I'm going to pin one comment as a reply to all the people recommending wick over the Soldapult. This was my first attempt at using my newly acquired solder sucker so any problem here "looked like a nail". I've refined my solder sucker technique since then and it's not too much of a problem for me now. Solder braid has it's uses, it's great for bulk removal or on large components. But I don't like when it leaves behind little copper strands. When it comes to working with TSSOPs, QFPs, or SOICs it can short pins on an IC and is a pain to remove: th-cam.com/video/TF_MkvHy8tE/w-d-xo.html So it's not usually my goto solution for removing solder.
Solder braid should not leave strands. If you leave strands behind, you're solder heat is not high enough and you're basically sinking the heat and the solder cools before it's done. There's an art to it all to make it clean. The sucker is more for bulk solder and thru hole in reality.
You are right, but the sheer force of this sucker is just way too much for solder pads. Remember: Soldapult was made for through-hole components when it was invented. In theese times you could have as much force as you wanted to blast off the solder from the pads. 0806 pads are way more fragile and you'll do yourself a big favor if you'd choose solder braid for those.
1. If pads are peeling away it is a clear sign, that soldering temperature was way too high. 2. I had only one desoldering pump that was somehow usable, this model was a "recoilless" type. I've also got one very similar to yours, from Pro'sKit and it is useless. 3. For any SMD parts - soldering iron, braid (wick) and flux is all you need to remove part and clean pads. 4. Old RAM chips were very fragile, and could be easily damaged by overheating and electrostatic charge. 5. And last but not least - when you contaminate a gilded pad with a leaded solder - you're lost, there is no way to clean it. Use Kapton tape to protect such areas.
PCB repair is a fine art. Worked in a board fab for a few years, saw some repairs I didn't think could be done. And yes, I've seen solder suckers rip pads right off before. This is why I use wick instead. The good stuff wick, can't use the cheap shit. I just wish my eyes could keep up. I have a remarkably steady hand and was ace at through hole, but some of the surface mount stuff I can't even see, I had an 8X scope for that.
Hello from Brazil! Congrats on not skipping the troubles you go by in your videos. It really helps people like me who just does this geek stuff as a hobby, and do not have perfect skills.
It's like Druaga1 but with less drugs and smoke. Also feels like there is a better sence of control over what is happening (not saying I don't like Druaga1 I love both channels)
This reminds me of that time Homer wanted to fix that toaster and ended up making a time machine. I really love your videos man. I learn new stuff with them. Keep it up.
Props on you for having the patience to deal with all of that. I think I would have just deemed it broken after the first major problem and be done with it.
Older SMT chips of that generation can fail if they are quickly heated. Over time they absorb moisture into the plastic and die, I believe its through the pin/plastic interface (small gaps allow the ingress). Memory chips like these were shipped in vacuum sealed bags with desiccant. Once the bag was opened there was a limited time period in which they could be used. After that time, the chips had to be heated through a baking process to ensure that any accumulated moisture was removed, then they could be run through a IR or hot air reflow or solder wave assembly process. It may be that blasting it with a hot air gun may have caused the damage from the accumulated moisture built up in the chips; the board was not conformal coated. I would recommend getting a hot air station if you are going to be doing more of this. And maybe looking into some process for baking the chips prior to using the hot air gun... Cheers,
Wow that's some dedication. A friend of mine in school in the 90s had a single 32MB SIMM. It was the most amount of RAM I'd ever seen at the time. Most PCs had 4MB and the school's one server had 16MB.
+Kev711 2001 my technique is to solder a wire to the track and heat it until it melts then slowly let the solder cool a little bit then i cause a fracture of cold welding right at solidification temperature (you probably desoldered something like that before unintentionally).
You win some, you lose some. Just how it is sometimes, particularly in a hobby where trial by fire is pretty much the only kind of trial in many cases. Good to see things worked out in the end!
I learned something important here: using a piece of Kapton tape to protect edge connectors is a damn fine idea. Also thanks, TH-cam's recommendation bar. Also i assembled my solder sucker out of bits of various ones i had, chose the spring such as to reduce recoil. Board whacker is a bad idea. Also if the air velocity i too high, it does more to cool the joint than to remove the solder, so there's two reasons it works better.
I hope you got a hot air station mate. Cause you can control how much heat you can put on the solder paths of a chip. And to remove a chip from a board, all you gotta do is just put some flux on the chip, and gently put the hot air on it and gently pull it off with tweezers.
I've used one of those before at work, they are much better for this sort of task. That's why I went off cam and used my heat gun. But I don't have a hot air "pencil" station yet. It's on my list of items to get at some point, just not at the top. I don't want a cheap garbage one so I'm waiting to get a better one with proper flow and temperature controls. I can make up for lacking it with soldering iron skill for now.
It is good to have a spool of solder wick (braid) handy for cleaning bridges, blobs and generally messy solder joints. Also it would have helped to lift the chips. In a pinch, you can substitute with the braided screen/ground cable on RF coaxial wires. A dab of flux and away goes that extra solder.
