Repairing my Atari 65XE

I bought an Atari 65XE off Ebay for a fairly decent price, but unfortunately the machine was broken. The memory test would fail at blocks 17-20, and 23-32. The rest were fine. I figured one of the RAM chips went bad, so I'd just replace it.

I found this nice place on the web that still supports Atari stuff (believe it or not!!!). They are called Best Electronics, and are located in California. Their web presence is at http://www.best-electronics-ca.com/. I ordered eight replacement RAM chips from them at 1.50 per RAM chip. I could have gotten them about 1/3 of the price from Jameco or a similar electronics firm, but I wanted to give this place my business for still supporting the Atari 8 bit computers. I also purchased a nice blue polo shirt with an embroidered Atari logo from them - sweet!

Here is a nice pic of the mainboard sitting on the bench after being removed from the case.

Top of the mainboard - the upper right two RAM chips have already been replaced with the new socketed versions.

My process was to replace one chip, run the RAM test, and repeat until I found the bad chip. I started at one end of the row of RAM chips, and one by one replaced them. Of course, it was the very last RAM chip, number eight, that was the bad one. Oh well, I now have all new RAM, and all are socketed for easier repair in the future if needed.
Some pics of the repair:

The re-assembly process:

And the completed, reassembled unit:

And yes, it worked fine after my efforts! :-)