If you have multiple rails on the secondary side shorted to ground, you'll need to start pulling parts off the power rail until the short goes away....
Iron wattage depends on what you're doing. For SMD work, a 40W iron can be sufficient, but for through hole stuff, a 60-80W iron can be needed due to...
Tripping the breaker could be a couple of things. It could either be leakage current to ground, or it could be the inrush current of the power supply...
If you have a Walmart near you, they have a Hypertough 44 piece precision bit set with an extender that works great on compact macs, and it's cheap....
IDE/ATA is basically the ISA bus with some buffers. Early disk controllers had little in the way of fault detection and misbehaving hard drives could...
The plastic base is more of a pin carrier than structural support, as you've found out breaking a pin off. Most of the structural support comes from...
The first "brrrrt" is the protected mode floppy driver loading. The subsequent "chuk chuk chuk" sound is Windows trying to find a file on the drive....
Not sure off hand, but they're usually pretty standardized sizes. I don't keep many X2 capacitors around because they don't go bad that often, and I...