I feel your pain brother, I've had a few moments while soldering that I wish that I could have back. BTW, nice work replacing that pad. I've had to do it on my Amiga 4000 where the battery leaked and ate through the trace. Not so easy to do, and that was with an actual trace repair kit.
The RAM module in there looks like the same modules as found in Latitude series of that time. My Latitude XPi CD has two of those plus onboard memory, making for a total of 48MB. Palm OS devices until the IIIx had a slot like this as well, standard size, I'm pretty sure. EDIT: I'm also pretty sure that decoupling capacitors aren't for "providing power when the chip needs it," but more for reducing high frequency noise and disruptions on the power lines to keep the chips from resetting of losing their contents during operation. It's stabilization, not a battery.
Who else i getting blazed? This is a great video, loving it, the part when he took of the copper bit, the silence was deafening. I had the same feeling when I formatted the wrong drive.
Thanks so much for producing this video. I shared this with my 90's computer friends and we all think it's an awesome video. We cringed so hard when you solder-sucked the pad off, but love how you got it back.
i once did something like this, the difference was it was an old 3.1 desktop, it ran parity ram. if you look at a lot of edo 72 pin there are 9 chip pads with 8 being populated, parity ram has 9 as we could not find any "proper" ram only the normal kind i just got 5 sticks of that and sacrificed one stick removing 4 chips from it and putting the extra chip on to the blank socket, at first it failed to boot but it was only due to the solder jumper that bypassed the blank socket, once the new chip was daisy chained on the stick it worked fine, 64 megs of "parity" ram way bigger than stock and i doubt 64m was available when new, but if it was it would have been very expensive.
LOL, omg the folder name is awesome! You know everybody is going to put all that stuff into a folder and label it "important stuff" anyways, they just did it for ya. Also, poor little ram chip. You put that guy through hell.
6:43 "...then I will remove that resistor and run this again to verify that just changing that will make it register it with more RAM." Or less RAM, even.
I recognize that type of soldering handle. Metcal my dude! I love it. Also if you want to flow a bunch of pins like that, using the big fat chisel works better.
Thanks for showing all your bad soldering. I have been there and would not like some of the early jobs I did to be up on the internet lol. The one thing that I really think is a good idea to get (yet still haven't gotten) is Hot Tweezers. Being able to pinch each side of a SMD and lift to remove is so handy, and since they are long nose you can pickup multiple pins on either side. While I love my chisel tip I still like a small standard iron tip for being able to use just the tip or the side to control heat and be very selective with what I heat up
I remember transplanting a 486slc CPU to my Toshiba T1850 (386SX-25) using a decent-ish Tenma adjustable temp iron, solder wick, and a precision screwdriver. The screwdriver was basically a chisel. I'd hammer the top of it to bust the pins on the CPU loose at the toe end after wicking the solder. The results once I got the CPUs swapped? It was like 20% slower. I found a DOS file to enable the L1 cache on the 486SLC and the machine was almost 4x as fast. I set up a keyboard shortcut to run the cache enabler after resuming from standby. This was at 25MHz. I considered bumping it to the 33MHz the CPU was designed for, but couldn't find the right clock crystal and the rest of the system might not have taken a 33% overclock. DOOM ran fine after the upgrade. I only did that risky surgery because I already had a newer, and faster, laptop (which I overclocked a little bit from 120MHz (Toshiba 420CDT) to 133MHz for the bus speed increase. 166MHz worked, but it ran too hot at that speed.
Hey man I applaud your Ingenuity and I expect to see another attempt at this you just need to keep working at it don't worry about making mistakes everyone is human
I enjoyed the video, but dude... a search on google for 72 pin laptop DIMM will tell you that these are just 72 pin SO-DIMMs. Nothing special at all. It looks like they come in sizes between 4 and 64 megs. I wonder if the 24 MB max is an actual limit of the controller used in that machine, or if 16 MB chips were the largest available at the time of printing... something to test for the future vid, perhaps?
I would assume the actual max is probably 32MB, with two 16MB sticks. The 24MB limitation is because the on board module is 8MB, and yes at the time 16MB would have been the largest (commonly available anyway) stick. Caveat - sometimes you can use larger sticks down the road, but at the time of manufacture that configuration is untested, so it's a bit of a crapshoot. Provided the BIOS isn't artificially limiting anything, you could use up to whatever the chipset's max would be, which would be the absolute upper limit. If you wanted to go even dumber, since this was before integrated NB and what not, you could conceivably switch out the northbridge / memory controller and maybe push further, but even that is limited by what cpu's said NB supports, and bios support to recognize and operate the chipset.
