Fixing An E-Waste ASUS P5A-B Socket 7 Mainboard

April 3, 2026 by Maya Posch 9 Comments

A fun part of retro computing is saving ‘e-waste’ that was headed for certain destruction. These boards can have any number of defects, modifications and more that have to be remedied prior to using them. In the case of the Asus P5A-B Socket 7 mainboard that [Bits und Bolts] rescued from the scrapheap at least one issue was obvious: someone had ripped off the plastic part of the ZIF socket, leaving only the metal pins poking out like an awkward kind of LGA socket.

In addition to the busted PGA ZIF socket there was additional damage, including a broken SMT capacitor and missing resistor. Interestingly, someone had apparently modded the ATX power connector to permanently power on the system by removing a pin and bridging to the power-on signal. Obviously this mod had to be undone by removing the bridge and installing a new pin. After this cracked solder joints had to be addressed, before the tedious task of removing the stray PGA socket pins one by one started.

Exactly what was done to this mainboard and why will likely forever remain a mystery, but at least there didn’t seem to be any serious damage. After installing a CPU it was possible to boot and access the BIOS as well as run a couple of tools, confirming that one more Socket 7 board has been saved from the scrapper.

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Addressing The Divisive Topic That Is Boiling Water

April 2, 2026 by Maya Posch 27 Comments

The topic of boiling water is apparently a rather divisive topic, with plenty of strong opinions to go around on what is safe and the most efficient way to go about it. Thus in a new video [Cahn] sought to address the many comments that came in after his previous testing of electric kettles on either 12 VDC or 240 VAC.

What’s interesting about this whole topic is that at its core the overall efficiency of boiling water is simply a matter of calculating the energy input minus energy losses, with the remaining energy going into the water.

As we can see in the video, using a higher battery voltage doesn’t really change the efficiency of a 12 VDC kettle, but the higher current draw does manage to melt a fuse that can’t take the heat — requiring a 20 amp fuse instead of the 15 A one.

One change that does make a difference is how it’s connected. Replacing the thin gauge wiring and the attached cigarette lighter plug on the 12 VDC kettle with beefier cable and an Anderson plug made things run cooler, resulting in an efficiency bump of about 10%. This cut the time required to get the water boiling by around 6 minutes.

Added to this test were an induction hob and an iso-butane-powered Jetboil, both of which scored rather unimpressively. For the induction option it’s obvious that a lot of energy is wasted by having the pan radiate it away from the water, while burning iso-butane loses energy through the exhaust gases. Ultimately what you pick to boil water with should thus be mostly determined by convenience rather than sheer physics.

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The Raspberry Pi 4 With 3 GB RAM Is No Joke

April 2, 2026 by Maya Posch 62 Comments

Raspberry Pi 5 price increases. (Credit: Jeff Geerling)

Although easily dismissed by some as another cruel April Fools joke, Raspberry Pi’s announcement of a new 3 GB model of the Raspberry Pi 4 along with (more) price increases for other models was no joke. Courtesy of the ongoing RAMpocalypse, supplies of LPDDR4 and LPDDR5 are massively affected, leading to this new RPi 4 model with two 1.5 GB LPDDR4 chips, as these are apparently cheaper to source.

Affected in this latest price increase across RP’s product range are RPi 4 and 5 models with 4 or more GB of RAM, with price bumps ranging from $25 on the low end to $150 for the Raspberry Pi 500+. If you wanted a Raspberry Pi 5 with 16 GB of RAM, you’re now paying $300 for the privilege.

Obviously, this news has got people like [Jeff Geerling] rather down in the dumps, essentially stating that using SBCs like the RPi is now beyond the means of many hobbyists. While you can still use SBCs that use e.g. LPDDR2 RAM, such as the older RPi Zero, 2 and 3 models, [Jeff] himself is now moving more towards wrangling with snakes on MCUs, as these boards are so far not significantly affected in terms of price.

With current projections in the RAM market being that this year will still see more price increases, it remains hard to tell exactly how ‘temporary’ this situation will be. That said, using readily available, powerful and cheap MCUs like the ESP32 variants for projects isn’t a bad idea if you really don’t need to be running more than perhaps FreeRTOS.

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Windows 3.1 On A Modern AM5-Based PC Is Surprisingly Usable

April 2, 2026 by Maya Posch 20 Comments

Although Windows 95 stole the show, Windows 3.0 was arguably the first version of Windows that more or less nailed the basic Windows UI concept, with the major 3.1 update being quite recognizable to a modern-day audience. Even better is that you can still install Win3.1 on a modern x86-compatible PC and get some massive improvements along the way, as [Omores] demonstrates in a recent video.

