An LGR restoration thing.

[PS/2 sliding into your video]

This right here is a machine from 1987: the IBM Personal

System/2 Model 30.

And as you can see it has seen better days.

I got this pretty cheap on eBay a while back.

It's just not in great shape, it needs a good bit of work.

But that's okay, I was just happy to get one of these early models of a Personal System/2.

They had the Model 60 and 80 and stuff like that.

I have those but I did not have one of the quote unquote “cheap” ones that IBM was

selling in ‘87.

So I thought this would do nicely for an upcoming video that I have planned on the Personal

System/2 line and as is obvious it's covered in all sorts of grime

and gooey residue and tape and marker.

And somebody even scratched out the little sticker on the front here that would normally

show like the serial number and the precise model number and everything.

I don't know what this thing went through but I found it sad.

And this power switch is not doing what it's supposed to either, it's just kind of flopping around.

[floptaplop]

There's no give in it whatsoever, so that's gonna need to be fixed and then

there's this empty bay in the front here which, depending on the model of Model 30 that you

got from IBM, would have had either a second floppy disk drive or it would be filled up

with a 20 or 30 megabyte hard disk drive.

And that is what this one originally had because the model number exactly that IBM referred

to this was the 8530-021, meaning that it came with the hard disk.

It also has some sort of networking card installed around back.

Not really sure what that is exactly yet but I suppose we'll see inside and perhaps that'll

be a clue as to what this did in a past life.

Getting inside the Model 30 is pretty simple, all you need is a Torx head screwdriver with

the correct head size.

And there are four of these screws around the edges of the case.

Then once they’re undone they actually don't come out of the case, which is kind of nice,

you're not gonna lose anything.

They just sort of dangle in there and they're spring-loaded,

these have individual springs on them.

And then the top of the case just slides off here, and yes: this is all plastic.

The bottom of the chassis is metal but yeah, this is one of the cost-saving measures that

IBM went to for these models of Personal System/2s.

Speaking of cost-saving measures, I assume: here's that power switch and as you can see

there's just a metal rod that goes between the power switch on the front of the case

and this toggle on the power supply itself.

It looks like that just sort of popped out of there at some point so whatever man.

All you gotta do is pop it back in place and it works just fine!

Not the most robust power toggle I've ever seen

but hey, at least the rod is metal and not plastic.

Unlike some of my Packard Bells...

All right over in the drive bay here we have the double-sided double density three and

a half inch floppy disk drive over here, it's a Mitsubishi model.

And then on the right we have the other side of the floppy disk cable just in case we want

to put another floppy drive there.

But we don't, we're gonna be putting a hard disk if all goes well.

And unlike many earlier IBM personal computers the 8530 has a hard disk controller built

into the motherboard.

However, look at that 44-pin connector.

That's not any of the usual suspects like SCSI, IDE, or even MFM.

A bunch of PS/2 machines used something called ESDI or Enhanced Small Disk Interface, which

looking online it seemed that's what this came with.

Not only is it a little strange in that regard but there are no power cables coming from

the power supply to plug into a hard drive, assuming I could find the right one.

On this machine the power actually goes through the connector on the hard disk or floppy disk

controller through the cable directly into the drive.

So there is no separate power cable, meaning that if I do put a hard disk in here It's

going to have to be one that is compatible with this and I'm gonna have to find the correct cable.

Anyway right here on the board you can see the CPU,

it's an Intel 8086-2 on this original Model 30.

There's also a later one with a 286 installed.

And this blank socket right here is for the optional math coprocessor, the 8087, which

I probably won't be putting in here.

Over towards the middle of the motherboard you'll see this riser card.

And this provides the expandability options for this machine,

which comes in the form of three ISA slots.

And it also has a battery on the riser as well, I was not expecting

to see this kind of thing on there.

Most of what I read online said that these normally came with like a Dallas real time

clock chip but this came with one of these barrel batteries.

And yeah, you know, I don't like keeping these things around but we're gonna see if it works first.

And then here is that gigantic networking card.

This was not standard to the machine, whoever had this or -- whatever company used this

had installed it at one point.

We'll find out what it is a little bit later.

But enough looking around, let's go ahead and get to some cleaning!

Starting with a little compressed air and tossing these dust bunnies out of the way.

And I'm not gonna give this an *extremely* deep cleaning because really, I have a lot

of Personal System/2 units that I want to show in an upcoming video and I just kind

of want to get this one in a presentable shape and feeling nice and clean, relatively speaking.

I'm just going over everything with an assortment of anti-static brushes and getting all this

stuff kind of cleaned up and feeling decent.

Because really, other than the caked-on dust it's not in bad shape.

I was really hoping there were no weird leakages or rust bits or yeah you know, who knows.

There's all sorts of junk that can go wrong on these older computers depending on how

they've been stored and for how long and where.

But all things considered I mean, it's mostly the outside that looked really bad,

the inside was just dusty.

Alright I'm curious about this other half of the board and this gigantic networking

card is in the way so we'll get that out of there.

And here we go!

There is a lot more dust over here, that's for sure.

Oh well, nothing a bit of brushing and some time can't help.

And gonna go ahead and take out the RAM sticks here.

