JKA@WASHINGTON.ARPA (08/10/84)
From: James Archibald <JKA@WASHINGTON.ARPA> I would appreciate some information on the probable cause(s) of the flakiness of an Apple ][+. It seems to crash rather severely--sometimes shortly after booting, sometimes during booting, sometimes w/o even reading the disk, but always before anything useful is accomplished. Is this something I can fix (assuming rather limited hardware knowledge) or should it be trusted to the care of a qualified repairperson? Are there such people and has anyone out there dealt with them? What kind of fee is charged for such a service? Any and all information is welcome. Thanks in advance. jim archibald -------
harrison@ucsfcgl.UUCP (Peter Harrison%MIS) (08/15/84)
Such problems are common with apples. I have ALWAYS (5 years) been able to fix them by a one or more of the following techniques: Let it cool off. If heating is the problem, buy a fan. The fans inside the computer do not work. Get one of the ones that hang off the side. Push on all the chips. They often work a little loose. You have to push pretty hard. The risk is that you will crack the mother board. I have not done that yet. Pull out your disk controller card (and/or other cards) and clean off the little gold contact fingers with an eraser. Make absolutely sure that the power is off. I got frustrated once pulling boards and managed to pull one with the power on: goodbye motherboard. You may be lucky to get someone who knows what they are doing at a computer store. The time I blew my motherboard, it took ComputerLand 4 weeks to get it fixed. I think I knew more than most of thir repair people, and I don't even know the names of the chips, let alone what they do. A big part ofg the problem was that they did not listen to what I problems were going on, or did not check to see if it was gone after they had a second (and third, and fourth) shot at fixing it. Peter Harrison
glen@intelca.UUCP (Glen Shires) (08/17/84)
.
If you have any plug-in cards in your system, remove them to see
(by process of elimination) if any one card is causing the problem.
Try your system with no cards (comes up in BASIC, does it work?)
Try booting with only disk controller card!
etc.
Sometimes there may be no problem with any one card but the combination
of all the cards in the system draws too much power or creates too much
heat.
--
^ ^ Glen Shires, Intel, Santa Clara, Ca.
O O Usenet: {ucbvax!amd,pur-ee,hplabs}!intelca!glen
> ARPA: "amd!intelca!glen"@BERKELEY
\-/ --- stay mellowThomka.es@XEROX.ARPA (08/19/84)
The most likely problem most Apples (II and II+'s) have is that the pins on the chips get tarnished. You may notice that some of the TI (Texas Inst) chips will get nearly black! It seems that they have a higher than normal silver content, not the usual nickel alloy most companies use. Then the contacts become very susceptable to thermal changes. The problem may happen at any time. I suggest that you clean the pins. That's quite a job, though, because there are approximately 100 chips, and about 14 pins on each chip, thus it takes about 2-3 hours in doing the job. I had the same problem a while back. I removed each chip, only one at a time (so as not to get them accidently in the wrong place), used a personally favorite cleaning method/cleaner and had my Apple up and running just fine after about 4 hours. If you really don't want to go through all that hassel, then just removing the chips and putting them back in their sockets will "clean" them for a while anyway. Chuck