Clarence, in my eyes, you have always carried yourself in the comments as an intelligent man, and I doubt you did "who knows what bad thing to it". I, too, treated mine like a raw egg. This is the THIRD total death of such a machine over here: first, the Book 8088, then the graphics card (tried it again now, positively dead), now that thing with the cable. How INEPT can that hardware design be? My channel is tiny, the people owning that machine type are few - how likely is it that with your case, we have FOUR? Yeah, the reviewers may praise it - but guess what, I say, use it 50 times, and let us see, will they praise it STILL. You are about to see some "last adventures with it" in the future, as I did not yet publish all I did with it, but I also have to say, this is, by now, just disappointing.
Might you please be so kind and tell me a time and a more exact area? I do not think I burnt anything - I did, however, resolder the cable holder places. (The menu would still work, so I doubt I did anything wrong with the soldering.) Basically, the beginning of the video "is the end". (Originally, I had planned to show you as a beginning a fully functional, repaired machine - instead, things went just downhill.) So you can see from about the middle on, after the intro, how the chaos unfolded, also prior to soldering: a mess that merely blurts "No Signal".
@@ninoivanovSure. I can see it at 5:37 for example. It is the big chip right below the connector. It might just be some glue stuck on the IC, but could also be a burn hole.
@@PvdDrieschAh, THAT... Thank you for pointing that out - the surface is slightly scratched. What you see as "blacker" is the real IC body, under some sort of "varnish". It is totally superficial, and in all fairness, I would rather attribute this to my own handling of the innards rather than the machine's production.
So, they had the ability to have a ribbon cable for the keyboard, and yet they chose to use regular wires for a display connector? I don't get it. I've heard most reviewers complain about chips heating up. The slower x86 portable that they make has a socket for a math co-processor and it's not installed by default and probably for a good reason. Because it will heat up enough to melt plastic. I used to make micro computer builds as a hobby in the past, not too different from these machines. I quickly discovered, that heat dissipation was a huge problem. Plastic traps heat and without active cooling or excessive perforation, chips that are resting up against other surfaces or sandwiched between parts will fail prematurely. I even lost mechanical hard drives to heating (that was before the flash storage era). Thank you for making this video and "taking one of the team", so that the rest of us don't buy it.
Too bad I was going to get one, I am happy with the 8088 laptop but my cga graphic chip would get too hot to touch after 10 minutes. I'll see if they make one with that 166 mhz 486 clone board.
Don't know if it matters but the display connector on the board looks like there's a pin or two with a big solder blob. Makes me wonder if there's just poor soldering at play?
Oh, no, that was me. When I gave up on it, I carefully resoldered the pins, too. I mean, if it dies anyway, why not try at least EVERYTHING to save it…
@@ninoivanov Ah.. makes sense. Am sad that it died like that. Especially for you, I know how disappointed I'd be. Though, it does "sound" like it still boots, and from what I saw, the ports on the back have two for 8 and 16 bit ISA slots, so with an adapter(which I saw on the store page when I looked it up on aliexpress) you could at least be able to use it with an external GPU. Though it sadly defeats the entire purpose of a cool little laptop.
*/!\ Never /!\* disconnect LCD display cables without disconnecting battery first and ensure there is no power on the motherboard. Otherwise you will get exactly this a dead graphics controller IC. This is true for all laptops and a common mistake that makes things much worse and more expensive to repair.
Yeah, thank you, but that‘s, like, nice theoretical philosophy, as practically, the cable was basically loose and all the time disconnecting and reconnecting… 😆 But jokes aside: thank you for mentioning it.
@@ninoivanov I think this is a poorly tested product and this issue will be fixed in the next generations. It's also possible it was designed this way on purpose by the manufacturer, build with Planned Obsolescence in mind.
![BOWKYLION - วิงวอน (ex-change) [Official MV]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/cLdnZWDaO-w/mqdefault.jpg)
Rip pocket 386. These things don’t seem very robust, at least to hold up to our sort of probing.
