I'm going to pin one comment as a reply to all the people recommending wick over the Soldapult. This was my first attempt at using my newly acquired solder sucker so any problem here "looked like a nail". I've refined my solder sucker technique since then and it's not too much of a problem for me now. Solder braid has it's uses, it's great for bulk removal or on large components. But I don't like when it leaves behind little copper strands. When it comes to working with TSSOPs, QFPs, or SOICs it can short pins on an IC and is a pain to remove: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/iqyPgM6nrd-cpHk.html So it's not usually my goto solution for removing solder.

"uh-oh I lifted a pad" - proceeds to braze the hood skin of a '57 Chevy in its place instead

PCB repair is a fine art. Worked in a board fab for a few years, saw some repairs I didn't think could be done. And yes, I've seen solder suckers rip pads right off before. This is why I use wick instead. The good stuff wick, can't use the cheap shit. I just wish my eyes could keep up. I have a remarkably steady hand and was ace at through hole, but some of the surface mount stuff I can't even see, I had an 8X scope for that.

1. If pads are peeling away it is a clear sign, that soldering temperature was way too high. 2. I had only one desoldering pump that was somehow usable, this model was a "recoilless" type. I've also got one very similar to yours, from Pro'sKit and it is useless. 3. For any SMD parts - soldering iron, braid (wick) and flux is all you need to remove part and clean pads. 4. Old RAM chips were very fragile, and could be easily damaged by overheating and electrostatic charge. 5. And last but not least - when you contaminate a gilded pad with a leaded solder - you're lost, there is no way to clean it. Use Kapton tape to protect such areas.

That long 7 second pause "It was at that moment..." lol

Hello from Brazil! Congrats on not skipping the troubles you go by in your videos. It really helps people like me who just does this geek stuff as a hobby, and do not have perfect skills.

This reminds me of that time Homer wanted to fix that toaster and ended up making a time machine. I really love your videos man. I learn new stuff with them. Keep it up.

It's like Druaga1 but with less drugs and smoke. Also feels like there is a better sence of control over what is happening (not saying I don't like Druaga1 I love both channels)

I'm glad I was introduced to your content by Druaga1. I like the more technical descriptions you give while going through the video.

This is a really long and convoluted way of buying something off of eBay!

Wow that's some dedication. A friend of mine in school in the 90s had a single 32MB SIMM. It was the most amount of RAM I'd ever seen at the time. Most PCs had 4MB and the school's one server had 16MB.

Props on you for having the patience to deal with all of that. I think I would have just deemed it broken after the first major problem and be done with it.

Older SMT chips of that generation can fail if they are quickly heated. Over time they absorb moisture into the plastic and die, I believe its through the pin/plastic interface (small gaps allow the ingress). Memory chips like these were shipped in vacuum sealed bags with desiccant. Once the bag was opened there was a limited time period in which they could be used. After that time, the chips had to be heated through a baking process to ensure that any accumulated moisture was removed, then they could be run through a IR or hot air reflow or solder wave assembly process. It may be that blasting it with a hot air gun may have caused the damage from the accumulated moisture built up in the chips; the board was not conformal coated. I would recommend getting a hot air station if you are going to be doing more of this. And maybe looking into some process for baking the chips prior to using the hot air gun... Cheers,

Thanks so much for producing this video. I shared this with my 90's computer friends and we all think it's an awesome video. We cringed so hard when you solder-sucked the pad off, but love how you got it back.

thankfully you just wrecked a 72-pin SO-DIMM and nothing weird and rare.

You win some, you lose some. Just how it is sometimes, particularly in a hobby where trial by fire is pretty much the only kind of trial in many cases. Good to see things worked out in the end!

You took the bullet for us . I will always check the voltage of chips when I do a repair !

Thats some serious dedication

I learned something important here: using a piece of Kapton tape to protect edge connectors is a damn fine idea. Also thanks, KZfaq's recommendation bar. Also i assembled my solder sucker out of bits of various ones i had, chose the spring such as to reduce recoil. Board whacker is a bad idea. Also if the air velocity i too high, it does more to cool the joint than to remove the solder, so there's two reasons it works better.

The absolute suspense from first use of the solder sucker to something actually going wrong. On the edge of my seat here.

hey Druaga2

Great channel. You really know how to make electronics fun

And THATS why you should use solder wick

Who else i getting blazed? This is a great video, loving it, the part when he took of the copper bit, the silence was deafening. I had the same feeling when I formatted the wrong drive.

