For some reason, a previous owner added 2 wires to the battery terminals, rather than powering it through the DC barrel jack on the back of the computer. I removed these straight away.

Keyboard repair

Unfortunately, I didn't take any pictures of this repair, since it was extremely fiddly work. But in essence it was quite simple. A lot of the keys were not responding at all, or not responding very well.

I disassembled the keyboard completely and cleaned all the contacts very well with isopropyl alcohol, followed by a very small amount of contact cleaner. Since then the keyboard has worked flawlessly.

ROM replacement

Originally this computer was completely in German and the only way to change this was to replace the ROM, which is conveniently accessible from the back, without having to open the case completely.

As a replacement for the standard masked ROM (not erasable), I chose a 2 megabit, 256K x 8, 29C020 flash ROM. After programming it with an image I found online and fitting it to the computer, it now speaks English.

One side effect of this change is that the keyboard layout cannot be configured, so even though it's still physically in the German AZERTY layout, the keys are mapped as a standard QWERTY keyboard.

Foot replacement