Dusty @ChlorideCull@fuzzy.systems

as for the broken inductor? connected to the Intel network chip on the board. probably won't work, but I can bodge that later

also, because I forgot to mention it - the fix for the EC was to yank the power cable, yank the RTC battery, hold the clear cmos button for a minute, and hold the power button for a minute, this resets all settings and forces everything to completely discharge, including the EC which otherwise is usually quite a pain to force a reset of

I do have an idea for what to do for the "ridiculous" part of the challenge, which involves the fact that you can just modify the BIOS however you want as long as you flash it with an external flasher...

not like I can do much until I have atleast one stick of DDR3 that this thing supports

If I had started this two weeks earlier I would've saved so much money

funnily enough I have an SPI flasher now, but I don't think I have any USB 2.0 sticks to use for using the official emergency flashing method, lol

woo, we've got life!

as in the EC (yeah sorry not super I/O) seems to be working, but unable to bootstrap the BIOS, but it's better than before!

it might be booting into bootblock recovery mode, which is a thing where it recognizes the BIOS is fucked and tries to find an image on a USB drive to flash, apparently - although this is early enough that the EC just straight up doesn't have the ability to show things on the display, so I can't tell, lol

I want to see two chess grandmasters play connect four

connect four is terrifying to play against people who can think multiple turns ahead

You know, kinda gonna bet that this severed inductor next to this crystal might be causing some issues

okay I couldn't help myself, I quickly checked and the PS_ON pin is never asserted, which probably means the Super IO chip isn't working properly... Gonna need to check if the thing is getting a clock to start with

so, I got the $15 computer, and it's more broken than described - nothing happens when I hit the power button, power rails aren't brought up, but I can see that 5VSB is active. Gonna need to check the signals from the PSU tomorrow, maybe manually trip PS_ON if the circuit is bad, and see if I can't get it to boot.

Worst case I have a dumpster dive PSU i could splice in to replace the proprietary one

every now and then I get someone asking me if I sent them something because i'm opted in to our internal phishing training thing where it can use your name