Fortunately Gary Ludiwg realized the problem on his way home, and he turned around and came back to BBR. It turns out that Evelyn had let the CMOS battery die, which resulted in CMOS reverting to fail safe mode including disabling both the L1 & L2 CPU cache. We should have figured that out since we knew about the CMOS battery failure, and saw the slow loading, plus a low throughput test under SYSCHK, but sometimes you can be so close to a problem that you can't see the forest because of all the trees.

Once Gary enabled the L1 & L2 CPU cache the throughput jumped from 35 to 370. He also replaced the hard drive since it was acting funny and replaced the modem with a USR 28.8 hard controller modem. With that done everything was recognized and it operated perfectly using W95B.

September 1 was a much more fruitful day. Gary and I were the only two there, but we processed three pentium class machines, and worked on several others, including two which we could not proceed with because they too had bad CMOS batteries. I have ordered two dozen AA Battery Holders which can substitute for CMOS batteries in most machines (so we don't have to stock a lot of different types of batteries), and hopefully they will arrive by September 22 which is our next Refurbishing Computers meeting.

There is a Chineese proverb that says "Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day. Teach a man to fish and he will eat for the rest of his life." The Chinese Proverb makes a lot of sense. We have plenty of space available for our Computer Refurbishing Project, but it is still limited, and when a news article is published in the local paper or when our project is mentioned on tv and it prompts a lot of donations at one time it frequently is filled up with material to be evaluated. We have some very good people working on our project, but the number of people we can motivate to participate is still limited, so we modified the Chinese Proverb and adopted our variation: "Fix an old computer for a man and he will have a computer that will fill his needs for a while. Teach a man to fix computers and he will have a computer for the rest of his life, and he can fix computers for his friends and neighbors."

As a part of that effort, we are in the process of putting together documentation of the tools and techniques we use. We invite any TCS members who want to learn Computer Repair to come out to Bethesda Boys Ranch on the 1st, 4th, and (if there is one, the 5th) Saturday of each month at 10:00 am and we will be happy to teach you what we do, and then give you an area where you can work on machines yourself, and when you run into trouble you can call on one of us to help.

For more information on the Tulsa Computer Society click here