Clarence, in my eyes, you have always carried yourself in the comments as an intelligent man, and I doubt you did "who knows what bad thing to it". I, too, treated mine like a raw egg. This is the THIRD total death of such a machine over here: first, the Book 8088, then the graphics card (tried it again now, positively dead), now that thing with the cable. How INEPT can that hardware design be? My channel is tiny, the people owning that machine type are few - how likely is it that with your case, we have FOUR? Yeah, the reviewers may praise it - but guess what, I say, use it 50 times, and let us see, will they praise it STILL. You are about to see some "last adventures with it" in the future, as I did not yet publish all I did with it, but I also have to say, this is, by now, just disappointing.
Did I miss something in this video? The top right of the larger ICs looks like it has a burn mark.
Might you please be so kind and tell me a time and a more exact area? I do not think I burnt anything - I did, however, resolder the cable holder places. (The menu would still work, so I doubt I did anything wrong with the soldering.) Basically, the beginning of the video "is the end". (Originally, I had planned to show you as a beginning a fully functional, repaired machine - instead, things went just downhill.) So you can see from about the middle on, after the intro, how the chaos unfolded, also prior to soldering: a mess that merely blurts "No Signal".
@@ninoivanovSure. I can see it at 5:37 for example. It is the big chip right below the connector.
It might just be some glue stuck on the IC, but could also be a burn hole.
@@PvdDrieschAh, THAT... Thank you for pointing that out - the surface is slightly scratched. What you see as "blacker" is the real IC body, under some sort of "varnish". It is totally superficial, and in all fairness, I would rather attribute this to my own handling of the innards rather than the machine's production.
So, they had the ability to have a ribbon cable for the keyboard, and yet they chose to use regular wires for a display connector? I don't get it. I've heard most reviewers complain about chips heating up. The slower x86 portable that they make has a socket for a math co-processor and it's not installed by default and probably for a good reason. Because it will heat up enough to melt plastic. I used to make micro computer builds as a hobby in the past, not too different from these machines. I quickly discovered, that heat dissipation was a huge problem. Plastic traps heat and without active cooling or excessive perforation, chips that are resting up against other surfaces or sandwiched between parts will fail prematurely. I even lost mechanical hard drives to heating (that was before the flash storage era). Thank you for making this video and "taking one of the team", so that the rest of us don't buy it.
Too bad I was going to get one, I am happy with the 8088 laptop but my cga graphic chip would get too hot to touch after 10 minutes. I'll see if they make one with that 166 mhz 486 clone board.
Don't know if it matters but the display connector on the board looks like there's a pin or two with a big solder blob. Makes me wonder if there's just poor soldering at play?
Oh, no, that was me. When I gave up on it, I carefully resoldered the pins, too. I mean, if it dies anyway, why not try at least EVERYTHING to save it…
@@ninoivanov Ah.. makes sense. Am sad that it died like that. Especially for you, I know how disappointed I'd be. Though, it does "sound" like it still boots, and from what I saw, the ports on the back have two for 8 and 16 bit ISA slots, so with an adapter(which I saw on the store page when I looked it up on aliexpress) you could at least be able to use it with an external GPU. Though it sadly defeats the entire purpose of a cool little laptop.
*/!\ Never /!\* disconnect LCD display cables without disconnecting battery first and ensure there is no power on the motherboard. Otherwise you will get exactly this a dead graphics controller IC.
This is true for all laptops and a common mistake that makes things much worse and more expensive to repair.
Yeah, thank you, but that‘s, like, nice theoretical philosophy, as practically, the cable was basically loose and all the time disconnecting and reconnecting… 😆 But jokes aside: thank you for mentioning it.
@@ninoivanov I think this is a poorly tested product and this issue will be fixed in the next generations. It's also possible it was designed this way on purpose by the manufacturer, build with Planned Obsolescence in mind.
@RmFrZQ I shall hope your first proposal to be right! 😁