The fifth meeting of the Hardware SIG was held on the 28th of August. John Thomson had donated two surplus monitors, a CD ROM drive and some video cards. Both monitors were checked and worked perfectly. Thanks John. John also supplied a tape drive which we weren't able to get working properly. It was recognised by the computer as a floppy drive, but without its proper drivers, it refused to run properly. Raja brought along a friend, Ian.
Upgraded Ron's computer to a 486 100Mhz with 32MBits of RAM. In fact we rebuilt another computer for Ron. All that it needs is for his external modem to be attached and his files transferred from his old computer and he is in business. That's Ron's new computer in the back of the photo (Fig 1.) with the red toolbox sitting on top. On the bottom left is the 15-inch monitor that John gave us.
In the photo below (Fig 1.) John has a happy smile on his face. This was at the point that things went wrong. The computer in front of him is his main computer that he wanted a CD ROM fitted to. On the surface it should have been an easy job. At first look we found that the computer had two hard drives and there seemed to be only one IDE port. Looked like no CD ROM. A closer inspection of the HDD card and the CMOS BIOS showed two IDE ports. The 2nd IDE port was hidden under the 1st IDE port and was not visible when the IDE ribbon was connected. Things looked good. Installed the CD ROM, set it to “master” and fired up the computer. Oh dear! The computer refused to boot and didn't recognise its normal hard drives. Removed the CD ROM and the computer booted up OK. Further checking showed the 2nd IDE port to be faulty. At this stage the swapping of drives and rebooting had corrupted the Windows operating system and it needed to be reloaded. No CD ROM, no loading of Windows. At this stage we called it quits. All was not lost as there was another computer available for John to use. This computer was a combination of two computers that didn't work. One was found to have a faulty BIOS chip and the other a faulty motherboard. As both motherboards were 586's, I managed to rebuild one working computer and ended up with a spare CPU. It still has one problem. The video card seems to be a bit touchy to moving the computer about. When the fault occurred the display was dead. A temporary fix was to lift out the video card and then put it back in. This gets the display working again. Apart from that it is faster than John's own computer and has a CD ROM fitted.
Fig 1. A happy John
Fig 2. The Hardware Sig membersMissed out on a good photo of this computer with its motherboard, power supply and hard drive out of the case and spread across a table. The motherboard had only the video card installed. The monitor, keyboard and mouse were attached with everything powered up and working. Ribbons and cords going in all directions. Made it a lot easier to swap the CPU, RAM and BIOS chips. Also plugging cards in and out was a lot easier.
Photo (Fig 2.) shows, from the left, John Marchington, Ron Oliver, John Hand and me.
That's all for this month. The next meeting is on the 25th of September.
Arthur.Footnote : In the photo (Fig 1) the computer is one that John purchased from the Club when the NZPCA computer room in Ghuznee Street was closed down. The Club's label "COMPUTER 3" remains on the top.