And from the factory my Model 30 came with 640 kilobytes of usable conventional memory

with some on the motherboard and these sticks providing 256k each.

Just gonna dust these things off because it makes me happy and hey look at that.

Already looking a lot better compared to how it was.

The contacts in there actually looked pretty good, so just sort of spraying them down with

some compressed air and stick the RAM sticks back in there with some highly satisfying

clicks, mmm. [satisfying clickity clicks] Welp time to brush down the rest of this and

spray it and all that good stuff.

[compressed air sounds] Oh Yeah, that is way better.

It's a rather attractive looking board with those yellow chips

and a kind of amber theme going on, I like it.

And I'm just gonna stick the networking card back in there,

although I don't anticipate using it.

I'm just curious what it'll do, if anything, on startup.

I'm pretty pleased with the interior of the machine for the time being so I'll go ahead

and start wiping down the exterior starting with the rear of the thing here.

And just using a microfiber dusting cloth and my anti-static brushes again, just sort

of loosening up all the dirt and grime as much as I can.

Ah, and one of the simple but great pleasures of restoring and cleaning up an older computer:

exhaust fans + compressed air.

[compressed air rapidly rotating the fan]

Yeah I don't know why that's fun but it is.

And yeah, this is completely unnecessary but I got one of these little detailing brushes

because they're kind of cool.

just has these rubber tips and you can go over all the little nooks and crannies and

crevices and -- I don't know if it's actually helping but it makes me feel better.

Now let's start addressing some of these stupid stickers and junk on the rest of the case.

Thankfully this one peeled right off of there and didn't seem to leave much residue at all,

just sort of came off in one go and I used the sticker to unstick the rest of it.

Then there's this unfortunate little serial number label that

has been scraped off for whatever reason.

So I'm just gonna try to finish the job with a light scraping of a screwdriver and since

it was already scraped into I didn't feel too bad about doing that.

Not the most ideal outcome but it'll do for now.

Then there's this permanent marker in an “L” shape and this can be tricky due to the texture

on IBMs from this era.

Ink like this and really grime in general tends to sink into that powder-like coating and ugh.

First thing I tried was some high-strength alcohol and that didn't do much.

Next I tried the old dry erase marker trick which often works on fresher, permanent ink

but had very little effect here on this textured surface.

Next I tried some goo remover and while that loosened things up after a few minutes, it

still wasn't going as deep as I wanted.

So it was down to one of those “magical” melamine cleaning sponges.

And while this has the potential to smooth out the coating if you scrub too hard -- and

I don't like doing that -- just taking it slow and steady seemed to do the job nicely

you can hardly tell that L-shaped marker stain was there.

Next I'm just gonna wipe down a lot of the rest of the outside of the case with a bit

of distilled water and vinegar mix just to get the loose grimy crap off of there.

And I got another one of these detailing brushes to get in there with the power switch.

This was probably the dirtiest part of the front of the case actually, just a lot of

gunk built up over time with a bunch of fingers and storage conditions doing their thing.

And then also near the power switch on the front of the case here there were these little

spots where it looked like the machine had been bumped up against something kind of hard

and it had left like a blue smear just on the tips of these corners.

And I'm just kind of going around the outside of it here very lightly to get rid of a couple

little spots that were annoying and it did pretty well, I thought.

There's only one little area here, looks like there was a sticker there at one point that

was preventing more yellowing.

But yeah overall I'm pretty happy with the way this is turning out already!

And now to get to the top outside portion of the case here.

And we're gonna start with that big ol’ wide masking tape strip that's been torn off

and is just looking ugly at this point.

And I'm just gonna use one of these decal removers with a plastic razor blade just to

kind of get it started so I can hopefully peel it off in one go, and that piece worked just fine.

And the second one proved to be a little bit more challenging but again, just taking it

slowly and carefully and there we go!

It came off as well pretty much in one piece.

And that plastic blade is soft enough that it didn't do any damage to the case plastic itself.

And before we start going all elbow grease and trying to get rid of that gooey stuff,

I’m just kinda gonna wipe down the rest of this a little bit.

It's kind of a light layer of dirt and griminess,

made the whole thing feel really kind of gross to touch.

And yeah, a bit of goo remover here and it got rid of most of that residue from the tape.

There was still some more stubborn junk that I ended up using a magic eraser on so yeah,

that's what I ended up doing for most of the rest of the top of the case here.

And unfortunately it's not gonna get rid of absolutely everything, there were some deeper

scratches and a couple spots with just some really stubborn stains.

But thankfully it's not terribly noticeable when it's all cleaned up like this.

At least on camera, you can notice a little bit more in person I think.

And let’s go ahead and put it back together here, and yeah man, I'm pretty pleased.

I can tell that the front of the case here has yellowed just a bit compared to the top

of the case in, you know, a couple little spots.

I'd say that's a pretty decent improvement for having spent just

a couple hours using very basic cleaning stuff.

And now that I have that power switch hopefully fixed up we can try and plug this thing up

and turn it on and see if it actually works!

I have not actually attempted to power this thing on yet.

Now this does use MCGA graphics but a normal VGA monitor will work as long as you have

the proper cable -- you just kinda have to remove one of the pins.