouched on the shelf for a few years.

I took a closer look and realized there was still some green corrosion. So I attempted to clean it again but was not making much headway, which was a similar issue I was having with the MicroLab board. After asking for help here in the forum I was finally able to make some progress in getting rid of the green. I improved my technique and am now very close to getting this VIP 286 board back in service.

So, while the MicroLab 286 is not looking good, this old VIP 286 is going to take it's place. Plus, this VIP machine has a history with me so it will mean more to me than the obscure MicroLab machine. Even better, the case for this VIP 286 is a mini-tower with a Turbo button and LED (no readout). I do not have any other mini-towers for my pre-pentium systems (I have one in an AT&T Pentium 200MMX) so this will be unique among my collection.

I am finishing cleaning the MB now. I have cleaned the case and power supply. And I have tested the MB and it works. I powered it up while I was testing the MicroLab board. So, since this VIP 286 is working and the MicroLab 286 is not I switched gears and made this my current project. (The MicroLab 286 is now a reseach project).

I will have a few questions about how to finish this 286 project. For now I have to finish the cleaning and final power tests.



Seaken

 

[seaken]

More pics of the cleaning





I used an old CGA card to help me clean out the ISA slot that has some green. I used a pen eraser (a little tougher than a pencil eraser) to carefully remove some of the debris. Then I am soaking the green area with the swabs. It works good. I am almost done removing all the green. The board is already working fine. But I want to make sure to remove all the green before I assemble it and put it into service.

Seaken

 

[seaken]

I successfully finished the cleaning and painted on some clear nail polish over one of the traces to keep it from oxidizing again. I am able to get into the BIOS and save changes when I have a battery attached. But there seems to be a bad memory chip and I cannot get any drives to be recognized. There is no onboard headers for either floppy or hard drives on this motherboard. So, I have to use an ISA controller card. I have two of these cards pulled from other systems. But neither of them is working on this machine.

It looks like I need to buy another controller card. I am thinking about getting a Multi-I/O card with floppy, IDE, Serial and Parallel ports. I have been looking in some of my other systems for a card I can try. I do have one in my AST Cupid Premium 486-33. But I worked so hard to set that up I am not incliuned to pull it out for tests on this VIP 200. I may just wait until I get another card.

Does anyone have any suggestiuons on buying a controller card for this 286? Is my idea for a Multi-I/O good or should I try to find just a disk controller? What is good? Anything to avoid because it is known to be crap?

Seaken