Longevity & Maintanance of Amiga Hardware

[save2600]

Some common sense preventative maintenance should help insure our systems stay running for some time:

Keep out of direct sunlight and heat.

Using the brush attachment of a vacuum (don't just blow dust around with canned air) out your power supply, any fans, the CPU boards themselves, any peripheral cards, hard drives and the floppy disk drives.

Clean your disk drives either by hand (Q-tip and tape head cleaner) or one of those wet diskette cleaners once a year at least.

Replace the electrolytic caps on an aging power supply.

Keep your gear plugged into a nice (not cheapie) surge protector at all times.

Replace any NiCad batteries BEFORE they leak all over your mobo. Or remove them completely and using a toothbrush, vinegar and baking soda - clean the entire infected area to help prevent the acid from creeping. Replace with a lithium battery mod.

NEVER quickly turn on/off your old computer gear. Always wait at least 10 seconds before turning back on.

Always turn your monitor on first and then your computer. Turning them both on at the same time via a surge protector switch can present too much of a load and when your AC line tries to compensate, you may end up with a surge OR reduced current going to your gear. Both can wreak havoc on our old electronics.

Also not a bad idea to pull and observe the pin condition of some of these I.C.'s. If they're dirty or corrosive, lightly sand 'em with fine grit sandpaper or a fiberglass brush. The act of fully removing them and re-inserting is usually good enough to make better contact and resets the female part of the socket for continued grip.

And lastly, don't plug or unplug anything from the computer while it is on! This includes anything connected to the joy/keyboard ports  

[save2600]

Nickel-cadmium batteries do not leak acid, and it's impossible to neutralize their highly caustic leakage with baking soda.

http://members.iinet.net.au/%7Edavem2/overclock/batt.html

Acid - Noun: a chemical substance that dissolves some metals. Cadmium does indeed leak and dissolves some metals which is why you end up having to replace traces and I.C.'s. So when Cadmium leaks, at the very least, it behaves like an acid  

And the combination of vinegar and baking soda does indeed help as it cleans away much of the fuzzy cadmium funk. Electronic circuit board repairmen have known this for decades. Clean that off and you've retarded its spreading big time. No, that method is not perfect and it depends on how bad the damage is, but it's a hell of a lot better than doing nothing.

Bead blasting is the way to go of course, but MOST here are not at that degree which is why I brought up the vinegar/baking soda application.