Commdore PC 20-II

I purchased this computer from its original owner as condition unknown / faulty. Although less well known than their 8-bit and Amiga line of computers, Commodore made quite a few PC compatibles. This specific model has an Intel 8088 CPU, 640 KB of RAM and a 20 MB hard drive, giving its model name.

Work done:

Exterior inspection:

The exterior was pretty dirty, but in fair condition:

Front

Side

Back

Bottom

To my surprise, the warranty sticker was still intact:

Warranty seal

Interior inspection:

I forgot to take a picture of the board before I removed the battery:

Full board

I'm not entirely sure, but it looks like the clock for this computer is on a small daughter board:

Clock board

On the back of the motherboard there were several bodges:

Back of main board

Here is the floppy drive model:

Floppy drive

And the power supply was also inspected, but was in perfect condition:

PSU

Battery repair

The major issue with these computers is a leaky Varta battery on the motherboard, and this computer was no exception:

Leaky battery

Luckily, the actual damage to the board was minimal:

Battery removed

I installed a removable connector for the new battery:

Battery wires installed

And placed the new battery in a more accessible place:

New battery

Hard drive

Initially the hard drive wouldn't run at all, but after some physical persuasion it started turning and the computer actually booted normally. But when I dug a bit deeper, I found that the drive has a lot of bad sectors.

Since this a so called IDE-XT drive, which isn't compatible with regular 16-bit IDE drives, it will be difficult to source a replacement, and I'll likely get a XT-IDE card as a replacement.