AST Ascentia 950N laptop repair attempt 

My first laptop was an AST Ascentia P Series :D It also had a strange fault with the display, but instead of shifting the image offscreen, it would actually completely lose sync and start freaking out. A fun thing to happen when I was doing my homework one day 😅 A gentle squeeze on the bezel would usually fix it.

Some old devices are unable to start if the CMOS battery is dead because the clock isn't running. After 1000x attempts, they randomly start and yours is doing something very similar. Replace the soldered CMOS battery and see if it helps

If you have any trouble with this, ask the 8-bit Guy. He worked at AST and has experience with these.

Ahhh, nice to see someone working on an Ascentia 950N. 8-bit guy said these were junk and failed a lot when new, I'm becoming less sure of that though with time as I see more and more working ones still around. Any that don't have that varta battery removed will be dead in a few more years though. Hopefully a corrosion repair and replacing the brown caps will fix that unit. As others have said the purple ones are polymer and don't have any liquid electrolyte to leak out. They're more than likely just fine. Good luck, hope you get it working!

can't wait for part2...nice little laptop

I hate having to repair laptops because of the issues you showcase. It really highlights how important companies like framework are for modern laptops, making such things potentially avoidable now.

My first laptop. Hand-me-down from my fathers work issued machine.

All this AST talk has taken me back. AST made some “oddly problematic” hardware in the 90’s. One fine day, my friend and I are taking turns playing Wing Commander 2 on his AST 486 (I had an Amiga 3000, so no WCII for me). As he was blasting his way through a wave of Kilrathi, we suddenly heard a very loud “pop!” and the screen went blank. As, even then, I knew a fair amount about computers, I opened up the machine expecting to find a blown cap or something… only to see the ceramic PGA package of the 486DX-33 was literally blown apart. It was shattered into multiple pieces strewn across the interior. The explosion was so violent that at least one chunk, with about 15 pins, has ejected from the non-zif socket. Like happening upon a bizarre auto accident, the physics of occurred still make no sense to me. Part of the shattered cpu die was exposed, having somehow separated from the ceramic package and blown it off the bottom of the chip (in those days, the chips were mounted “hanging down” in the package because they used contact wires to the die). In then following 32 years (including working in the semiconductor industry), I’ve never been able to imagine the cascade of electrical faults, the current involved and where the draw could have originated that could have caused the violent explosion of that ceramic package. Electrically it makes no sense, from what I know of the 486 and power delivery in older AT class machines (which admittedly isn’t extensive). Whatever happened occurred very quickly; there were no other signs of an issue and no blown caps; my trusty Radio Shack multimeter said the voltages on the PSU were fine and I couldn’t find any obvious issues. I’ve seen modern faults where unchecked secondary PCIe shorts have burned up GPU’s, shorts at the slot resulting in holes burned through a motherboard, runaway thermals melt a die, I even witnessed last years famous Zen 4 Asus debacle. But I’ve never, ever seen anything else as inexplicably violent as that AST’s completely exploded ceramic CPU package.

Contacted you via email about one of your past repairs, hopefully you will get to it. It will make me really happy :))

We had these in my first proper job, I loved this PC! I seem to remember it has quite a shiny/reflective TFT panel?

Mooi hoor 👌

That brown Nichicon PF(M) cap is very much suspect. Those are used in the Toshiba's I work on and they leak 100% of the time. My guess would be that the corrosion in that area is not from just the battery. The purple-ish caps are probably fine, as well as any others not in the PSU part of the board but I would still take 1 or 2 out to test them.

Got an Acer Extensa 355 laptop from 1997 with the exact same floppy write protect issue. Jamming a second floppy disk on top of where the write protect sensor is solved it (it had that issue since I was given it in 2006) I've seen that type of gunk at 17:00 still wet from small batteries like that Varta and I'm pretty sure it came from there...

These violet caps are Os-Con polymer caps and VERY likely NOT your problem. They are very low ESR and also very reliable and also solid (no liquid electrolyte). The brown PF-series caps on the other hand....

I actually want one of these things now. I'd put in a 16-32gb IDE SSD into it. Or a compact flash card or something.

I got a similar looking laptop from Siemens Nixdorf in this teal color, I got a fitting Dockingstation too, Battery is dead, hardrive carrier is fallin out too. it looks like it got a desktop Pentium with 133MHz and 58MB of ram.

Remember to clean up the leakage as it is conductive and are corrosive and can ruin/short the board.

Do you think we could make a voodoo 4 video card that plugs into the exoress card slot on a laptop? Im sure with modern tech we could make the chip extremely small and efficient. But i wonder if you can run video through it to the display.

Hey! Glad you're back making videos, I enjoy watching you repair these old machines. Just one thing, as I know English isn't your first language, the convention in English is numbers after the decimal point are listed individually. Ie: windows three point one one, and a one point four four floppy disc. I don't know why, ask the British lol, but it sounds very weird when you say three point eleven. 🤣😁

Does Windows 3.11 for Workgroups use "chimes.wav" as its startup sound while Windows 3.1 use "tada.wav" as its startup sound?

the odd behavior definitely suggests bad electrolytic caps or corrosion damage, but it could also be a bad solder joint. good luck finding the fault!

Hey what screwdriver are you using in this video? I'm looking for a good precision screwdriver and like the look of that one.

Wow, this laptop is peak Windows 3.1. Could have easily been upgraded to Windows 95 back then.

There's a LOT of factory rework on the mainboard. This was a low volume product, right? Or maybe AST couldn't afford to throw away faulty designs at the time.

I happen to be watching this right after the latest 8-bit Guy video, you know what I mean... By the way, a BIOS that is accessible when the machine has already booted to DOS or Windows even??? That's a first for me! Has anybody here seen such a thing before?

And today's video is sponsorem by the word "screw".😂😂😂

Nice one. Is the PCD-5T also for sale? :D

Those mobile Pentiums look weird. I always thought that laptops use similar looking Pentiums as desktops.

It could be running some Linux, like Slackware or Mandrake Linux??? This could be nice.

*cough* 8-bit guy *cough*

Two different cmos batteries??

Did AST manufacture their own laptops or did they rebadge Clevo?

It looks like to me like a bad caps or bad dc/dc converter (or voltage regulator) , more likely bad caps.

Be careful not to break the hinges with these, the hinges are garbage. I love that the office software is registered on the Ministery of Finance. edit: I didn't see the whole video yet....

8:41 gahhh! cheap brittle plastic is like a curse to the eyes and ears...

"Promo sm" ❣️

Hey, this isn't a Compaq!? 😉

Modern laptops are way easier to work on than old stuff like this despite some online trying to say otherwise. You can fully disassemble and gut a modern laptop in like 20 minutes. Old laptops take more than 20 minutes to just get to the motherboard. Absolute crapshoot. The mid 2000s is when most laptops became easy to open up.

Nice machines but the cases look like they have been made from recycled bin liners 😅