Mystery PC Arrival

It arrived. Packed in a box, buffered by packing noodles, and, wrapped in three layers of bubblewrap. I have to hand it to the seller, the PC was well packed.

I inspected the outside. There was some spotty corrosion on the bare metal parts of the case, as well as some distress to the front plastic portion and the beige slip cover. Not too much. It's as if it has been banged around a little, but I suppose that would be expected for such an old PC.

I fired up my air compressor and took of the slip cover. The screws looked familiar. There were several thread counts and sizes, that I can recall, that were part of PCs of this age. The six that held the slip cover on brought back some memories. Surprisingly, there wasn't much dust on the inside. It was fairly clean. I did observe some deeper rust spots on some portions of the case and mounting hardware for the drives, but, overall, good condition. A desicated bug carcass was ejected and swept up to be buried with the rest of the garbage.

386sx. Two RAM chips. IDE controller. Serial, parallel, and game port controller. VGA video card. And... an absolutely massive card that I have no idea what it is. Seriously. This card is the depth of the case and has a plastic bracket that keeps the end of the card from flexing while the PC is being moved. It has an RJ port and some other port that looks oddly parallel, but I'm not sure what it would be. Maybe SCSI?

The right thing to do at this point would have been to disassemble the PC, clean everything up, check the power supply and make sure it's not a fire hazard, and, over time, piece it back together. Did I do this? Hell no. I plugged that sucker up and powered it on.

There was a pop. My heart sank. I switched it off. In the air there was the smell of ozone; the particles of some electronic component or something or other inside the PSU floating outside of the vents. I really hope I didn't fry the components. I checked for fire. Whiffed some of the air around the various components to see if I could detect some major destruction. Nothing rang my alarm bells. Did I decide to play it safe and check out the components before attempting another power on? Hell no.

The second power on actually showed a BIOS screen and then the machine powered off after a second or two. Several more attempts, though I have no idea why I did it this way, showed the same behavior. So... the components were not fried, but the PSU is a bit lacking. I have to think about this for a bit. Oftentimes, I'm too reactionary. I should treat this aged hardware with a bit more gently.