I got three solutions. WD40, Duct tape or a hammer. This calls for WD40. WD40 is completely non ion passing solvent. As in nonpolar. It will do nothing to electronics. It will lubricate, clean and free parts. You can pour it in a computer. If that does not work, dip the entire computer in WD40.

Pour it in papabill.

And if that doesn't work, beat it with the hammer??

Wouldn't do it while powered up, though.

WD-40 (the WD stands for Water Displacement) was/is a necessary "tool" in my cars when distributors get wet. A couple of shots of WD-40 and they'd start right up. My '90 Isuzu pickup still has an old fashioned distributor and I have used WD-40 on it on cold and damp mornings (after it has sat for a couple of days) and the occasional splash from flooded intersections.

Hey, brother, you are talking to an old North Carolina country boy. The three major things in our toolboxes was WD40, duct tape, and a ball-peen hammer-seriously!

If it moves and shouldn't: Duct tape!
If it doesn't move and should: WD-40!
If Duct tape and WD-40 don't work: Hammer!

Well in this case, maybe not but right before I threw it in the trash, sure, I would beat it.

Back wehn MacSEs were showing up at the dump I couldn't pass them up. I would bring them home and plug them in. Before popping the case the ones that did not boot I would slam down into the concrete basement floor after pushing the on button until I got a chime. More often than not, it worked.

I have used a hammer directly on a drive, most to get by "stiction" a drive that won't spin up. I've also popped drives open and with a phillips given the axle a spin while I push the on button and spray WD40 on everything.

We're talking last resort but it works sometimes.

Hey, whadda got to lose? It'll either fix it or finish it.

Well, unfortunately my eyesight is too poor to work on them any more, especially when you are talking about these little areas like memory seating slots. And arthritis prohibits doing much of anything else. So if the answer can't be had by "normal" means, I'm just out of luck.

I did get the G3 Minitower working and OS X 10.2 loaded today, even though it's only showing 256k of memory. Hmmm, I've got (2) 256k sticks in place, but they are separated by a blank slot. Seems it's either all or just one.....

I think they needed to be in adjacent slots in those machines, so if the next slot is bad, I guess you're out of luck. 256K is really not nearly enough to get any performance from 10.2.

So true, so true.

Oh, well. I've still got my little Grape iMac

sniff sniff