-=> Roy J. Tellason said to Greg Mayman
 -=> about "SILICON CHIP ON LINE" on 03-17-04  04:06.....
 
 GM> If so is there anyway to bypass the battery or hook in an external 
 GM> one?

 RJT> I don't know.  I've heard that *some* people have had luck with
 RJT> opening those things up,  and hooking other batteries up to it,  though
 RJT> I don't know how you'd go about such a thing.

I checked that site that Jay Emrie gave me.

The CMOS RAM turns out to be also in the module, so there was no
need to bring the voltage out of the chip. I confirmed that with
my multimeter -- for a computer that failed less than 12 months
ago, there should still be at least 1v or so in the battery, and
if it had been on one of the pins I might have been able to feed
voltage in and make it work...

...yeah, I know they probably would have put a diode in series
with it just to prevent external voltage getting in, but you have
to try don't you?

But none of the pins showed any voltage at all.

It's a pity that they didn't make the module with a pop-top so
you could remove the batteries and replace them. But that kind of
thinking didn't seem to apply... "it'll last 10 years and that
should be long enough for anyone."

Look at all the problems with the Y2K date thing, that were still
being promulgated as late as 1990, or that were known about but
no-one bothered to fix them until the last minute.

10 years seems such a looong time in the future, but it is but a
moment in the past. I have gear much older than that....

 RJT> I had a similar situation with a Compaq,  where I went looking for
 RJT> what could be salvaged,  and the HD was about the extent of what was
 RJT> standard.  The FDD was not the usual size,  and nothing else in there
 RJT> turned out to be very usable,  so I yanked a few parts and tossed the
 RJT> rest into my "scrap boards" box.  Maybe I'll get more
useful out of it,
 RJT> maybe not,  I guess time will tell.

I had a Compaq 386 given to me, and I was starting to set up the
way I wanted it when the HDD driver failed. And of course it was
a chip soldered into the motherboard! The only bits I salvaged
were the two HDDs. As in your case the perfectly good 3.5" FDD is
non-standard mounting!

The same with this EPSON computer.  I might be able to rework
their power supplies into something useful... there's an article
in Silcon Chip on how to rewind the transformer and rework the
PCB for a 12v high current supply.

   ,-./\
  /     \ From Greg Mayman, in beautiful Adelaide, South Australia
  \_,-*_/    "Queen City of The South"    34:55 S  138:36 E
       v

... Only fools and politicians expect it all to be easy.
___ Blue Wave/386 v2.30

--- FLAME v2.0/b