The RAM module in there looks like the same modules as found in Latitude series of that time. My Latitude XPi CD has two of those plus onboard memory, making for a total of 48MB. Palm OS devices until the IIIx had a slot like this as well, standard size, I'm pretty sure. EDIT: I'm also pretty sure that decoupling capacitors aren't for "providing power when the chip needs it," but more for reducing high frequency noise and disruptions on the power lines to keep the chips from resetting of losing their contents during operation. It's stabilization, not a battery.

I feel your pain brother, I've had a few moments while soldering that I wish that I could have back. BTW, nice work replacing that pad. I've had to do it on my Amiga 4000 where the battery leaked and ate through the trace. Not so easy to do, and that was with an actual trace repair kit.

You and Druaga are my favorite KZfaqrs. Seriously, videos like this remind me of the golden days of KZfaq.

Hey jokers, Druaga2 here

Dramatic and educational. Do more videos, please🤗

You just got another subscriber mate. thank you for the content!

Hey man I applaud your Ingenuity and I expect to see another attempt at this you just need to keep working at it don't worry about making mistakes everyone is human

I definitely admire your testicular fortitude for trying this out. Most impressive!

Subscribed because of this video. Love the channel

Learned something new today, gj fixing that pad!

a guy having fun with a camera in his workshop i love this kind of free form content

When the new RAM worked it was very satisfying!

Love your voice when you explain ... Damn you should join dubbing industry...

I honestly can't think of any Program or Game of this Era which could use this amount of RAM. So you basically wasted precious Time and Money on a pointless Effort. On the other Hand you produced an interesting Video! 3.3/5V would watch again :]

LOL, omg the folder name is awesome! You know everybody is going to put all that stuff into a folder and label it "important stuff" anyways, they just did it for ya. Also, poor little ram chip. You put that guy through hell.

It was so stressful watching the video. My hat is off to yo sir. It takes some guts to do that to something that rare.

I hope you got a hot air station mate. Cause you can control how much heat you can put on the solder paths of a chip. And to remove a chip from a board, all you gotta do is just put some flux on the chip, and gently put the hot air on it and gently pull it off with tweezers.

Incredible work

3:19 what? that era of computer? there's almost 10 years between these two machines

I remember transplanting a 486slc CPU to my Toshiba T1850 (386SX-25) using a decent-ish Tenma adjustable temp iron, solder wick, and a precision screwdriver. The screwdriver was basically a chisel. I'd hammer the top of it to bust the pins on the CPU loose at the toe end after wicking the solder. The results once I got the CPUs swapped? It was like 20% slower. I found a DOS file to enable the L1 cache on the 486SLC and the machine was almost 4x as fast. I set up a keyboard shortcut to run the cache enabler after resuming from standby. This was at 25MHz. I considered bumping it to the 33MHz the CPU was designed for, but couldn't find the right clock crystal and the rest of the system might not have taken a 33% overclock. DOOM ran fine after the upgrade. I only did that risky surgery because I already had a newer, and faster, laptop (which I overclocked a little bit from 120MHz (Toshiba 420CDT) to 133MHz for the bus speed increase. 166MHz worked, but it ran too hot at that speed.

Thanks for showing all your bad soldering. I have been there and would not like some of the early jobs I did to be up on the internet lol. The one thing that I really think is a good idea to get (yet still haven't gotten) is Hot Tweezers. Being able to pinch each side of a SMD and lift to remove is so handy, and since they are long nose you can pickup multiple pins on either side. While I love my chisel tip I still like a small standard iron tip for being able to use just the tip or the side to control heat and be very selective with what I heat up

Simply fun to watch... Subbed

I've got an Acer laptop that uses this kind of RAM. This ram isn't proprietary to Gateway, it's just a less common type of RAM

I recognize that type of soldering handle. Metcal my dude! I love it. Also if you want to flow a bunch of pins like that, using the big fat chisel works better.

Why don't you have more subscribers? Your content is just.... AMAZING!

Great content. Thank you

No built in disc drive. Wow, this thing was ahead of its time, truly.

I love it. Doing it for the sake of doing it, no other reason.

i once did something like this, the difference was it was an old 3.1 desktop, it ran parity ram. if you look at a lot of edo 72 pin there are 9 chip pads with 8 being populated, parity ram has 9 as we could not find any "proper" ram only the normal kind i just got 5 sticks of that and sacrificed one stick removing 4 chips from it and putting the extra chip on to the blank socket, at first it failed to boot but it was only due to the solder jumper that bypassed the blank socket, once the new chip was daisy chained on the stick it worked fine, 64 megs of "parity" ram way bigger than stock and i doubt 64m was available when new, but if it was it would have been very expensive.