* laptop SIMMs. (I don't think SOSIMM was a term... maybe mini-SIMM?) DIMMs only became a thing with mid-generation and later Pentiums. If you're searching for DIMMs / SODIMMs in that size range or for 486 / early Pentium laptops (or desktops), you're most likely going to be disappointed, either from a lack of results, or something incompatible turning up in the mail. At best, you're going to get all the misspelled and incorrectly listed dregs (with the price either being actually pleasingly low, as no-one else will have bid, or stupidly inflated because the seller overestimated the value but there are literally no other options) when if you used the right terms you'd have dozens to pick from and could almost guarantee getting it at a fair price. 72-pin is 32-bit tech, thus SIMM. And I have a feeling that pin count only actually applies to desktop modules anyway, or laptops that take the easy route and just use desktop memory parts. For a subnotebook like this, you definitely need specific reduced-outline (and likely different pinout) laptop parts. And yeah, if you can afford to experiment, in a case like this it might be worth trying a 32mb module and seeing if you can get up to 40mb. I know that's a config that at least a few machines officially supported (it is, after all, a simple doubling of the maximum situation described in the manual - 4mb onboard and 16mb upgrade installed), and 64mb total seems to be a common claim for 486 desktop boards in the DX2 / DX4 era, though some are allegedly capable of 128mb either officially or otherwise. Which, as they tended to have four sockets, would match with a laptop offering two (the virtual one onboard, and the actual upgrade slot) and technically capable of either 32 or 64mb total, should you also go Beyond The Impossible to upgrade the onboard memory. The caveat in those cases is that it might actually end up harming performance - there's not much software you can run on a 486 that can make meaningful use of more than maybe 32mb, and once you reach 64mb, never mind exceeding it, the common 486 chipsets have difficultly cacheing the full amount. Which means you could well end up with large parts of in-use memory being uncached, and the computer will actually seem to run slower with the larger memory count than it did with just 16, or certainly something in the 24 to 48mb range. Maybe if you had a really good memory manager overlay program it could specifically allocate hard drive RAMcache to those areas (as it doesn't really benefit from CPU or L2 motherboard cache the same way programs running from RAM do themselves) and limit program loading to the cached area, which would give you a considerable loading speed boost for any data that has to be repeated loaded in (and if that's a full 32mb, well... a great deal of 486-era software is much smaller than that. You could probably fit most of DOS, Windows 3.1 and 1993-era Office into that, and certainly the OS plus Works wouldn't even touch the sides). Even if you're running an SD card or other flash device, and so not worrying too much about the media speed or access times, the IDE interface will be, at best, DMA-16, and in some cases either a slower DMA or even rotten old PIO mode, so having the data already sitting in memory would be a distinct advantage.
I honestly can't think of any Program or Game of this Era which could use this amount of RAM. So you basically wasted precious Time and Money on a pointless Effort. On the other Hand you produced an interesting Video! 3.3/5V would watch again :]
That's not excessive. 24gb in a Latitude 7080 is excessive! That's my daily beast of a laptop. Granted mine has an i7 not a 486. But, I remember when Gateway made these laptops. I have a Toshiba of the same era, and one with a k6-2 333. Yes, Toshiba made a laptop with a AMD k6-2 cpu. But both a small little tanks. I have a grand 16mb in my older Toshiba, and 48mb in my newer one. I use it to run things like BeOS 5.0.4. It actually works just fine. Of course a modern webpage would eat both of them whole, but that's not why I have such things. Anyway, I was highly impressed with your attempt here. It takes some balls to risk something this rare.
Those zero ohm resistors are actually decoupling capacitors. That’s what they’re marked as “C1, C2, etc” instead of “R1, R2, etc”. They connect from VCC to ground to provide a little bit of extra juice for each chip so neighbours’ power use won’t affect each other.
You should be able to install Windows 98 with no problem. The biggest requirements 98 had over 95 was a math co-processor. I owned a computer with a 486sx2 processor installed and that was the only barrier that it couldn't overcome. Installing Internet Explorer 4 gave my computer the Windows 98 look and feel I was looking for. :)
xX_SpeedyScout_Xx be patient, it will come up. Also, some interyoutubers work and project seems to be a great idea to build interest among inter related subject Chanels. Like techmoan and the 8 bit guy to sometimes collaborate together...
Over the weekend destroyed a 486 133MHz chip, trying to do an SMD replacement job on a 5V to 3.3V adapter. I knew the odds of success were low. Lifted a few pads off the PCB when removing old chip, and that was that. There is no way I can fix it with copper strips. Pitch is too fine. I could attempt a botch wire job, but then I'd be risking the motherboard. Sometimes it's best to admit defeat and move on, before more damage is done.
I've never soldered memory onto Simms before. I have soldered memory on top and bent out and address pin and wired it across the board for memory upgrades in machines which were measured in dozens of K of ram.
In the old ad it says: "Choice of Desktop Infrared Receptor OR External Floppy Drive"... guess the preowner chose the floppy instead of the ir receptor... that's why you don't have it.
Great soldering skills. I will have to practice and equip myself propely!!! Looking at what you're able to do is really motivating! I would had been curious to lookup deeper into spec sheet of the chipset itself to see if the 24 mb is only The manufacturer limit written in the manual or if this limit comes from the chipset itself. It is probably unlikely that the chipset would have a 24 mb memory limit as this number isn't a multiple of 2. Maby that internally on the mother board there is on the other side some unpopulated spaces as well or that somewhere in the layout there would had been room for another row of chips onboard that haven't been drawn on the pcb. Imagine it with 32mb of ram.
