Hello everyone, this is my first post!
I bought my cube one year ago in a non-booting condition; I had to buy a new HD and upgraded from 8 to 24 MB RAM.
Last week I was able to install nextstep 3.3, but only in the second attempt, the machine froze the first time.
Then it seemed to work fine, but suddenly I had a freeze again; and then after the bootscreen I was confronted with a distorted video (see first picture). So, after booting the machine freezes after 10-60 minutes, or the video is distorted. After reset the game starts again.
After examine the board I noticed that the area around two of the electrolytic capacitors had been "polluted" (see 2nd picture)
Did anyone experience something similar? After searching the forum I found that someone managed to replace bad SMD-capacitors, but the radial are somehow difficult. Or is my problem unrelated to my problems.
Thank you for any help!
Richard
https://www.dropbox.com/s/zgjdj1kgk24fx88/distorted.jpghttps://www.dropbox.com/s/owq191sxl0two8k/badcap.jpgps: is there a trick to remove the RAM without using a tool?
Yes, that can definitely be caused by bad caps. Do not continue to apply power in that condition before replacing all of them. In my case it turned out a video ram chip was bad as well, which was a much more involved repair, but I had that same pattern on the screen.
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Brian Archer
The radials are generally easier to replace with the right tools. The SMD require more patience and more skill.
I wrote about slab capacitor replacement in this thread:
http://www.nextcomputers.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=2803Also if you want to look at my writeup for the slab, feel free to download it here:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/fiwxr8ejsx1loxw/NEXTSTATION%20Turbo%20Color%20Capacitor%20Replacement%20-%20NC.pdfGood luck!
Thank you for the hints - I replaced now all of the capacitors (non-smd)!
But unfortunately, I still have the freezes with distorted video. So it looks I have a bad video ram issue too.
Brian, can you share your experiences with me?
Thanks again
Richard
I knew of no way to test the ram on board so I just replaced the chips in groups until I found the bad one. It was not a fun repair. The packaging type is known as ZIP Ram.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zig-zag_in-line_package--
Brian
