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A rough TAM

Franklinstein

Well-known member
I saw this on Yahoo! and decided to buy it, figuring I could at least employ the base unit and keyboard with the TAM main body I found at a junk shop last year. This one showed up and, though it's a bit scuffed, the CD door is pretty much ruined, and the palm rest leather has seen better days, it seems to be in one piece. It has a full compliment of RAM, the fat back, and the requisite riser cards. 

I disassembled the main unit to clean it and replace the heat sink grease, which was an ordeal. It's not too difficult to figure out how to take apart the main body, though I did break the top off of the base unit (though that seems typical as these plastics age). The main unit had a couple dead bugs in it but everything good otherwise; I don't think it has seen a lot of use. The original hard drive was gone but I rigged a 20GB replacement for now. The CDROM is a Matsushita CR-504 variant, using more or less the same mechanism as the regular tray-loading CR-504 variants, which makes spare parts slightly easier to acquire. My drive seems to work well enough, and even muddle its way through some CD-Rs (though I did have to switch to an external to get it to install 8.5 from a less-than-perfect CD-R). 

The base unit had some spots of mold, probably from the dead bugs. I cleaned that out and then serviced the audio connector cables (cleaning and coating with protective spray). It works well enough now, no audio crackles or hums. 

 
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