Posts by Joseph Peterson5

Look, you absolutely should not touch that original power supply without testing it first. You really need to grab a multimeter and check those voltages—you’re looking for roughly 5.0 to 5.2V DC and about 9V AC. Just a heads-up, don't freak out if the AC side reads a little higher than 9V; that's totally normal when you're testing it without any load attached.
The pinout for the power supply is here:
http://www.vcfed.org/forum/showthrea...-with-no-Volts

Once you've confirmed the output voltages are sitting where they should be, then you can go ahead and try hooking it up to the Apple II.
Or, if you're feeling a bit more adventurous, just build your own custom power supply, something similar to this setup. I'd highly recommend checking out some videos by John; his stuff is top-tier.


As far as the restoration goes, the absolute baseline is swapping out the capacitors. You can either hunt down individual caps yourself or just order one of those specific recap kits made for the Apple II.
It would also be a smart move to swap the capacitors in the RF modulator while you're at it.

https://www.retroleum.co.uk/c64-capacitors

I've grabbed kits from these guys before for several different Apple II machines, and everything has always worked out fine.

The next thing on your checklist should be the voltage regulators; there are two of them tucked away inside.

The final step is to glue some heatsinks onto all the critical chips.

If you find a piece of cardboard inside the computer case, my advice is to just toss it. It doesn't actually do anything; it was probably just slapped in there years ago as some makeshift EMI shield.

If you run into anything else, just hit me up. There's a massive community on Facebook and a few dedicated forums specifically for Apple II enthusiasts.

It’s a pretty smart move to bring it into the repair shop, but honestly, you should make sure to ask them to pull the drive out right when they take the laptop from you.

So, I went ahead and installed it myself, and now I'm running Windows 7.
But I've run into this one tiny, annoying little glitch—whenever I hit Shutdown, the PC actually powers down, but the Num lock light just stays stuck on my keyboard.
Back when I was rocking Windows XP, this never used to happen.

Anyone got any bright ideas on how to fix this?

What kind of recorder are we even talking about here?

Honestly, if they actually pulled off what he’s claiming, don't hold your breath expecting to get anything back.

If you’ve gone through the whole ritual of formatting, then partitioning, and then hitting it with another format, you might as well just kiss those files goodbye because your chances of getting anything back are basically zero.

Just a quick heads-up for anyone watching digital TV over in the coastal areas near San Diego or up towards the North Bay:
NIT just flipped the switch to digital broadcasting a couple of days ago, making them the first local station in the US to make the jump. Now you can catch them just as easily as those other four channels that already went digital.

I'm pretty sure VLC is totally free, man. Just grab it and see if it does the trick for you.

The Electronic Program Guide isn't an option because I'm pretty sure our local US stations don't even support that kind of data yet.

I'm running an AMD Athlon XP with 512MB of RAM, though I’ve got a bit of a bottleneck situation on my end—the video stick is plugged into a dedicated USB 2.0 card because the motherboard itself is stuck on the ancient USB 1.1 standard (it's an old Soltek 75DRV4 setup).
But honestly, once I figured out the little trick of bumping up the process priority in Task Manager, everything started running smooth as silk.

Brian Kim86 said:The software bundled with the stick is decent enough, though I usually jump into Task Manager and crank the DVB-T player's priority up to "above normal" or even "high" just to stop the video from stuttering—it eats up a hell of a lot of CPU cycles.

Man, thanks for the heads-up on this forum about tweaking those priorities. I was getting all sorts of annoying frame drops and laggy playback before, but once I set the process to high, everything’s been running smooth as silk.

So, I picked up the Quickstick and honestly, I’m pretty stoked with it. As far as the software goes, I’ve just been sticking to the stuff that came bundled with the stick itself; for now, I don't really see what the big deal is. It gets the job done better than I expected—I just hit the R key and it starts recording.
I did try messing around with some other programs to see if I could switch things up, but none of them would even recognize the thing as a capture device. At this point, I'm kind of at a loss on how to force it to play nice with anything else.

So, how are you feeling about that QuickStick? I’m actually planning on pulling the trigger and grabbing one tomorrow—at least, that’s what they were hinting at over at Microsoft.

I can get on that, but honestly, I won't have a second to breathe until I'm back from work this afternoon.
Just shoot me an email through PM.

I’ve actually got that in MIDI format—it’s what I use for my ringtone.
Plus, I’ve got the watch and about 40 minutes of cartoons in DivX.