14 Oct
2008
14 Oct
'08
11:18 a.m.
I usually sacrifice a connector saver to resolve this issue.
Eric
On Tue, Oct 14, 2008 at 10:00 AM, Mr Ian Primus <ian_primus at yahoo.com> wrote:
--- On Tue, 10/14/08, Brad Parker <brad at
heeltoe.com> wrote:
This is something I've never seen before;
I'm
trying to revive an old
dead Compaq for a friend of a friend.
I went to plug in a stock VGA cable (15 pin) and it would
not go. The
connector on the Dell motherboard (this is a very very old
386) has one
pin blocked.
Someone here must know what that means; what do I do? grab
the needle
nose and hack my cable?
That was pretty common at one point in time. Old monitors didn't have this pin (and a
few others...). A lot of PC/clone video cards from the 286/386/486 era are like this. It
normally only caused problems when you went to use the computer with a KVM setup - the
male-male VGA cables always seem to have all the pins filled. The solution is to either
use a monitor that doesn't have this pin filled, modify a cable, or do what I always
did - drill a tiny hole in the port connector with a hand drill.
-Ian