Do computers have past lives?

Posted on August 12, 2007 in Amiga and Hardware. - Comments [1]

The good news is that the Amiga 4000 that I’ve been “restoring” has powered up! This followed the removal of a leaking battery and giving the motherboard a good thorough washing.

Opening up the machine to extract the motherboard did mean that I had to disassemble the machine completely. It was doing this that I discovered that there were a couple of Zorro cards in there. Of course when I received the machine there was no software included.

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Amiga A4000 suffers leaking battery

Posted on July 24, 2007 in Amiga and Hardware. - No comments

My old A4000 which used to run 24/7 driving a BBS has never worked since it came out of storage. So recently purchased a replacement Amiga A4000 with the intention of combining and cannibalising one in order to save the other. The new one, acquired a few months ago was advertised as “fully working” but I knew I was taking a gamble on the state of the battery. What’s worse is that the machine has been sat untouched for a few months while I waited for the opportunity to do something with it.

Things didn’t look good when I finally opened the machine up. From the picture, you can see that the battery has leaked pretty badly. One of the memory modules removed from the SIMM sockets had suffered very badly with the contacts at one end dissolved completely!

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