On October 27 Gary Mote, Merritt Ford, Gordon Leaman, and I worked on the machines that had been donated during the previous two weeks. Out of six 386 based PS/2s we found one that worked. The others had 211, 161, 162, and/or 163 error codes. If anyone is familiar with PS/2 error codes, please call Don Singleton at 622-3417. We also found that four donated monitors all work, and a team checked out a 286 and a 386. We expected Ron Forest from a Christian School in Barstall to join us, but he was unable to make it this time, but expects to come to the November 22 or 29 meetings.
On November 1 Gary Mote, Tom Henson, Gordan Leaman, Armando Giacommetti, and I worked on installing a new motherboard in one of our donated 286s that had very little equipment in it. Basically we took the case and power supply and tried to build a computer from the ground up. We tried two different mother boards and two different sets of SIMM chips, but were unable to get it to work, and after four or five hours work we just had to call it quits. The helpers said they learned a lot about hardware, but we wish that we could have had a real accomplishment as well. Such is life. We will try further on November 22.
William Best showed up and not only brought us a machine and also some other parts, including some much needed 30 pin simms, some of which he donated, and some of which came from Cyber Connections, and William stayed to help us with the new motherboard and checking out the machine he brought.
We were also very happy to see Pat and Mike Kimbrel who showed up with about 8 boxes of equipment, software, etc. Thank you very much for all of the very generous donations.
If you are interested in learning more about hardware, and how to work on old computers, you are welcome to join us at 10:00 am on November 22, 29, or December 6. Whenever we are not busy checking out new donations, we will remove some of the 286 motherboards from machines we can't seem to get to work, and we will rebuild those machines using some motherboards that were donated by members who had upgraded their machines to later 486s and Pentiums. Many of the motherboards we have do not have manuals, so if you donated motherboards to us and happen to run across the manual, we could use it. Also if anyone has any extra 30 pin SIMMs that they have left over because they upgraded to a motherboard that needs 72 pin SIMMs, we could certainly use more of them.
Also if anyone knows of legitimate non-profit organizations in need of machines, we now have in the checked out and ready to ship shelf two 286s, two 386s with very limited memory (1 or 2 meg), and one reasonably configured 386. We have very few VGA monitors, and need to keep what we have to checkout other new machines, so we can either release the machines having VGA cards without a monitor, or we can substitute a Mono, CGA, or possibly EGA monitor. Please don't ask us to donate these machines to individuals, but if you know of schools, churches, church schools, shelters, or other non- profit agencies that can make good use of these machines, we would be happy to talk to them.
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