This is something I’ve always wondered about. Say you found a ram module that hit the silicone lottery, but you want to use it on a different part, higher density ram stick or even video ram put on a better gpu. What about replacing vrm from a better board to a board with better features but weaker vrm? I’ve always been kind of surprised there aren’t videos on TH-cam of extreme over clockers doing stuff like that, and it’s made me assume it’s probably not possible.
OK, at about six minutes in, I'm a bit confused. The thing you took out of the laptop looked like an entirely normal mid-90s laptop SIMM. What was the problem with just buying a random 16mb one from eBay and trying it? Worked fine for my similar-vintage Acer... Was it just for the challenge of soldering on the additional chips? I mean, I'm impressed... just puzzled.
He didn't know that, and probably saw in the manual: ''use only our very expensive special RAM!''. Many people at the time (and still to this day) were swindled by that, so he tried this extreme experiment. Yes most STI-DIMMs of that era will work in most machines. You don't need to search for RAM for your specific machine - if it fits in the slot then it'll probably work.
sl9sl9 Some brands of the era had tiny differences to detect wrong brand RAM modules. Large 3rd party RAM brands like Kingston offered separate modules for each such brand.
That's as maybe, but... yknow... Google. It's so much easier to learn lots of stuff about technical subjects so quickly now. Five minutes on a forum would probably have cleared up the question, rather than just blindly typing the same search terms you'd use for a modern laptop into eBay and then being surprised when you find relatively little suitable for a 20-year-old machine.
I would like to point out, the type of ram module is an STI-Dimm (for current day PCs there is typically just "DIMM" memory, and current day laptops use SODIMM) if you can find a module of STI-DIMM you will likely be able to get the laptop back up, and if you're lucky and find a 16MB module you'll solve the whole problem you had in this video. Hope this helps!!
Solder suckers have a specific job, punching out through hole components, there's a little piston that protrudes when you suck to punch the lead through the board
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I'm going to pin one comment as a reply to all the people recommending wick over the Soldapult. This was my first attempt at using my newly acquired solder sucker so any problem here "looked like a nail". I've refined my solder sucker technique since then and it's not too much of a problem for me now. Solder braid has it's uses, it's great for bulk removal or on large components. But I don't like when it leaves behind little copper strands. When it comes to working with TSSOPs, QFPs, or SOICs it can short pins on an IC and is a pain to remove: th-cam.com/video/TF_MkvHy8tE/w-d-xo.html So it's not usually my goto solution for removing solder.
Solder braid should not leave strands. If you leave strands behind, you're solder heat is not high enough and you're basically sinking the heat and the solder cools before it's done. There's an art to it all to make it clean. The sucker is more for bulk solder and thru hole in reality.
Make sure to grab some flux for those delicated parts. It helps a lot.
Lord, fix that description it just makes you look like you skipped primary school. It's *to its maximum*.
I've never seen somebody doing component level board repair professionally use a sucker, but anyways: footguns sometimes make for great content :)
You are right, but the sheer force of this sucker is just way too much for solder pads. Remember: Soldapult was made for through-hole components when it was invented. In theese times you could have as much force as you wanted to blast off the solder from the pads. 0806 pads are way more fragile and you'll do yourself a big favor if you'd choose solder braid for those.
1. If pads are peeling away it is a clear sign, that soldering temperature was way too high.
2. I had only one desoldering pump that was somehow usable, this model was a "recoilless" type. I've also got one very similar to yours, from Pro'sKit and it is useless.
3. For any SMD parts - soldering iron, braid (wick) and flux is all you need to remove part and clean pads.
4. Old RAM chips were very fragile, and could be easily damaged by overheating and electrostatic charge.
5. And last but not least - when you contaminate a gilded pad with a leaded solder - you're lost, there is no way to clean it. Use Kapton tape to protect such areas.
PCB repair is a fine art. Worked in a board fab for a few years, saw some repairs I didn't think could be done. And yes, I've seen solder suckers rip pads right off before. This is why I use wick instead. The good stuff wick, can't use the cheap shit. I just wish my eyes could keep up. I have a remarkably steady hand and was ace at through hole, but some of the surface mount stuff I can't even see, I had an 8X scope for that.
Hello from Brazil!
Congrats on not skipping the troubles you go by in your videos. It really helps people like me who just does this geek stuff as a hobby, and do not have perfect skills.
"uh-oh I lifted a pad" - proceeds to braze the hood skin of a '57 Chevy in its place instead
It's like Druaga1 but with less drugs and smoke. Also feels like there is a better sence of control over what is happening
(not saying I don't like Druaga1 I love both channels)
don't forget the blue table
FRIENDLY JAPANESE BUSINESSMAN Excuse me? I am fully aware that he doesn't do actual drugs and yes I DO get his humour.
Druaga doppelganger
stop following me sir
Sign me up for a retro tech channel with casual drugs!
This reminds me of that time Homer wanted to fix that toaster and ended up making a time machine. I really love your videos man. I learn new stuff with them. Keep it up.