The only real gotcha here is that the AMD AM5 system with Asus Prime X670-P mainboard is one of those boards whose UEFI BIOS still has the ‘classic BIOS’ Compatibility Support Module (CSM) option. With that enabled, Win 3.1 installs without further fuss via a USB floppy drive from a stack of ‘backup’ floppies that someone made in the early 90s. [Omores] also tried it with CSMWrap, but with this USB to PS/2 emulation didn’t work.

Windows 3.1 supports ‘enhanced mode’ by default, which adds virtual memory and multi-tasking if you have an 80386 CPU or better. To fix crashing on boot and having to use ‘standard mode’ instead, the ahcifix.386 fix for the responsible SATA issue by [PluMGMK] should help, or a separate SATA expansion card.

For the video driver the vbesvga.drv by [PluMGMK] was used, to support all VESA BIOS Extensions modes. This driver has improved massively since we last covered it and works great with an RTX 5060 Ti GPU. There’s now even DCI support to enable direct GPU VRAM access for e.g. video playback, with audio also working great with only a few driver-related gotchas.

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Post-Failure Autopsy And Analysis Of An LFP Battery

April 2, 2026 by Maya Posch 8 Comments

Recently [Kerry Wong] had one of his Cyclenbatt LiFePO₄ batteries die after only a few dozen cycles, with a normal voltage still present on the terminals. One of the symptoms was that as soon as you try to charge it, the voltage goes up very rapidly to above 14 V due to what appears to be high internal resistance, and vice versa for discharging. In addition, the Bluetooth feature of the BMS appeared to have died as well, making non-invasive diagnostics somewhat tricky.

Close-up of the BMS. (Credit: Kerry Wong, YouTube)

After gently cutting open the plastic case, [Kerry] was greeted by the happily blinking blue LED of the Bluetooth module and deepening the mystery. Overall the build quality looks to be pretty good, with no loose cables as seen with certain other LFP batteries.

Cell voltages measured normal, with no significant imbalance. Next was measuring the internal resistance, which showed a clear issue. One of the cells was reading over 3 Ohms, whereas the others were in the milli-Ohm range. This would definitely explain the issues with charging and discharging, with a single bad cell causing most of the issues.

Of course, why the Bluetooth feature failed remains a mystery, and there’s still a lingering question on whether the BMS practiced proper balancing between the cells, as this can also cause issues over time.

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Running A Game On A PC With No System RAM

March 31, 2026 by Maya Posch 43 Comments

As a clear sign of how desperate these RAMpocalypse times are becoming, we have [PortalRunner] over on YouTube contemplating how to run modern-day software on a PC that has no sticks of that most precious PC-related commodity that is not printer ink. What fallbacks do we have when purchasing some sticks of DDR5 is inconceivable due to budgetary limitations or chronic sticker shock symptoms? As it turns out, quite a few.

Of course, it should be noted up front that none of these options are particularly good or desirable. The video starts with simply trying to push Linux to see how little RAM it really needs using boot arguments. This unfortunately soft-bricks the system if not enough RAM is allocated for boot. Next is the idea of leaning heavily into swap, as today’s SSDs ought to be a lot faster than memory page swapping from a HDD. Only this turns out to be also too slow to be usable due to the sheer overhead that this adds.

Even more desperate is to try and use the video RAM on GPUs as a kind of system RAM, which sort-off works, but also with enormous overhead and an if possible worse experience than running a system off basically a pure swap file. Ultimately the most viable method is to lean into the CPU’s many megabytes of cache and modify a CoreBoot BIOS image to simply not initialize system RAM.

As long as you can squeeze your software into the BIOS image and available CPU cache memory, you can run amazing software like the Snake clone in the video. Of course this concept could be expanded upon, and maybe even made to work with UEFI BIOSes, but there will probably not be anyone running Linux from a 32 MB L3 cache any time soon.

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Improving FDM Filament Drying With A Spot Of Vacuum

March 31, 2026 by Maya Posch 29 Comments

Keeping your filament safely away from moisture exposure is one of the most crucial aspects of getting a good 3D print, with equipment like a filament dryer a standard piece of equipment to help drive accumulated moisture out of filament prior to printing or storage. Generally such filament dryers use hot air to accomplish this task over the course of a few hours, but this is not very efficient for a number of reasons. Increasing the vaporization rate of water without significantly more power use should namely be quite straightforward.

The key here is the vapor pressure of a liquid, specifically the point at which it begins to transition between its liquid and gaseous phases, also known as the boiling point. This point is defined by both temperature and atmospheric pressure, with either factor being adjustable. In a pressure cooker this principle is for example used to increase the boiling temperature of water, while for our drying purposes we can instead reduce the pressure in order to lower the boiling point.

Although a lower pressure is naturally more effective, we can investigate the best balance between convenience and effectiveness.

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