why is posting photos so slooooow is the internet melting down
got this Compaq LTE 386s/20 as a repair challenge, would be perfect to run Citadel-86
power brick appears to work, 30v on two pins
plug it in to the laptop, the light flashes and you can hear it start and shut down, oh yeah that's a short
lets get it apart
sum magic smoke let out by the battery
can't find a service manual, guess i get to wing it
its a terrifying layer cake of delicate flat flex
with some care and reason i got it apart without wrecking it
thar we go, that's a whole 386 PC on a two board sandwich of 1990 tech
welp something sure disintegrated itself
that's F501 next to it and i can just make out F50-something under the ashes
F is fuse
fuse go kablooey
which means something else is still shorted
fun
the mobo isn't short anymore so the problem gotta be on this itty bitty power supply
that fuse went direct to the battery, toasted itself good, trace vaporized and not an obvious fix
made a last ditch effort to reverse engineer the pinout and run the mobo off a lab supply
it draws a reasonable amount of power and the chips heat up a normal amount but no luck getting it to boot
it makes noises tho, that means the chipset is at least partly working
i suspect the motherboard works fine but there's power sequencing that needs to happen and i ain't got time for that
trying to be better about not getting hung up on repairs so ON THE BACKBURNER SHELF IT GOES
if anyone wants the bits to fix another one, or perhaps have parts for me, let me know 🙏
the LCD might even work but i think the power generation for the backlight might be on the cooked board
GEM is truly truly outrageous