Been doing board level repair for the last 5 years at the store I own. Every once in a while, physical inspections miss stuff. Glad you caught it, man! Congrats!

Spoiler alert if you haven’t watched the video.

My very first vintage Mac was an SE FDHD from eBay. There was no video display, but it chimed. I tried every solution in the Dead Mac Scrolls, recapped the analog board, desoldered and cleaned the brightness knob, and anything else I could think of. After weeks and weeks, I was staring at the board one evening, and accidentally bumped a small inductor or filter near the top of the board.

One side was broken off.

I soldered it back on, flipped the power switch, and was greeted by a very happy Mac. That was a magical moment, and I am never getting rid of that little SE FDHD.

"It's the fucking heatsink!" It's an instant classic.

But Jesus! Four PowerPCs with more than 800MB RAM, wow! Imagine using that in the 90's!

"WAIT WHAT!?" 😂 That feeling when the fix doesn't make sense haha (immediately at least)

Great job - I love to see man triumph over machine.

It's actually really important to STOP when you are angry/frustrated with troubleshooting. I find that is usually when I am about to make bad decisions and compound the problem. Stopping for a while and then circling back, I would say, is EXACTLY the thing that led to your success in the end. Take the win!

"...So I'm selling it" 😂

That intro 🤣

“fine… we’ll look at it again”

i felt that in my soul 😅

Wait, are you actually selling it? That would be a huge bummer if you are.

As someone who is a programmer, this type of scenario is something that one can run into often, and I'm saying this from personal experience. Part of debugging is isolating what is going wrong, and seeing what happens when you change something. Sometimes the simplest of changes can cause significant glitches, and sometimes the smallest fix can save the whole program.

this does now compute.

If you can, try touching each of those solder joints after the heatsink is back on. That way, the solder will reflow and settle the way the board now flexes, meaning that they won't be a stress point anymore.

... that scream at 7:04 😆

So satisfying to see you found the problem and fixed it! Sometimes it just takes some time away from the project to approach it from a fresh perspective. For everyone who has struggled to diagnose intermittent computer issues, it was extremely satisfying to see you successfully resolve it!

I am genuinely glad to see this fixed. It’s honestly been keeping me up at night.

I'm glad you saved this machine. What a weird problem but I guess it makes sense, pressure and broken legs/solder joints are actually common but we all forget them haha
Nice find! 💪🏻

Wow, you had the balls to actually go that deep into finally fixing that Mac clone! Congrats on getting it to work!

the simple sentence at 9:42 can describe the troubleshooting process of any tech issue

That outro feels like the dramatic ending of a movie! Love it.

"WOAH, WHAT??? WAIT, WHAT???????" 🤣 I LOVE the incredibly genuine, absolutely floored reaction 🧡 This is the closure I NEEDED hahaha, I legitimately began clapping at 12:23