News: 1588316953

... despite AOL being the outcome, it was a good hack.

... and that's why they call them hacksaws

I did the same thing in the aughts. My research PC needed a second network port, but the university bought me a full height card for a half height machine. The card was small enough, but the backplate required ... modding.

They found out when I left.

As the elevator doors begin their slow crawl, you hurriedly mention something about the top half of the card kept in the Ta!

Years ago I had a colleague who managed to put a DDR2 module into a DDR slot. When they had not got it working they called me to have a look as they could not understand why it was not working.

Looked at the RAM and the modules I had with me and noted the difference in the notch and asked - how did you insert it ?

"Oh, with some difficulty, but I got it in, I thought it was just a bit tight in the unused socket"

I had a PHB who did something similar, except he only asked me for assistance when the newly inserted module started smoking!

Should have told him it would work if he could get the smoke back into it.

my performa 6400 had a cheap ass soft modem. Worked ok until the cpu got busy and couldn't cope with the 36.6kbs spec.

If its any consolation to your 90's craptastic Mac: Winmodems were pretty much garbage when introduced, and there's a special place in hell for all those at IBM who came up with the MWave modem/sound cards.

Soft Modems always the reputation of being utter garbage, actually back in the year.

If you are careful there is usually some unused space on the edges of cards which can be removed to better allow insertion into tight spaces. Personally I would have deployed a file or perhaps a sureform plane to give more control, but the saw obviously did the job and probably quicker. The guy might have done parquetry as a hobby and been well practiced with it. I’m a dab hand with various sorts of wood planes. Eschewing noisy, dangerous, sawdust spewing machines I have been manually sawing the sides of grooves with a rip cut tenon saw then removing the filling with a modern router plane. I also have a teeny, tiny old Stanley router plane which is excellent for delicate work and in tight places.

Soon I shall tongue and groove some boards with a matched pair of wooden planes, the sort with a wooden wedge holding the blade which you adjust with a judicious tap on toe or heel.

All these things produce safe shavings instead of dangerous sawdust and mean I can listen to the radio or the bird song while I work.

The trick with designing a multi-layer PCB is to run traces inside the board along the edges to discourage home modifications like this... ;-)

That's actually bad design practice. But if you had a good torch and a typical board of the era, it was easy to test for the presence of traces.

In the days of no-name PCs and strange-name boards, a little adjustment was often necessary.

Being a Westpondian, my first reading of this had me thinking you were taking a blowtorch to the board. Ah, two countries separated by a common language...

We had a client in the 386/486 days who liked his HP desktop so much, he upgraded it himself to a small 386 motherboard.

Issue was the pitch of the ISA slots between the 386 and his HP's case wasn't the same. When I met this machine, most of the card bracket had been sawed out, and the cards held in with wood screws and hot melt glue!

ain't no problem in the world that can't be solved with hot-snot

i always use duct tape and WD40

https://www.flickr.com/photos/dullhunk/7214525854

The universal rules! They speak the truth.

Throw baling wire & chewing gum into the repair kit and you can fix damn near anything.

RTV for me.

EBT+ and 3M waterproof double sided tape will attach most things to most other things if the load isn't too great.

Contact adhesive is underrated for bodging. The grab of that stuff is unbelievable. Something ludicrous like multiple kg/sq cm.

Using a saw is a bit posh innit?

In my crowd we have aways used a hammer, if that doesn't work get a bigger hammer.

Yup, if it ain't as big as Mjölner then it ain't big enough...

I was gonna use a bigger hammer... beat me to it!

I had one of those small Dell desktops that only took half-height PCI cards. I needed to fit a small card, can't remember what it was, but it had a full size bracket. A hacksaw did the trick!

I once sawed a hole in a slimline case to make a full height graphics card fit.

One place, I had a work order cross my desk. Remove door to server room, widen doorway, fit new door. Quite apart from the effect this would have on existing servers, there was no reason for it - the door was fine.

Turned out some idiot had a new unit to install, and was convinced it wouldn't fit through the door because it was 120cm wide. 30cm 'long', though. Yes. They just needed to turn it through 90 degrees.

Pretty sure that if I hadn't made sure they were elsewhere, they were the type to pull out a saw and hack away at the wall instead.