This is a really long and convoluted way of buying something off of eBay!
That long 7 second pause "It was at that moment..." lol
Props on you for having the patience to deal with all of that.
I think I would have just deemed it broken after the first major problem and be done with it.
I'm glad I was introduced to your content by Druaga1. I like the more technical descriptions you give while going through the video.
Older SMT chips of that generation can fail if they are quickly heated. Over time they absorb moisture into the plastic and die, I believe its through the pin/plastic interface (small gaps allow the ingress). Memory chips like these were shipped in vacuum sealed bags with desiccant. Once the bag was opened there was a limited time period in which they could be used. After that time, the chips had to be heated through a baking process to ensure that any accumulated moisture was removed, then they could be run through a IR or hot air reflow or solder wave assembly process.
It may be that blasting it with a hot air gun may have caused the damage from the accumulated moisture built up in the chips; the board was not conformal coated.
I would recommend getting a hot air station if you are going to be doing more of this. And maybe looking into some process for baking the chips prior to using the hot air gun...
Cheers,
Wow that's some dedication. A friend of mine in school in the 90s had a single 32MB SIMM. It was the most amount of RAM I'd ever seen at the time. Most PCs had 4MB and the school's one server had 16MB.
You took the bullet for us . I will always check the voltage of chips when I do a repair !
And THATS why you should use solder wick
even if he did he still would need to redo the gold plating and the globs of solder left on the pads then he tries to insert lol
+Kev711 2001 my technique is to solder a wire to the track and heat it until it melts then slowly let the solder cool a little bit then i cause a fracture of cold welding right at solidification temperature (you probably desoldered something like that before unintentionally).
+Kev711 2001 gold doesn't stick as much to the solder then the solder is almost at melting point.
john wick*
You win some, you lose some. Just how it is sometimes, particularly in a hobby where trial by fire is pretty much the only kind of trial in many cases. Good to see things worked out in the end!
I learned something important here: using a piece of Kapton tape to protect edge connectors is a damn fine idea.
Also thanks, TH-cam's recommendation bar.
Also i assembled my solder sucker out of bits of various ones i had, chose the spring such as to reduce recoil. Board whacker is a bad idea. Also if the air velocity i too high, it does more to cool the joint than to remove the solder, so there's two reasons it works better.
I hope you got a hot air station mate. Cause you can control how much heat you can put on the solder paths of a chip. And to remove a chip from a board, all you gotta do is just put some flux on the chip, and gently put the hot air on it and gently pull it off with tweezers.
I've used one of those before at work, they are much better for this sort of task. That's why I went off cam and used my heat gun. But I don't have a hot air "pencil" station yet. It's on my list of items to get at some point, just not at the top. I don't want a cheap garbage one so I'm waiting to get a better one with proper flow and temperature controls. I can make up for lacking it with soldering iron skill for now.
It is good to have a spool of solder wick (braid) handy for cleaning bridges, blobs and generally messy solder joints. Also it would have helped to lift the chips. In a pinch, you can substitute with the braided screen/ground cable on RF coaxial wires. A dab of flux and away goes that extra solder.
the solution to the problem here is to use a razorblade to cut the solder, i fucked up my gpu like this and the scraping method works wonders.
I feel your pain brother, I've had a few moments while soldering that I wish that I could have back.
BTW, nice work replacing that pad. I've had to do it on my Amiga 4000 where the battery leaked and ate through the trace. Not so easy to do, and that was with an actual trace repair kit.
thankfully you just wrecked a 72-pin SO-DIMM and nothing weird and rare.
hey Druaga2
i was about to comment the same, he sounds the same, acts the same, the format is similar, druaga had a clone while he was high?
That's the same thing I was thinking haha!
The RAM module in there looks like the same modules as found in Latitude series of that time. My Latitude XPi CD has two of those plus onboard memory, making for a total of 48MB. Palm OS devices until the IIIx had a slot like this as well, standard size, I'm pretty sure.
EDIT: I'm also pretty sure that decoupling capacitors aren't for "providing power when the chip needs it," but more for reducing high frequency noise and disruptions on the power lines to keep the chips from resetting of losing their contents during operation. It's stabilization, not a battery.
Who else i getting blazed? This is a great video, loving it, the part when he took of the copper bit, the silence was deafening. I had the same feeling when I formatted the wrong drive.
Thats some serious dedication
You and Druaga are my favorite TH-camrs. Seriously, videos like this remind me of the golden days of TH-cam.
in goolden days widoe would have to be cut in 3 minute segments. and have cats. If you think about later it would be 5 minutes.
I've got an Acer laptop that uses this kind of RAM. This ram isn't proprietary to Gateway, it's just a less common type of RAM
Acer bought Gateway in 2007, so it might be still proprietary to Gateway, and they perhaps used the same modules? I'm open to being corrected.
@@fabian999ification This is a 90's laptop, made over 10 years prior to that even, I highly doubt it's related ^^
@@DxDeksor Ah I see, that makes sense. Sorry for the late reply. Idk what I was on about, your reply makes a lot more sense lol
Thanks so much for producing this video. I shared this with my 90's computer friends and we all think it's an awesome video. We cringed so hard when you solder-sucked the pad off, but love how you got it back.
