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Old August 9th 18, 10:21 PM posted to alt.comp.hardware.pc-homebuilt
Flasherly[_2_]
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Default "Why I Will Never Buy a Hard Drive Again"

On Thu, 9 Aug 2018 19:59:49 -0500, Rene Lamontagne
wrote:


Every time it went pear shaped you had to take the cover off and tamp
all the chips back down, I'M glad I never owned one, it was a real disaster.


Standard operations, I'd assume. My first past over an XT MB's ISA
extension with AST Rampage, earls EMS standards, (with a MegaByte or
two), was solely for swapping programs through a 384K physical window
about 640K conventions: They were all same-same, or socket-chipped
RAM: no differently for an Intel 386SX motherboard, then, which was
populated by 8 banks of 9 chips to each, with each memory chip being a
requirement of the buyer to install by hand-insertion.

Chip maintenance, therefore, could be quite the extensible operation
when a computer program "crashed". Altogether ignoring a power outage
state, the first indicative is BIOS post faults in accounting memory
population.

Never to fear, though. I don't recall much in the way of established
forums for an Internet, indeed if such existed;- 1200BAUD, though,
might get you into a couple so-called transatlantic forms, mostly for
Britain, as an English speaking capacity. Hardware or its experts
might as easily be deferred to the Bulletin Board Operators, to our
present age and status popularly assessed wiz-kid hackers, sometimes,
even for an odd industrial advocate representative of brandname
engineering.

In any event, I had, perhaps still do, (stuffed away somewhere), a
relic bag of mystical properties containing extra memory chips for
performing the rites of a dead-machine revival. How I got good at it,
and if ever I actually was, apart from never being shorted long from
an actual memory population, that time is too distant to correctly
recall. Chip failure faults, however, then and as now, if ever
anything but surface mounts might occur, (I've an amp or two with
them, seated EPROM and such), is a regular condition from an
inspection and maintenance standpoint. (Cursory and expected, prior
to an impromptu techbench and going after Chinese(TM) cold-solder
joints, or, Zeus forbid, an actual condition requiring synching an
O-Scope waveform or Digital Logic Probes.)