Dead 130XE

[danwinslow]

Well, I plugged in a newly arrived 130xe that claimed to be a 320KB upgrade. It worked great for about 60 seconds, then went crazy. When I powered it off and back on, it went immediately into MEMORY TEST. Sigh. It showed every other block red in the first line of the memory test....does that mean anything in terms of isolating which chips couldn't take the power-on stress and blew?

[mimo]

I don't think that there is an easy way to tell which IC is bad. Better to either piggy back a known good chip onto each of the ram chips and take them off one at a time to isolate the bad ones, or imo just replace the lot and put sockets in at the same time.

 

There is quite a lot about this topic in the 8bit forums.

[Rybags]

My guess would be that nothing's blown.

 

More likely one or more ICs is loose, maybe a wire loose somewhere, or something's grounded that shouldn't be.