farris@marlin.NOSC.MIL (Russell H. Farris) (05/12/89)
A few weeks ago I picked up a couple of old IBM PCs, sans
cards, with the hope of getting at least one to work. Both PCs
have 5-slot, 64KB-256KB motherboards and 63-watt power supplies.
I plugged in the appropriate cards but neither PC worked,
so I began trying various minimal configurations to isolate the
problem. Both PCs have exactly the same symptoms, which fact
leads me to believe that I am making some kind of boneheaded
mistake.
With only a video card and a keyboard connected, and the
DIP switches configured for no floppies and 64k of memory, each
PC comes up in IBM BASIC 1.10. Each seems to work OK for about a
minute, then it dies. After dying this way, it usually takes
several hours before the PC will come up again.
I have tried different video cards and keyboards with no
effect. Do ROMs get flaky with time (these are OLD computers)?
Does it matter which slots are used for various cards? Has
anyone else run into a similar problem? Your help will be
greatly appreciated.
Russ Farris (farris@marlin.nosc.mil)