Wait...THAT'S what was wrong with my rare Mac clone?! 

Been doing board level repair for the last 5 years at the store I own. Every once in a while, physical inspections miss stuff. Glad you caught it, man! Congrats!

Spoiler alert if you haven’t watched the video. My very first vintage Mac was an SE FDHD from eBay. There was no video display, but it chimed. I tried every solution in the Dead Mac Scrolls, recapped the analog board, desoldered and cleaned the brightness knob, and anything else I could think of. After weeks and weeks, I was staring at the board one evening, and accidentally bumped a small inductor or filter near the top of the board. One side was broken off. I soldered it back on, flipped the power switch, and was greeted by a very happy Mac. That was a magical moment, and I am never getting rid of that little SE FDHD.

Great job - I love to see man triumph over machine. It's actually really important to STOP when you are angry/frustrated with troubleshooting. I find that is usually when I am about to make bad decisions and compound the problem. Stopping for a while and then circling back, I would say, is EXACTLY the thing that led to your success in the end. Take the win!

That intro 🤣

So satisfying to see you found the problem and fixed it! Sometimes it just takes some time away from the project to approach it from a fresh perspective. For everyone who has struggled to diagnose intermittent computer issues, it was extremely satisfying to see you successfully resolve it!

I'm glad you saved this machine. What a weird problem but I guess it makes sense, pressure and broken legs/solder joints are actually common but we all forget them haha Nice find! 💪🏻

I am genuinely glad to see this fixed. It’s honestly been keeping me up at night.

"WAIT WHAT!?" 😂 That feeling when the fix doesn't make sense haha (immediately at least)

If you can, try touching each of those solder joints after the heatsink is back on. That way, the solder will reflow and settle the way the board now flexes, meaning that they won't be a stress point anymore.

As someone who is a programmer, this type of scenario is something that one can run into often, and I'm saying this from personal experience. Part of debugging is isolating what is going wrong, and seeing what happens when you change something. Sometimes the simplest of changes can cause significant glitches, and sometimes the smallest fix can save the whole program.

Great props to you, This Does Not Compute. Your consistent power cycling to a chime at the end was thrilling for me. :) Happy sales!

Wait, are you actually selling it? That would be a huge bummer if you are.

Wow, you had the balls to actually go that deep into finally fixing that Mac clone! Congrats on getting it to work!

"It's the fucking heatsink!" It's an instant classic. But Jesus! Four PowerPCs with more than 800MB RAM, wow! Imagine using that in the 90's!

Phew! Glad you found the Issue. *And i can imagine that it IS damn Heavy.*

I was swearing with you all the way through men. I worked in IT a long time and holy shit I couldn't look at some point, feeling how frustrating it is. GLAD YOU GOT IT, MATE. This is the most "on the edge of my seat" I have been in the last 5 years. Not even Mission Impossible did this to me haha. Oh my god, I'm so glad for you.

Congrats! Reminds me of three-days I spent trying to find a bug in a $25K animation box in the Nineties. Pulled very part, replaced RAM, bought spare $10K Targa card. Turned out to be an internal break in a SCSI cable. Can't live with 'em, can't live without 'em. :D

"WOAH, WHAT??? WAIT, WHAT???????" 🤣 I LOVE the incredibly genuine, absolutely floored reaction 🧡 This is the closure I NEEDED hahaha, I legitimately began clapping at 12:23

the chime while probing the clock had me rolling :D glad you fixed the issue! it was a titanic effort

I'm glad to see a follow up video. The way you cover your troubleshooting is really satisfying to watch.

I have experienced a similar dilemma too, looked everything and everywhere, except the most obvious. YAY to you fixing the problem!

Agree with someone else here, I actually felt a thrill as you tracked down the issue. If it weren't for a physical disability I would love to learn how to do this sort of thing. Maybe not so much for preserving this level of vintage hardware, but just in general to prevent so much perfectly usable hardware from becoming e-waste. Thank you so much for sharing this tale of perseverance.

I really admire your ability to flow and troubleshoot down to the dumbest component level failure.

Wow, what a crazy problem to have (and to troubleshoot!) I certainly don't blame you at all for not discovering it any sooner ... would have never guessed it'd be something like that. Great episode as always.

That outro feels like the dramatic ending of a movie! Love it.

I find this video inspiring, because here you were on the brink of giving up just to have another crack at it. You retraced your steps multiple times until a small defect became more apparent. Yes it might have been easy to spot if you had known about it, but I find it comical but also reassuring for I as I'm sure many others too overlook things just as simple when fixing stuff. I'm happy your time and effort ended on a positive note, and I hope this Genesis MP goes on to represent it's kind for more decades to come!

