TCS - Refurbishing Computers

Refurbishing Computers

by Don Singleton
Tulsa Computer Society
From the November 1998 issue of the I/O Port Newsletter

James Kirkpatrick, Jim Erwin, Gary Mote, Bill Van Drihle, and Fermin Olivera were at the September 5 meeting of the Refurbishing Computers group. We continued setting up test beds so we could test each of the components we had donated, that had been taken out of old computers, so we would know the components were good. Jim was getting things all set for his return to Belize, so we helped him by making available any operational computers and spare parts we had which he could use. As we reported in an earlier report, Jim is with a Missionary Mission to Belieze (a country just south of Mexico) and they are setting up the Belize Bible & Trade School, where they will be training disadvantaged youths in Belize to be able to work on computers (among other trade skills). He will be setting up a Refurbishing Project, just like ours, and will use that effort to train the students in Belize. Jim spent as much time as he could afford while in the US with us in our Refurbishing Project, to learn as much as he could, and Gary spent even more time with Jim, getting him set up with some software he could use in Belize.

James Keith, Gary Ludwig, and Mark Wakefield were at the September 26 meeting. Mark runs Sparko Electronics in Mounds, and learned that we really needed someone experienced in monitor repair. He got two VGA monitors working that were previously almost not useable, and we are sure that he will be invaluable as we continue working on machines. Gary introduced us to INTERLNK and INTERSRV, two programs that were added beginning with Dos 6.0, which I had never heard of before. If you run Interlnk on one machine, and Intersrv on the other, and connect them with a lap link cable (either serial to serial, or parallel to parallel), you can transfer programs across without a Local Area Network. Gary had built a CD with disk images of various configurations, ranging from DOS for a 286, through several versions of Windows 3.1 (including one that uses a couple of free programs from ZiffNet that make Win 3.1 look a lot like Win 95), to Win95a and Win95b. He showed us how you could format the target machine, and boot from a floppy with Intersrv on it, and transfer over a complete disk image in just a few minutes.

Does anyone have any of the old Software Vault CD Roms with all of the shareware software for DOS and Win 3.1? I would like to extract some of the software from them, install it on a system, make a disk image with it installed, and then when we get a computer ready to deliver, shoot over a disk image with the computer already setup with educational software for a school, business applications for a church or non-profit agency, etc.

Gary Ludwig, Brian Miller, Darrin Chambers, and Winston Roach were at the October 3 meeting. Gary and Brian checked out a number of video cards, and Darrin, Winston, and I checked out a number of Floppy/IDE controller cards. A couple of more sessions, that are as productive as this one, should yield us a good inventory of checked out cards, and we can get back to reparing units, knowing that the parts we swap in have been checked out in running machines. Through Brian's efforts we discovered that several of our machines and some of our floppy disks were infected with the NYB virus, but we were able to get it cleaned off of the machines and floppies.



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Tulsa Computer Society 11/15/98
Don Singleton, President
djs@ionet.net