Repair / Restoration involves the replacement of battery inside the computer. It also involves the attempt at replacing the software. Some of these companies are out of business and one can only hope that some site on the internet has the files that may be needed to setup the computer.

These outdated IBM compatible computer systems have batteries that keep the time. Some times the battery is part of a chip and sometimes the battery can be attached to the main board. This involves unsoldering to remove it and replace it. This is one very important step.

Another step is to locate the setup software that allows me to tell the computer what it has and what it does not have. For example if a computer comes with a 5 1/4 inch floppy drive. The large floppy disks that are flexible. This floppy disk drive must be replaced because very few companies still sell this kind of floppy disk and they are really unreliable. It is easy to damage and easy to lose data. To change the floppy drive, we need the setup software.

Once the first two steps are done than we locate the video software and install our operating system to make the computer work again like it was meant to. If the computer has a hard drive it may have bad sectors that can destroy information that is put into them. To avoid this the hard drive through a thorough testing to identify any bad sectors and flag them. When we flag a bad sector we mark it as unusable and any software you put into the computer will skip those areas.

The last step is for you to decide what additional software needs to be added and I'll try to locate something that will run in your computer. The consideration in this decision is the video capabilities and the memory available. Video capabilities vary from 1 color to 16 million colors and memory could be from less than 1 million bytes up to 32 million bytes. A byte is a character like the letter "A" or a number from 0 to 255. The minimum memory is 640,000 bytes. The size of the hard drive limits the number of programs that can be put into a computer. Considering the limits of each computer is the most important thing. And I'll always try to get each computer to do the best for the capacity it has.

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Copyright © 1999 Elias A Galban
Last modified: October 29, 1999