This is just a small anecdote that doesn't really need its own section, but it didn't really fit anywhere else and is worth sharing.

A few months after acquiring my PC98, I started it up like normal, only to be greeted with a loud, sustained beep and an extremely ominous error message in scary red text during boot-up...

PARITY ERROR - BASE MEMORY

This was troubling!!!!!!! Needless to say!!!!!!!!!

I tried restarting it several times, but each time, it was the same error. Distraught, I did a quick online search, but wasn't finding anything conclusive as to why it could be happening. I'm extremely shy and have a hard time speaking up in public chats, but I was desperate and managed to work up the courage to ask about it in the English PC98 Discord server. The responses I got were...

"your memory's dead"

"better get out that desoldering gun"

At this point, I thought I was going to cry... I didn't have the skills for a repair of that magnitude. But before pronouncing it dead, I decided to do a little more searching and stumbled upon this post from 2003 on a Japanese message board...

"Is it a Slot 1 type? You might be able to fix it by scrubbing the bejeezus out of the connector. I resuscitated two machines that way."

The DA isn't a Slot 1 type as it has a 386 CPU with a traditional socket connector, but other posts in the thread said that it's pretty rare for memory to actually break and this problem is caused by bad contacts more often than not. I hadn't given the machine a thorough cleaning as the seller claimed in his listing that it had been done already, so it was a possibility.

I opened up the case and cleaned every nook and cranny of the motherboard with a toothbrush. There was so much dust in there the bristles were black by the end.

I reassembled it and started it up. It worked perfectly.

I never saw the error again.

I told customers this constantly when I worked at a retro game store, but it's really true... 90% of the time, if it seems like something's wrong with old electronics, the problem is dust.

Always keep isopropyl alcohol and cotton swabs handy!

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