Wiggly/wobbly A1200 accelerator card

[McVenco]

The last few days, it seems that my BPPC card does not connect too well to the A1200 mainboard.

When I startup the miggy, sometimes I just get a grey screen, with no change in brightness of the power LED (only the CAPS led blinks at each reset). When I push the BPPC a bit tighter to the expansionboard connector, the machine boots normally.

However, when I insert a floppy disk (which causes a little shock/bang/thud inside the case) when booted up to the WB, the screen suddenly greys out again (loss of contact on one of the pins on the accelerator card I guess).

I noticed that the board is not sitting too tight in the trapdoor slot - it can wiggle almost over 1 cm when it's connected to the expansion slot.
Is it normal that an accelerator card is this wobbly or has the expansion board connector in my A1200 worn out (too many times of inserting/removing a turboboard?).

And when an A1200 is built into a tower, does the acc.card get secured somewhere, or does it just "sit" loosely on top of the mainboard?

I've cleaned the contacts, so that shouldn't be the problem in this case.

[ChaosLord]

Use the duct tape, Luke  :-)

[humppa]

I noticed that the board is not sitting too tight in the trapdoor slot - it can wiggle almost over 1 cm when it's connected to the expansion slot.

Try to carefully bend up the connector pins with a needle. The BPPC should fit much tighter afterwards. It successfully fixed the problems I had with my BPPC.

[JaXanim]

The design of the connector socket allows quite a lot of angular displacement about the mainboard, but that doesn't mean there's bad contact. My Apollo1260 card is very 'floppy', but it's never given a moments trouble. At one time, I used an elastic band the stabilise the card in my Power Tower, but it was only cosmetic and I stopped using it (the elastic that is).

I wouldn't mess with the socket connectors unless you definitely know there is a bad contact.

JaX

[humppa]

I wouldn't mess with the socket connectors unless you definitely know there is a bad contact.

Well, it's quite obvious, isn't it:

When I startup the miggy, sometimes I just get a grey screen, with no change in brightness of the power LED (only the CAPS led blinks at each reset). When I push the BPPC a bit tighter to the expansionboard connector, the machine boots normally.

I had exactly the same problems and could reproduce them easily by changing the angles of the BPPC slightly. In some positions, my Miggy didn't boot at all, with others, it worked fine. A typical example of bad contact. The connectors get worn out after some time and loose their tight fit.

[HellCoder]

I used paper (fold it a couple of times) and carefully fit it in the CPU-SLOT at the side to make sure the card can't move.