So I begin with my beloved old friend, that got it's death sentence from a 3.6volt CMOS battery.
Last time I ran this system, it worked perfectly well, then I stored it away in my closet for probably over a year before having decided to dig it out today, to be greeting with absolutely nothing. Monitor remained off, no BIOS beep codes to indicate any particular failure, all the keyboard lamp indicators were all lit solid though. So upon taking a peak inside, I see that the battery left a nasty gift inside, a gift of corrosion left over from an acid leak. That got on both front and back of the board in that spot.
Hoping I could aid it by cleaning up the corrosion with vinegar and rubbing alcohol, I managed to clean it up but the traces on the motherboard seem effected, even after having dried, it still doesn't work.
Quite unfortunate, as this was my favorite 486 machine. Here are the specifications:
Am5x86 133MHz - 486 processor.
TMC Research PCI48AF motherboard (Capable of 128MB of RAM, max!)
32MB DRAM + 256K Cache 32K TAG
ATI RAGE LT PRO PCI Graphics Card (4MB VRAM, if I recall)
3DFX Voodoo 2 3D Acceleration Card
Sound Blaster AWE64 Gold with Add-On SIMMConn Memory Adapter expanding the audio RAM up to 28MB!
2GB Transcend Compact Flash Card in place of a Harddrive, using a Syba Compact Flash to IDE adapter, that mounts in the rear brackets.
Memorex 52x CD-ROM/CD-RW Optical Drive.
3.5" 1.44MB Floppy Disk Drive.
5.25" 1.2MB Floppy Disk Drive.
MS-DOS 6.22 and Windows 3.1 with all the appropriate drivers installed.
Well, any replacement motherboards I get for this system, and any other system I obtain, I will get rid of those darned 20+ year old batteries. They ain't nothing but trouble.
So who else has had any experience with batteries ruining something? I know we have a Christmas decoration that the batteries very well corroded the terminals, pretty badly.
However, there have actually been some occasions where the battery acid BURNED THE FUCKING SPRINGS OFF.