Hey jokers, Druaga2 here
i once did something like this, the difference was it was an old 3.1 desktop, it ran parity ram.
if you look at a lot of edo 72 pin there are 9 chip pads with 8 being populated, parity ram has 9 as we could not find any "proper" ram only the normal kind i just got 5 sticks of that and sacrificed one stick removing 4 chips from it and putting the extra chip on to the blank socket, at first it failed to boot but it was only due to the solder jumper that bypassed the blank socket, once the new chip was daisy chained on the stick it worked fine, 64 megs of "parity" ram way bigger than stock and i doubt 64m was available when new, but if it was it would have been very expensive.
LOL, omg the folder name is awesome! You know everybody is going to put all that stuff into a folder and label it "important stuff" anyways, they just did it for ya.
Also, poor little ram chip. You put that guy through hell.
that whole module has seen worse than hell lol
6:43 "...then I will remove that resistor and run this again to verify that just changing that will make it register it with more RAM."
Or less RAM, even.
I definitely admire your testicular fortitude for trying this out. Most impressive!
No built in disc drive. Wow, this thing was ahead of its time, truly.
I recognize that type of soldering handle. Metcal my dude! I love it. Also if you want to flow a bunch of pins like that, using the big fat chisel works better.
Personally id use a heatgun or an oven
Thanks for showing all your bad soldering. I have been there and would not like some of the early jobs I did to be up on the internet lol. The one thing that I really think is a good idea to get (yet still haven't gotten) is Hot Tweezers. Being able to pinch each side of a SMD and lift to remove is so handy, and since they are long nose you can pickup multiple pins on either side. While I love my chisel tip I still like a small standard iron tip for being able to use just the tip or the side to control heat and be very selective with what I heat up
It was so stressful watching the video. My hat is off to yo sir. It takes some guts to do that to something that rare.
30 minutos de video para que al final se rinda y compra otros modulos de RAM por ebay 10/10
la forma dificil decia no la ideal
The absolute suspense from first use of the solder sucker to something actually going wrong. On the edge of my seat here.
I remember transplanting a 486slc CPU to my Toshiba T1850 (386SX-25) using a decent-ish Tenma adjustable temp iron, solder wick, and a precision screwdriver. The screwdriver was basically a chisel. I'd hammer the top of it to bust the pins on the CPU loose at the toe end after wicking the solder. The results once I got the CPUs swapped? It was like 20% slower. I found a DOS file to enable the L1 cache on the 486SLC and the machine was almost 4x as fast. I set up a keyboard shortcut to run the cache enabler after resuming from standby. This was at 25MHz. I considered bumping it to the 33MHz the CPU was designed for, but couldn't find the right clock crystal and the rest of the system might not have taken a 33% overclock. DOOM ran fine after the upgrade. I only did that risky surgery because I already had a newer, and faster, laptop (which I overclocked a little bit from 120MHz (Toshiba 420CDT) to 133MHz for the bus speed increase. 166MHz worked, but it ran too hot at that speed.
a guy having fun with a camera in his workshop i love this kind of free form content
Subscribed because of this video. Love the channel
Learned something new today, gj fixing that pad!
Hey man I applaud your Ingenuity and I expect to see another attempt at this you just need to keep working at it don't worry about making mistakes everyone is human
Love your voice when you explain ... Damn you should join dubbing industry...
I enjoyed the video, but dude... a search on google for 72 pin laptop DIMM will tell you that these are just 72 pin SO-DIMMs. Nothing special at all. It looks like they come in sizes between 4 and 64 megs. I wonder if the 24 MB max is an actual limit of the controller used in that machine, or if 16 MB chips were the largest available at the time of printing... something to test for the future vid, perhaps?
I would assume the actual max is probably 32MB, with two 16MB sticks. The 24MB limitation is because the on board module is 8MB, and yes at the time 16MB would have been the largest (commonly available anyway) stick.
Caveat - sometimes you can use larger sticks down the road, but at the time of manufacture that configuration is untested, so it's a bit of a crapshoot. Provided the BIOS isn't artificially limiting anything, you could use up to whatever the chipset's max would be, which would be the absolute upper limit. If you wanted to go even dumber, since this was before integrated NB and what not, you could conceivably switch out the northbridge / memory controller and maybe push further, but even that is limited by what cpu's said NB supports, and bios support to recognize and operate the chipset.
Thats what i was thinking while i was watching this
* laptop SIMMs.
(I don't think SOSIMM was a term... maybe mini-SIMM?)
DIMMs only became a thing with mid-generation and later Pentiums. If you're searching for DIMMs / SODIMMs in that size range or for 486 / early Pentium laptops (or desktops), you're most likely going to be disappointed, either from a lack of results, or something incompatible turning up in the mail. At best, you're going to get all the misspelled and incorrectly listed dregs (with the price either being actually pleasingly low, as no-one else will have bid, or stupidly inflated because the seller overestimated the value but there are literally no other options) when if you used the right terms you'd have dozens to pick from and could almost guarantee getting it at a fair price.