Packard Bell cases were notorious for having unusual shapes, presumably to make you buy all the internals from them.

I also used a hacksaw to make things fit - but on the case metalwork rather than the bits I was trying to stuff inside it.

On the plus side PB cases were remarkably solid, so could stand to lose a bit of metal here and there.

Packard Bell was the bane of my existence at one point.

How come?

Because I worked in a PB/NEC plant doing QA for both lines. The NEC's would sail through QA because they had been built to higher standards. The PB's would often not even need to be picked up & shaken to test for loose objects inside (LOI) as you could see bits missing off face plates, bits missing from the rear plates, or in one case it was obvious the fekkin thing had been *stomped on*.

"How do I know it failed? The boot print & dent in the side was my first clue."

The manager for the NEC line wanted us to reject a unit for the slightest infraction, the smallest of niggles, because "we don't ship crap".

The PB manager seemed to want us to pass it for anything less than actively being on fire. "Sir, there's a LOI in this one. Send it back." Screw that! Open it up, take out the LOI, shut it back up, & ship it! "What if the LOI came out of the PSU & will cause the unit to catch fire if I turn it on?" That's what the warranty is for!

*Sigh*

I'm posting this anon because I'd like to maintain the fiction that I might one day survive the shame of having worked for PB...

Packard Bell was the bane of my existence at one point.

There's nothing wrong with a Packard Bell PC that can't be put right with explosives!

In the early 90s we had a mix of ICL PCs and a small number of Packard Bells. I can confirm that the PBs were way less reliable.

Hmm, well, I am sorry to admit that I had a Packard Bell PC once upon a time. I also had problems fitting cards into the damn thing and had to cut various bits and pieces off sometimes, but I preferred cutting the PC case, to cutting the cards. So I can commiserate with our friend's friend.

My desktop case is over ten years old, and it wasn't really expecting graphics cards to be as big as they are now. There were plenty of 3.5" drive bays, it's just that some of them were in the way. Side cutters and pliers did the trick. Just got to keep those cables away from the sharp edges now...

Way back before the Raspberry Pi was even a bud on the vine[*], I picked up one of the early nano-ATX all-in-one boards. One of the VIA EPIA variants; I think it had a 1ghz processor descended from the Cyrix architecture and an S3 Chrome GPU, or somesuch.

Naturally, i wanted to do something interesting with this new and incredibly small bit of technology. And I had a couple of dead NES machines in a cupboard.

So, one was fetched out of deep storage, stripped down and attacked with a dremel to make room for the board and improve airflow.

Alas, the result was a bit fragile. Fortunately, I discovered that the plastic Nintendo had used was thermoplastic - and I had a knackered old soldering iron to hand.

The smell during the welding process was pretty nasty, and it was far from the neatest set of welds in the world, but hey. What's inside the NES, stays inside the NES!

It did all actually work out pretty well in the end - I managed wire up the power/reset buttons to the m/b, got the OS booting off a CF card, and even found a laptop CD drive which fitted pretty much perfectly behind the cartridge-slot door. Once I'd welded a few more bits of plastic into place to keep it in place, anyhow :)

[*] What I know about horticulture can be transcribed onto a very small pea pod...

Did you not know about solvent weld? Or have you used the stuff so much the fumes have affected your memory?

Not sure what you mean by "solvent weld". I have several plastic adhesives, and often none of them do a good job on a given piece of plastic. Do you have any recommendations?

Main trouble is likely that I never know what kind of plastic it is, so just have to try each glue in turn and hope one of them actually dissolves it slightly to make a better bond.

Hauppauge TV card. Face plate tab not aligning with case slot, to say nothing of being too wide. Needed Dremel to remove excess metal and pliers to adjust profile. And that was recent.

'Needed Dremel'

Words only ever said by Dremel cultists.

and why? A true hack would have altered the offending chassis or case(thinking blow torch here, while the computer was powered up!) unless he was sawing off some of the pins?

Fitting an ISA modem usually involved fannying around with the IRQs and assigning the correct COM port.

Having corrupted a hard drive by installing a sound card and not knowing to check/change the IRQ, I can testify to this.

Where did you get this picture of a saw, El Reg.

Not sure if the 90s ever saw one with no cache at all. Should be literally a freaking blast to saw anything with that !