Just fabulous. No way you can spot one bad joint. But as tech ages this will become more and more common. Great video.

This sort of thing has happened to me too. I do find it's good to take a project and set it aside for a while... I can become "frustration blind" and working on a different project is a nice reset.

Wow - this was my dream machine back in the early 2000's. I have a 9500 MP, and that was perfect for running BeOS, but this would probably be even sweeter. Given the case is not basically one giant blob of decaying plastic (like the 9500) it would also have longevity. I would totally buy it, but being in the UK, that seems like it could be extremely expensive and problematic. If you don't get a buyer, please comment on this message and we can discuss more.

Fantastic video and well done for not giving up! Shows that sometimes you just need to stop, and come back to a problem days later. I'm so glad you could get it working again!

8:11 I love how applying thermal paste on camera has become a RU-vid meme.

NICE SAVE! Well done. That amazing CPU card deserves life and you brought it back!

This is the very best kind of video. I love the stubborn persistence to figure out a problem like this.

NICE!!! Good work! I had a similar problem with a tiny bord in a remote for a security system. It would randomly not work. Turned out it was the tiny antenna souderd to the bord. One of the joints was cracked but very hard to see. You really do have to check every joint.

I'm glad you ended up not being satisfied with the conclusion you did in the last video, and that my hunch about the board flex was in the correct ball park, just not what I was expecting. XD Awesome job eliminating variables one after the other until you found where the problem really was. Hope that's a lesson you'll remember for a long time.

What a great save! I am so glad you managed to get it working. I have had similar struggles and it is so rewarding when it works.

It always makes sense to reflow all joints. Cold joints have caused havoc for loads of old tech.

Glad to see this unique behemoth up and running again! You did an excellent job with the troubleshooting.

Conquers the demons in the machine. "Should be reliable moving forward"-> Immediately summons them again. Awesome you found the problem. Thanks for taking the time to film it.

Great job finding the issue! Glad to see this machine back to life

I was sitting here with a huge grin on my face as you were slowly closing in on the problem, and nearly yelped in excitement once you got the thing up and running again. Great job methodically working your way through it and figuring it out. It's an inspiration to troubleshooters everywhere.

mate... the amount of times i have done troubleshooting like this only to find it was something simple that i have overlooked is something i can relate to. You got it eventually, well done :)

so glad to see this working now! I've had a lot of headaches over broken solder joints too, i sometimes will just try to bump random components when i cant make sense of things and sometimes i find one that wasnt soldered anymore and that was the problem (or part of it)

Congratulations on fixing it! I'm so happy to see that you found the issue and fixed it.

One of the best videos of your channel,I'm jumping when the chime play,Your breakdown analysis was absolutely fascinating, it always is, it's the little details that drive us crazy! Seeing your Genesis MP working makes me happy!

Ha, what a novel issue! I’ve had some similar situations, where I give up and randomly find the solution later on. I’m glad you were able to fix it!

Love the persistence, that you came back to it and figured it out. Logically with your amount of experience and knowledge something had to give. 😂 I verbally yelled “Yeah” 🤓 when you got it working. I was actually thinking about this at work the other day 😆 Happy you pushed on (after a needed break, as others have mentioned) and figured it out. What’s funny is how many times you mentioned the “heat sink flexing the motherboard“. Congratulations

Great work!!! First video I watched on your channel was the one previous to this. So it was super awesome to be able to watch this immediately following it

That is an absolutely wild ride. Glad you found the issue!

Congratulations!!!! That feeling of accomplishment when you finally fix something that has been a PITA for so long and seemed impossible to fix is wonderful

Genuinely hilarious video. It's lovely to see you getting it working again, I felt so bad for you last video!

So glad to see you fixed the problem. We all miss things, sometimes that rabbit hole is just too easy to fall into!

the way you paced that video to be very detailed and not boring was excellent. that was a really good video on trouble shooting.

Sincere congrats on keeping trying and saving that gem of a system!

Very satisfying resolution! Your persistence is amazing.

In 2005 I spotted one of these in a shop with the cover missing and basically stripped except for the quad cpu card. I had no idea what it was and the owner gave it to me. So I set about doing the internet thing and soon I had ram, a hard drive, etc. I couldn’t believe it was a quad cpu at 200 mhz. Had fun playing with. Even installed Linux and beos. Was a blast.

“fine… we’ll look at it again” i felt that in my soul 😅

Ya i’ve done face-palm repairs too. As long as you find the problem in the end and have a great story to tell! Always a joy to watch someones’ success with a troublesome repair! 👍🏻

Awesome troubleshooting bro. Well played and well repaired.