72-pin is 32-bit tech, thus SIMM. And I have a feeling that pin count only actually applies to desktop modules anyway, or laptops that take the easy route and just use desktop memory parts. For a subnotebook like this, you definitely need specific reduced-outline (and likely different pinout) laptop parts.
And yeah, if you can afford to experiment, in a case like this it might be worth trying a 32mb module and seeing if you can get up to 40mb. I know that's a config that at least a few machines officially supported (it is, after all, a simple doubling of the maximum situation described in the manual - 4mb onboard and 16mb upgrade installed), and 64mb total seems to be a common claim for 486 desktop boards in the DX2 / DX4 era, though some are allegedly capable of 128mb either officially or otherwise. Which, as they tended to have four sockets, would match with a laptop offering two (the virtual one onboard, and the actual upgrade slot) and technically capable of either 32 or 64mb total, should you also go Beyond The Impossible to upgrade the onboard memory. The caveat in those cases is that it might actually end up harming performance - there's not much software you can run on a 486 that can make meaningful use of more than maybe 32mb, and once you reach 64mb, never mind exceeding it, the common 486 chipsets have difficultly cacheing the full amount. Which means you could well end up with large parts of in-use memory being uncached, and the computer will actually seem to run slower with the larger memory count than it did with just 16, or certainly something in the 24 to 48mb range.
Maybe if you had a really good memory manager overlay program it could specifically allocate hard drive RAMcache to those areas (as it doesn't really benefit from CPU or L2 motherboard cache the same way programs running from RAM do themselves) and limit program loading to the cached area, which would give you a considerable loading speed boost for any data that has to be repeated loaded in (and if that's a full 32mb, well... a great deal of 486-era software is much smaller than that. You could probably fit most of DOS, Windows 3.1 and 1993-era Office into that, and certainly the OS plus Works wouldn't even touch the sides). Even if you're running an SD card or other flash device, and so not worrying too much about the media speed or access times, the IDE interface will be, at best, DMA-16, and in some cases either a slower DMA or even rotten old PIO mode, so having the data already sitting in memory would be a distinct advantage.
You just got another subscriber mate. thank you for the content!
I honestly can't think of any Program or Game of this Era which could use this amount of RAM.
So you basically wasted precious Time and Money on a pointless Effort.
On the other Hand you produced an interesting Video!
3.3/5V would watch again :]
The reason was that Window 98 needs 24MB of RAM. But in the end I decided to leave it as a Win 95 machine since it has a bit less overhead.
3:19 what? that era of computer? there's almost 10 years between these two machines
That's not excessive. 24gb in a Latitude 7080 is excessive! That's my daily beast of a laptop. Granted mine has an i7 not a 486. But, I remember when Gateway made these laptops. I have a Toshiba of the same era, and one with a k6-2 333. Yes, Toshiba made a laptop with a AMD k6-2 cpu. But both a small little tanks. I have a grand 16mb in my older Toshiba, and 48mb in my newer one. I use it to run things like BeOS 5.0.4. It actually works just fine. Of course a modern webpage would eat both of them whole, but that's not why I have such things. Anyway, I was highly impressed with your attempt here. It takes some balls to risk something this rare.
When the new RAM worked it was very satisfying!
This "not gonna be able to find info" bit is basically every carrier special phone in a nutshell
Cheapo phones that like 5 people own
"HEY GUYS COME GET THIS 'DEAL' ON THIS RANDO FUCKIN PHONE"
BLU is the fucking master of this, they'll just release random OEM phones that are exactly like another without any fucking documentation on them
Those zero ohm resistors are actually decoupling capacitors. That’s what they’re marked as “C1, C2, etc” instead of “R1, R2, etc”. They connect from VCC to ground to provide a little bit of extra juice for each chip so neighbours’ power use won’t affect each other.
Still odd that there is no contact to the GND-pin(s). Perhaps the GND-pin on the slot-connector is on the other side...?
You should be able to install Windows 98 with no problem. The biggest requirements 98 had over 95 was a math co-processor. I owned a computer with a 486sx2 processor installed and that was the only barrier that it couldn't overcome. Installing Internet Explorer 4 gave my computer the Windows 98 look and feel I was looking for. :)
you short circuit where the CAPs was to be installed, no just the jumpers.
Why don't you have more subscribers? Your content is just.... AMAZING!
coz youtu be would rather u watch loganpaul
xX_SpeedyScout_Xx be patient, it will come up. Also, some interyoutubers work and project seems to be a great idea to build interest among inter related subject Chanels. Like techmoan and the 8 bit guy to sometimes collaborate together...
Came here because that RAM expansion lid looked similar to the one on my Gateway 2000 handbook 486 :)
It's not a Druaga video unless something goes wrong or doesn't work the first time. Well done Druaga2!
