🚀 go-pugleaf

In aus.computers Phred <ppnerkDELETETHIS@yahoo.com> wrote:
[...]
> Now I don't really know whether the battery acid had caused the 
> problems, or whether it just looked bad.  Whatever...  These two PCs 
> were perfectly reliable for around 7 to 9 years at least, and maybe 
> they only died in the end through disuse.
[...]

Quite do-able.

A few years back I had a machine returned that had been stored in
a garage for a few years, and it also had "guts spilled" problem.
I gather the board it question (it's around the same vintage as
the one I'm talking about) had the battery soldered or welded directly
to the board.

Mine looked pretty bad when I got it back. There were definite signs 
of that blue-green tinge that indicate tracks, or at least
a ground plane somwehere, are being digested.

I snipped the battery off, cleaned up the mess with soapy water
(total immersion NOT recommended!) to clean off any remainder, and
soldereded in the a AA battery-pack-with-velcro-patch.

Has been working ever since. (Modulo the next prob being a series of 
browouts/blackouts around the mid 90s which fried this machine's poor old 
750 MB disk).

I've since been renewing bunches of DEC (remember them? ;-) '486s
that some uni was giving away wholesale to various people. 

Most of them seemed completely dead to start with. But most of them were 
also were revived with a good jiggle of some mem chips, some replacements of 
others (this series of mobos seemed to change its mind over Page Mode vs 
other memory sometime during production), and new disks. 

Score so far is around 9 out of around 11 revived. 

Probably these are also similar to your example, in that the disk ctl and video 
are on the mobo. Was also "fun" trying to get the antique network cards going 
without any idea what the approx dozen jumpers were all for.

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