This made me feel better about my soldering skills :P

This "not gonna be able to find info" bit is basically every carrier special phone in a nutshell

6:43 "...then I will remove that resistor and run this again to verify that just changing that will make it register it with more RAM." Or less RAM, even.

how did you make that new pad attached to the circuit board? I'm curious cuz since there was no pad which let you solder things on.

i love how you number the videos using hex

I found this video strangely compelling simply because this is the sort of hellishness I tend to put myself through from time to time. XD

I've never soldered memory onto Simms before. I have soldered memory on top and bent out and address pin and wired it across the board for memory upgrades in machines which were measured in dozens of K of ram.

I love this video!

What's the point of a jumper resistor exactly? Why not just connect with solder like you did? Is it perhaps easier in terms of manufacturing to use the resistor? Or does it offer some kind of fault protection type thing?

holy shit this is cool

Would it work to use pencil graphite where the missing pad was?

get this man a hot air station

I like how it says SIMPLE TECH on the board :D

love that one! :D very entertaining!

did the heat from the heat gun kill a chip?

great job

Awesome video

In the old ad it says: "Choice of Desktop Infrared Receptor OR External Floppy Drive"... guess the preowner chose the floppy instead of the ir receptor... that's why you don't have it.

That moment when two best friends start to talk exactly alike.

That's not excessive. 24gb in a Latitude 7080 is excessive! That's my daily beast of a laptop. Granted mine has an i7 not a 486. But, I remember when Gateway made these laptops. I have a Toshiba of the same era, and one with a k6-2 333. Yes, Toshiba made a laptop with a AMD k6-2 cpu. But both a small little tanks. I have a grand 16mb in my older Toshiba, and 48mb in my newer one. I use it to run things like BeOS 5.0.4. It actually works just fine. Of course a modern webpage would eat both of them whole, but that's not why I have such things. Anyway, I was highly impressed with your attempt here. It takes some balls to risk something this rare.

I am glad you are able to use WIndows 95 again :D

You got a little mahogany on that last memory check success don't lie lol!!

30 minutos de video para que al final se rinda y compra otros modulos de RAM por ebay 10/10

You should be able to install Windows 98 with no problem. The biggest requirements 98 had over 95 was a math co-processor. I owned a computer with a 486sx2 processor installed and that was the only barrier that it couldn't overcome. Installing Internet Explorer 4 gave my computer the Windows 98 look and feel I was looking for. :)

Came here because that RAM expansion lid looked similar to the one on my Gateway 2000 handbook 486 :)

Thank for those Licence Keys!

12:30 I know that death silence moment when you remove a pad on a PCB...

This is something I’ve always wondered about. Say you found a ram module that hit the silicone lottery, but you want to use it on a different part, higher density ram stick or even video ram put on a better gpu. What about replacing vrm from a better board to a board with better features but weaker vrm? I’ve always been kind of surprised there aren’t videos on KZfaq of extreme over clockers doing stuff like that, and it’s made me assume it’s probably not possible.

I'm sad that didn't work. I would've loved to see something like that actually end up working just as a proof of concept

Gateway 2000....the good ole days!

The infrared to serial dongle can be replaced by any IrDA adapter, you can still find them for serial or get a more modern USB IrDA adapter.

Very interesting! Just subbed

wow u got a lot of patience !

"You just voided your warranty" xD

You deserve another thumb up... Good video.

fuck, never has a ram repair ever been so bloody epic.....

Thanks 4 the vid. I have one also, and as you stated, there aren't many out there. Nor is there much information.

OK, at about six minutes in, I'm a bit confused. The thing you took out of the laptop looked like an entirely normal mid-90s laptop SIMM. What was the problem with just buying a random 16mb one from eBay and trying it? Worked fine for my similar-vintage Acer... Was it just for the challenge of soldering on the additional chips? I mean, I'm impressed... just puzzled.

hope you had fun dissecting some RAM

I really miss the Cow Spots (TM)... :'(

While I get the need to max out vintage hardware.. I do all the time, In this case what can you run on 24 that would not be able to run on 16.. besides perhaps giving windows applications a little more oomph. I think that machine i would be sticking to dos 6 w/311

RAM upgrade - Rossmann style!

Looks like a beast back then...

Why didn't you just add external 5v to the added ram modules?

I thought that I dumb enough to destroy old good things with crazy experiments, but seems I am not. You won the first place, take your cup, winner.

Subscribed in Spring 2018

wondering if it could go any higher with ram. Like my IBM thinkpad 380xd that I use to have. It said it would only work with up to a 64MB stick, but a 128MB ram module works fine and the computer recognizes all of the ram.