Incredible work
Over the weekend destroyed a 486 133MHz chip, trying to do an SMD replacement job on a 5V to 3.3V adapter. I knew the odds of success were low. Lifted a few pads off the PCB when removing old chip, and that was that. There is no way I can fix it with copper strips. Pitch is too fine. I could attempt a botch wire job, but then I'd be risking the motherboard. Sometimes it's best to admit defeat and move on, before more damage is done.
I thought that I dumb enough to destroy old good things with crazy experiments, but seems I am not. You won the first place, take your cup, winner.
i love how you number the videos using hex
This made me feel better about my soldering skills :P
Simply fun to watch... Subbed
I've never soldered memory onto Simms before. I have soldered memory on top and bent out and address pin and wired it across the board for memory upgrades in machines which were measured in dozens of K of ram.
Great channel. You really know how to make electronics fun
Dramatic and educational. Do more videos, please🤗
fuck, never has a ram repair ever been so bloody epic.....
Thanks 4 the vid. I have one also, and as you stated, there aren't many out there. Nor is there much information.
I love this video!
I found this video strangely compelling simply because this is the sort of hellishness I tend to put myself through from time to time. XD
The infrared to serial dongle can be replaced by any IrDA adapter, you can still find them for serial or get a more modern USB IrDA adapter.
12:26 it was at this moment he realized he fucked up.
I like how it says SIMPLE TECH on the board :D
I'm sad that didn't work. I would've loved to see something like that actually end up working just as a proof of concept
I love it. Doing it for the sake of doing it, no other reason.
In the old ad it says: "Choice of Desktop Infrared Receptor OR External Floppy Drive"... guess the preowner chose the floppy instead of the ir receptor... that's why you don't have it.
12:30 I know that death silence moment when you remove a pad on a PCB...
love that one! :D very entertaining!
Great soldering skills. I will have to practice and equip myself propely!!! Looking at what you're able to do is really motivating!
I would had been curious to lookup deeper into spec sheet of the chipset itself to see if the 24 mb is only
The manufacturer limit written in the manual or if this limit comes from the chipset itself. It is probably unlikely that the chipset would have a 24 mb memory limit as this number isn't a multiple of 2. Maby that internally on the mother board there is on the other side some unpopulated spaces as well or that somewhere in the layout there would had been room for another row of chips onboard that haven't been drawn on the pcb. Imagine it with 32mb of ram.
This is something I'm curious about as well. I haven't opened this laptop yet to see what's inside. One day I will.
holy shit this is cool
Great content. Thank you
You got a little mahogany on that last memory check success don't lie lol!!
Awesome video
Great vid man
Roses are red
You're Druaga2
I'm bad at poems
Make more videos
+1!
FRIENDLY JAPANESE BUSINESSMAN I don’t think you understand jokes
I am glad you are able to use WIndows 95 again :D
"You just voided your warranty" xD
Oh boy, i have some old 16, 24 and 32 megabyte modules lying around
This is something I’ve always wondered about. Say you found a ram module that hit the silicone lottery, but you want to use it on a different part, higher density ram stick or even video ram put on a better gpu. What about replacing vrm from a better board to a board with better features but weaker vrm? I’ve always been kind of surprised there aren’t videos on TH-cam of extreme over clockers doing stuff like that, and it’s made me assume it’s probably not possible.
You deserve another thumb up... Good video.
I enjoyed very much your failure. Learned a lot. Thank you.
Very interesting! Just subbed
get this man a hot air station
OK, at about six minutes in, I'm a bit confused. The thing you took out of the laptop looked like an entirely normal mid-90s laptop SIMM. What was the problem with just buying a random 16mb one from eBay and trying it? Worked fine for my similar-vintage Acer... Was it just for the challenge of soldering on the additional chips?
I mean, I'm impressed... just puzzled.
He didn't know that, and probably saw in the manual: ''use only our very expensive special RAM!''. Many people at the time (and still to this day) were swindled by that, so he tried this extreme experiment. Yes most STI-DIMMs of that era will work in most machines. You don't need to search for RAM for your specific machine - if it fits in the slot then it'll probably work.
sl9sl9 Some brands of the era had tiny differences to detect wrong brand RAM modules. Large 3rd party RAM brands like Kingston offered separate modules for each such brand.
That's as maybe, but... yknow... Google. It's so much easier to learn lots of stuff about technical subjects so quickly now. Five minutes on a forum would probably have cleared up the question, rather than just blindly typing the same search terms you'd use for a modern laptop into eBay and then being surprised when you find relatively little suitable for a 20-year-old machine.
I would like to point out, the type of ram module is an STI-Dimm (for current day PCs there is typically just "DIMM" memory, and current day laptops use SODIMM) if you can find a module of STI-DIMM you will likely be able to get the laptop back up, and if you're lucky and find a 16MB module you'll solve the whole problem you had in this video. Hope this helps!!
Use a brick to when de-soldering the chips with a heat gun, genious!
I really miss the Cow Spots (TM)... :'(
@17:11 I actually let out a breath of air, I didn't know I was holding it in, glad it worked, for a minute I was watching heart surgery.
great job
Solder suckers have a specific job, punching out through hole components, there's a little piston that protrudes when you suck to punch the lead through the board