Re: What retro activity did you get up to today?

Posted on 2021-01-05, 08:43

by

by andrea

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

What about recelling the current battery? What's that ? Intriguing ! Does it involve opening it ? Yes, it's basically replacing the actual battery cells (99% of the time just regular 18650s) inside the battery pack. Anybody ever seen laptop LCD damage like this? There are a bunch of these spots …

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Re: When did you purchase your first 386 / 486 Computer? Availability vs the early 90's affordability norm.

Posted on 2021-01-04, 23:13

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by andrea

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Yeah, tell me about it! The memory prices were sky high until sometime in 1997 when they finally came back down to reasonable levels. I think DRAM price was probably one of the reasons I just skipped over the Pentium. I figured there was no point if I couldn't have at least 16MB of RAM (which cost …

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Re: What retro activity did you get up to today?

Posted on 2021-01-04, 22:35

by

by andrea

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Very impressive and a really nice story. Congratulations ! :) I wish I had those skills. I have a Packard Bell Chroma laptop for which new batteries (or even old batteries) are impossible to find. It runs fine and I don't intend to use it outside or something, but I'm curious how it performed back …

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Re: What retro activity did you get up to today?

Posted on 2021-01-04, 22:07

by

by andrea

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I just repaired (again) a Frankenstein laptop that was bad when it was new and still is today. The issue was that the network card would only connect if manually set to 10Mbps. Auto and 100Mbps wouldn't negotiate a link. In the past I tried replacing the jack (MagJack) hoping it was just a dodgy …

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Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today

Posted on 2020-12-30, 11:33

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by andrea

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Have my fingers crossed for you. Some S3 Virge cards have OK display output, others are totally blurry and crap. Ouch, really?? I'm hoping for a good display. Since I'm out of Blank CD and floppy disks, I cant' install it properly atm due lack of drivers. I bought a Gotek Floppy driver, once it …

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Re: Bodge wires

Posted on 2020-12-28, 17:46

by

by andrea

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Well, thank you 😀. I agree that the wire was a bit thicker than what should be used, but was the only thing I had at home and shops were closed because of the government. And my "koptan" tape won't stick to anything reliably.

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Bodge wires

Posted on 2020-12-28, 15:56

by

by andrea

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Hello, Not necessarily retro, but I feel like this this forum has the best audience to answer my question. I'm fixing up a garbage find but still good (1156 i7) PC to hopefully resell it. With a good used SSD and some extra eBay "Price + Shipping, lowest first" RAM it came up really nicely. It's an …

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Re: Fixing (rare?) 286 - Smith Corona & Acer PC 210 / 286 HD

Posted on 2020-12-24, 09:04

by

by andrea

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Whoo71 wrote on 2020-12-24, 06:01: I did also remove capacitors where there was a huge concentration of the stuff: Ah no, that's just 100% capacitor. Clean the board, recap, and see what happens. Probably it'll start working.

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Re: Fixing (rare?) 286 - Smith Corona & Acer PC 210 / 286 HD

Posted on 2020-12-22, 09:43

by

by andrea

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

IMG_20201221_235420.jpg That's a Delta, it means quality. Worth repairing imho. All resistors appear to be faulty, reading ohms well below what they're rated for Both diodes on the board appear to be shorted (~.6V in one direction, >2V in the other) Have you testing in circuit or out of circuit? In …

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Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today

Posted on 2020-12-13, 19:04

by

by andrea

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Too bad it is not revision 2.00. It supports K6-2 CPUs. It wasn't easy to find out what revision it is (1.20 - I hope). It is not written anywhere on the board and every revision has different voltage settings! It may not be in the manual, but the VRM controller seems capable of providing K6-2 …

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Re: PlayStation One controller on windows98

Posted on 2020-12-04, 20:52

by

by andrea

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Those adapters show up as HID joysticks, so they work with everything that supports HID devices.

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Re: UDMA 5 with DOM's & CF's

Posted on 2020-11-29, 12:48

by

by andrea

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

Using those male-male pins won't work, because you end up switching the odd and even pins. (E.g. DOM pin 1 ends up on pin 2 on the cable, pin1 cable to pin2 DOM...). For 80-wire detection you need to ground pin 34.

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Re: PCI Video card works in one PC, not in another

Posted on 2020-11-28, 22:17

by

by andrea

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

douglar wrote on 2020-11-28, 22:08: Would it be possible to feed the voltage in through a card in another PCI slot? In my case the each slot had the 3.3v pins going nowhere, so no. If you don't want to touch the board I guess you could mod the card, injecting 3.3V on the appropriate point on the …

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Re: PCI Video card works in one PC, not in another

Posted on 2020-11-28, 17:50

by

by andrea

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I'd guess the problem is not PCI spec but rather the lack of 3.3v supply on older boards (Remember AT does not have a native 3.3V rail). Many newer graphics work off (at least partly) the 3v3 rail, I know for a fact the ubiquitous ebay Rage XL does. I have a 430TX board whose PCI slot only supply 5 …

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Re: PCI Video card works in one PC, not in another

Posted on 2020-11-27, 22:37

by

by andrea

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I don't have that computer with me right now, but here's a drawing: https://i.imgur.com/6kk2WWK.png DO NOT TRUST THIS PICTURE BLINDLY, PLEASE RECHECK THE PINOUT BEFORE DOING ANYTHING. It's 11.30 at night, I'm tired and my eyes were crossing while colouring the pads. It should be right, but please …

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Re: PCI Video card works in one PC, not in another

Posted on 2020-11-26, 13:32

by

by andrea

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

I'd guess the problem is not PCI spec but rather the lack of 3.3v supply on older boards (Remember AT does not have a native 3.3V rail). Many newer graphics work off (at least partly) the 3v3 rail, I know for a fact the ubiquitous ebay Rage XL does. I have a 430TX board whose PCI slot only supply 5 …

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Re: USB 2.0 driver for Windows 2000

Posted on 2020-11-22, 16:03

by

by andrea

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

Windows 2000 SP4 comes with USB 2.0 drivers out of the box. Is USB 2.0 enabled in the BIOS? Does an _Enhanced_ USB host controller appear in devmgmt?

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Re: Possible to mount a hard drive to an empty folder in NT 3.51 / NT 4

Posted on 2020-11-21, 20:40

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by andrea

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

I was thinking symlinks as an alternative, but google says that they are a prerogative of NTFS 3.0 (NT 5.0), and NT 4.0 uses NTFS 1.2. BUT NT 4.0 can also speak NTFS 3.0 after SP4, so it could be interesting to see what happens if you feed a NT4 SP4+ machine a NTFS 3.0 volume with links. Obvs don't …

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Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today

Posted on 2020-11-12, 21:17

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by andrea

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

in Marvin \ General Old Hardware

IMG_1393r.jpg Just as a curiosity, as I know nothing about this era of hardware. The keyboard connector is labeled XT, but there is another DIN5 footprint 1 cm down labeled PC. Is this just so the connector matches the hole in the case (does it move between XT and AT chassis?) Or the KBC is …

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Re: Compaq/HP Restore Plus! Machine check

Posted on 2020-11-05, 18:55

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by andrea

in Marvin \ Software

in Marvin \ Software

The best restore CDs probably were those made by Fujitsu Siemens. They took a standard XP iso and added: - oeminfo/oemlogo sysdm branding - SLP key and oembios files for SLP preactivation and that's it. Every other software (nero, powerdvd, works, etc) came on its own separate disc so if you …

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