So it’s back together. I’m leaving it another day until I turn it on for the alcohol to fully dry out…
I ended up dremmeling the memory with a polishing wheel to attempt to get the contacts clean enough to have some hope of reasonable connections being made…
You can actually see the fluff on the memory stick there (that’s the painfully expensive VRAM) – which is taken before it got another spraying with isopropyl alcohol (like the big can at the back folks? I’ve spent more on cleaning this machine than it’s actually worth)…
It’s weird because when I first bought those SIMMs they were so expensive and I was insanely anxious about inserting them. Everything I read was all about how static sensitive they were. And here I am going at them with a power tool attempting to get enough corrosion off for the machine to work.
If it does all work I might be tempted to throw RISC OS 5 or 6 into it, because then it will have exciting features like ‘DHCP’ which means it won’t be quite so much work to coax it into connecting to the internet. I need to have a look and see if they include any form of networked storage access.
Although I’ve reassembled it, if I do get a new OS I might even find it a new disk. I had a quick meandery look around, but didn’t remember where the harddisks were living (in the drawers by the desk) until afterwards. What is bugging me is I’m fairly certain that John gave me a StrongARM 233 (as opposed to my original 200Mhz) and a 2 slot backplane (although why I want to plug in the SCSI card when I’ve no SCSI drives anymore is a good question).
Still it’s all back together now, and looking at least a lot more like a computer:
And all sat back in place ready for me to throw the switch in a couple of days.
In other exciting computer news, the media server stuff has all arrived. Although I’m still vacillating about whether I should buy it a new hard disk.
