Sam, Ouch! Tugging at my eyes to clear those good naturally rantings...:) I used to fix quite few of them because I took few apart and was told by a C64 vet who repairs and resells them in early days. In C64 machines, buffers is not on Commodore's minds (saving $, yes right!) so they blow up pretty easily by idiots resulting in lots and lots of 6522 PIA ic swaps but that is not it for "dead" ones. About the black boxes PSU, most of them are potted, ack! Better snip off the power cable C64 side and wire up a new transformers that is same ratings as the orignal or bit better than that and use one regulator there, other two AC lines is used to power inside rectifers/regulators/filter capacitors and multiple fuses! You have to also open up the halves and check the voltage outputs after the regulators and fuses, capacitors inside the c64. Better C64 power bricks is not potted and is colored beige, they're easy to fix so look for them instead. The circit board is more of barebones worth of interconnected chipsets and few TTL's, not that real problem there. Fixed other C64 by replacing all 4164's, and a happy owner. There IS a powerful tool that connects all the ports, cartidge port and it takes over the C64 for diagnostics via the monitor. Sorry, they're kinda not rarity. More like coachroaches everywhere you go. I see them all the time, truly coachroaches that won't go away! (as I type this, amid Sam's wails of frustration is heard. Just imagining myself.) About the drives, they do need cleaning and greasing to operate properly, check the clocking. I fixed one because a sick crystal blew out the IC in the little sheilding box. I think they did have their own PSU inside that drive box? that was long ago. :)) The red led is controlled by cpu inside which is bit useful. Also make sure the drive rpm is right, it does have belt driven spindle. For a moment, users still use them for some reasons...You may remember that my friend burns his EEPROMs on C64 with a burner cartidge for years and says it was well worthwhile investment and paid him every time he uses it, it's already paid for long ago. (the burner can burn anything up to 27256 types) Recently, he's digging for it because this thing grew legs and got lost in his junk in order to burn a new image into EEPROM IC. That's for fixing the 2 years old Asus board branded PVI-486SP3 that lost it's rom memory for no reason. In a nutshell, check those DC voltages first. For grabled display (aka checkerboard display) at startup often points to memory fault. Also clean those edge contacts with strong alcohol, crunch socketed chips in. Also C64 used RF sheilding with fingers that contacts the IC's for heatsinking, put some fresh heatsink paste there if needed. If some ports, keyboard, serial and I/O, funny sound, seems dead, suspect 6522 PIA's Those MOS technology runs HOT like hot sunlit car seats. (g) There was at least 3 generations of PCB boards in C64 lifetime designs, the last one was fewer chipsets and one big IC, all in tiny board. Very easy to open up that shells, needs to unsolder the RF tin pan (Just tedious but easy to do in order to get at solder side if needed. When soldering work, be easy on PCB, it is not very good to heavy-handed tech.) To summarize: * Power problems - dead or flaky operation, check both inside C64 and the power brick. * blown PIA's (two of them) - C64 seems to work but certain feature(s) is/are dead. * memories - grabled or checkerboard. Actually, the design fault because the potting held in heat output If you are patient, chip at potting away until you get at the regulator, replace it with bigger heatsink and find the fuse too if needed. PCB is PCB with chips and all get ruined if left out in elements. Looks like power loss somwhere in that one and blown fuse. Remember, we are supposed to fix those historic stuff not wasting those little poor electrons that made up this letter? To add, the worst machine to work on is old Toshibas, thousands of screws and little parts, too short wires, etc and baddie of all, pitiful few hd choices especially ones that uses regular IDE hd...Mostly in early series before '91. Jason D.