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Well there's only one way to find out for sure. My own experience is that any solvent that will dissolve a glue that bonds plastic will also dissolve the plastic. Obviously I haven't tried anywhere close to every combination though. Sometimes a combination of things might work, a bit of heat and...

They seem to run quite cool, although I don't know how they are in terms of power consumption. They certainly use more power than modern 2.5" laptop drives, but old drives tend to use more than newer drives so they might turn out to be similar. Has anyone measured the actual fit? Perhaps...

It's pretty easy to test resistor networks, I wouldn't go replacing those unless the ones you have are bad. Usually checking them in circuit will give you a pretty good idea. Comparison with a working board will remove any doubt.

Environmental factors come into play too. Ozone in particular tends to break down rubber, and trace amounts of various solvents and other chemicals can attack it as well. Elevated temperatures increase the speed of any reaction, including the deterioration. I suspect that the long term...

I don't know about these particular things, but a lot of stuff like this is ultrasonically or solvent welded. When the adhesive works by melting the surface of the plastic to bond it, there isn't much you could do to dissolve it. A clean cut with a very sharp blade could get it apart nicely...

I saw a video a while back from some guys that were doing hard drive data recovery. I forget what they used for the clamp but it was something fairly simple they had made, I would never have thought it would be possible but it worked. Of course this was just to recover data from the drive, but...

Vias can be notoriously problematic on some boards. They are created by a relatively thin layer of plating applied to the hole drilled through the board. Contact area with the traces on each side is very small and over time thermal expansion, flexing of the board, and/or corrosion can damage the...

Don't just throw parts at it. Test the parts and only replace them if they are bad, or if they are something you are unable to test and you have tried everything else. Each time you replace a part, you create the opportunity to error. Wrong part installed, part installed the wrong way around...

It's probably needed it for several years, a few more weeks won't hurt anything. The capacitors are always bad, these are ~25 year old machines, they were never intended to last that long. It's one of those things I don't even bother testing, I just replace the capacitors whenever I work on one...

Unless it was owned by another collector, it is extremely unlikely that the capacitors were ever replaced. Quiet sound is a classic indicator of bad caps, personally I would re-cap it before bothering to do any other troubleshooting.

Mine is like that even without kids in the mix. The months go by like weeks.

Sounds like something is shorted on the motherboard somewhere. I'd start by removing any non-essential stuff like drives, memory upgrades, etc. If it still does the same thing, start testing for shorted diodes and transistors, particularly around the power supply area on the motherboard.

It does matter, well not so much the color itself, but each differential signal has to use a twisted pair of wires. You can't use one wire from one of the four pairs and one wire from one of the other pairs for the same signal. Differential signals are transmitted as the difference in potential...

On Semiconductor does this. More than once I have ordered samples from them, 5 SOIC-8 chips that came in a 18" long IC tube. The tube was inside an even longer sealed anti-static bag along with several packets of desiccant and a moisture sensing card. This was wrapped in butcher paper and stuck...

I've seen some that just had a bunch of dust in them, and others various unidentifiable goo that had crept down between the contact plates. Once you get it apart, a wipe down with DeOxit and reassembly usually works.

I've seen a few drives that developed a bad connection between the spindle motor contacts and the PCB. Cleaning the contacts resolved the problem in those, but that likely only applies to drives where the spindle motor has springy contacts that press against pads on the PCB. It's worth checking...

Vacuum cleaners move a lot of air volume, but they are about the worst thing you could find for pulling an actual vacuum, probably less effective than sucking the air out through a straw with your mouth. A refrigerator compressor actually makes a pretty decent vacuum pump. The best I've found...

Those caps are shot anyway, you can see the leaked electrolyte, the corrosion is why those parts fell off in the first place, look at how black that solder looks. Even if it was well packed, it would still need to be repaired. Any board you find will need to be re-capped, so if you can't solder...

Look at garage sales and computer recycler stores. You can probably find a whole ADB mouse, otherwise I think there are only a few different sizes of the balls, shouldn't be too hard to find one that fits.

I haven't had any luck with external means. The only thing that worked for me was to desolder the defective switches, take them apart, and manually clean out the insides then put them back together. It's a bit fiddly but once you do it a few times you can do it pretty quickly.