Topfield TF500PVRc

Sometimes  these fixes are so simple that when the device is back in working condition it’s almost annoying to realize that there’s nothing more to do than to put the device in use. This was one of those cases. The word of my hobby had started to spread and one day I received a message from a friend on Facebook about DVR that had taken a habit of losing all recordings from its hard drive. Once I got this top field TF500PVRc in my hands I started to look for a fault in hard drive itself since it seemed to the most logical place to start. I took the casing apart and removed the HDD for reformatting on a PC. Since the DVR was new to me and already broken I saw no point in trying to save any remainders of the pre-existing recordings. Before doing anything else I thought it would be easiest to let the DVR format its own hard drive. As a theory this was a brilliant one. Unfortunately that was all it ever amounted to; a theory. Each and every time I tried to format the drive it got stuck at 14%. After inspecting the hard drive a little more it became abundantly clear the hard drive had come to the end of its road. In my collection of spare parts I had a hard drive suitable for this device so I replaced the old one with it. The replacement was a little smaller in capacity but it was sufficient. When I proceeded to power the DVR on it asked me if I wanted it to format the hard drive. After the formatting I had myself a fully functioning DRV by pretty much no cost at all.

iMac G5

Our story starts once again at our school’s lab where these once so reliable workhorses are brought when they turn into impractically shaped paper weights to receive some usually futile CPR until they, stripped of all dignity, are turned over to EoLC. In this case it means that the equipment is taken apart to be recycled properly. This Apple iMac G5 was brought in because its operating system had gone MIA and along with it a students diploma work. After a couple of day examining the computer’s now pretty far faded soul I came to the conclusion that it was not reasonable to try to recover the file considering how much effort it would take and how probable succeeding would be. As a very helpful individual I offered to recycle the computer on my own at home and maybe salvage some spare parts for my own projects from it. 

For starters I checked if the hard drive was working correctly and tried to re-install the operating system and ran through some other ways to get the system to boot but none of the most common steps of troubleshooting helped.

Further investigation pointed again towards faulty capacitors as was the case with the video projector I had fixed prior to this computer. Only this time the caps were on the motherboard and there were about 30 of them instead of three or four. Every now and then the computer turned on and loaded BIOS without a problem and then froze completely. At some point the iMac ceased to boot even that far so I had to let the computer sit for a week. Once again I contacted my affiliate and asked for bag of new capacitors. The parts arrived in due time and installing them onto the motherboard proved to be a simple task. New set on problems started to arise after replacing all of the 30 caps. After the operation the computer wouldn’t boot at all. Since I had now tried all of the solutions I had found so far I directed my attention to the power supply. Some people had had problems with the caps on the power supply so I replaced them as well. Before that I had emptied some unknown part of the computer of its magic smoke that all electronic devices run on. They usually stop workin after said smoke escapes the circuitry. This obviously didn’t help my cause at all. 

I left the iMac in storage for some time to wait for new ideas and inspiration but after some time I had to throw it away because I needed the space for something else.