I am super happy you got this working again. I hate when I have similar issues that drive me nuts. Something so simple accidentally overlooked.

that was very satisfying to find such a intermittent problem. kudos on sticking it through!

Nice, nothing like finding the unexpected problem and fixing it. thanks for the update

What patience you bring with you. I would have already thrown everything in the corner. 🤣 Very good that it gave you no peace.

Loved this one. So glad to see that it's not just me that has luck like this.

When you were checking the CPU pins for loose legs, did you inspect the rest of the card under the scope? Surprised that broken joint wouldn't show up under visual inspection, but I can also understand how you may not have bothered to do a full visual inspection of the card. Easy to lose sight of the basics when you're in the vortex and chasing the dragon.

Holy crap! I am so happy you got that to work again! That was such a stupid little problem that was causing it to not boot. Even I would have missed something like that lol.

hahah yes!! Awesome! Stopping and thinking about it for a bit was probably what you needed anyway. I'm SO HYPED you got it figured out! It's such a cool machine and you figured it out.

I really was sad last week when you didn't post a video. im glad you're back. love your videos.

In my humble experience with computers, retrocomputing and electronic stuff in general (I'm also into vintage electronic music instruments), a lot of times the most puzzling and unnerving issues were caused by silly stuff like cold/broken solder joints, bad contacts, etc. I remember some years ago I spent months at scratching my head on my Roland D-50 synthesizer, which was intermittent at power on. Some times it would boot, some times not. I spent hours and days checking this and that, cleaning contacts, reflowing solder joints, replacing capacitors, just to realize at a certain point that the problem was due to the reset signal not being generated correctly. And that was because of a cold solder joint on an IC on the power supply. After reflowing the solder joints, the synth was rock solid. So, I definitely know how you felt when discovering the cause of your headache :-D This happens with software development too. I work as a programmer for a little software company, and if I'd have to write a book about all the times I got headaches chasing bugs and ghosts whose cause was trivial, that book would be think as a brick. Fixing the cause took seconds, finding it sometimes even days.

What a great result! You got there in the end. Top job!

Just brilliant. So happy that you’ve figured this out 🎉

So great you manage to figure it out eventually. Ain’t it frustrating when you see the simple solution only after following a dozen complicated wrong paths? 😂

I love these troubleshooting videos, it reminds me of my days working in Data Centers!

Man you got me with those two videos, I love troubleshooting and hate it if I can't get it working :D

Yesh!! What a ride!! So happy you pinpointed the issue and fixed it!!

Cheers Mate! Glad to see you don't give up on these things.

Great update. Inspiring to dig back some of my older boards that I have given up on.

Reminds me of a friend who would troubleshoot surface mount components with a tiny rubber headed mallet. Tapping on components would sometimes let you know if solder pads had cold solder joints. Too bad affordable phone mounted thermal camera modules didn't exist 30 years ago

That was an unexpected problem by far. Kudos on getting it back up and operational!

Brilliant! Well done in finally sourcing the problem. 🎉

As an electrical engineer who builds PCBs often, it's amazing how often it's something stupid - something not soldered, a tiny solder splash, something not plugged in, etc. That's why the first steps in troubleshooting are quick inspection for obviously broken components, voltage/continuity checks, and careful optical inspection under magnification.

Amazing job! Your perseverance astounds me.

Glad you found the problem! I day dreamed about this Mac as a young adolescent when it was released.

Woot! Glad you got it! Yelled out loud when you finally figured what the trouble was!

Hell yeah! Awesome fix! I love finding the problem!

Thank you for sharing the heartfelt story with a positive outcome! I'm happy for you!

Congrats! This was super satisfying to watch.

So glad you got it fixed and brought us along for the ride. I hope it ends up in a good home where it will be appreciated.

Fantastic job! All that perseverance paid off!

Colin, this video made me cry and laugh at the same time. Especially the ending, you cheeky man.

Major props for not giving up. I don't post that much here but I had to give credit where credit was due.

Congrats! Nothing more satisfying than *finally* fixing a problem that you just can't leave alone :)

NICE job! Great troubleshooting! :)

Good job, Colin! This is great content

Well done mate, easily missed but at last you found the cause, great job.

That was so satisfying! Thank you for figuring it out!

That was one hell of a journey! It makes seeing it work so much more satisfying

Wow, respect! That's a well done error searching and video work! Stay persistent and never give up! 😎👍

7:27 That was a quantum particle changing its behavior while being observed 😂

I'm glad you went back to this one. Another classic saved.