Reviving IIe... power supply and RAM card issue advice

[Gary <vengefultacos@gmail.com>]

I took my Platinum IIe out of the closet a few days ago in
anticipation of getting my new  CFFA card. It's sat since in the
closet about 4 years or so now. Sadly, its long nap didn't sit too
well with it.

I've think the power supply is starting to fail. When I hooked up a
Unidisk 3.5" and 5.25" drive, it fails to power up at all. It manages
to run with just the 5.25" drive, but often gets disk errors. Pulling
some of the I/O cards (I have a Ramworks II, a Super Serial, an
Uthernet, a mouse card, disk controller, and an older version of the
CFFA in it now) results in the drive working just fine. Another clue
is that when populated with all the I/O cards, ADT Pro will sometimes
get timeout errors when using the Uthernet. Pull the Super Serial and
mouse card though, and it works fine.

I'm wondering if I should try to get a replacement IIe power supply,
or if I should try to find a modern equivalent. I'm planning on maxing
out the system with a Transwarp and a sound card at some point. I
worry that a used IIe power supply end up having the same issues in
the not too distant future. I've seen some mentions of people using
modern power supplies with Apple II's. For example,  http://www.8bitsystem.com/
seems to offer an adapter for ATX power supplies for the IIe that
seems perfect, but there is no contact information on the site. Does
anyone have experience in adapting other power supplies for use with a
Apple IIe?

While trying to figure out the power woes, I think I hit on an
unrelated problem. I ran the diagnostics on my RamWorks II card, and
found that the upper two banks of memory were marked as bad or missing
from the start. At first, I thought this was another symptom of the
power supply not supplying enough juice, but when I swapped a few of
the chips marked bad with ones marked good, the bad ones were still
marked bad (and the good ones were marked bad as well...). I pulled
the bad chips from the card, and it now passes the diagnostics, but I
have to wonder how two full banks of chips would all die like that.
Could an issue with the card have fried them? If so, I don't think I
want to replace the chips with new ones. Would stray static
electricity wipe out two banks that precisely?