I'm so jealous. 🤣

Congratulations! I love Packard Bell machines! Personally I am the proud owner of a Packard Bell Platinum 55 from '96.
Make sure to post pics!

Also how did you get access to a transfer station? I've been looking at recycling center drop offs so I'm always interested in new possible places to hunt down old electronics. 😁

Well you just drive in and you can recycle your old electronics or take things. They also have tents to keep em dry. I was gonna dig out an old stereo, but my folks wanted to leave.

Also it has a lock on the case like some older ones do. How should i get it open?

That is a good question, You could drill it out or if you don't mind spending 15$ you could call a locksmith to cut you a pair of keys for it.

ahendricks18 wrote:

Also it has a lock on the case like some older ones do. How should i get it open?

I think I once got one open by lockpicking it 😁 iirc the locks weren't terribly complicated 😀
If that doesn't work, you could always use the drill thingy though I never did it that way.

Nice find! Windows 3.0? Now I'm interested.

Yeah that would probably place it between 1990 and 1992.

also make sure you image the drive for restoration purposes incase something goes haywire, the drive shouldn't be that big. Hope you have a modern computer with an IDE controller for it. Getting the drive OUT of hte packards are the challenge 😀

Cool. Upstate NY has a lot of cool stuff. LI / NYC not so much and people here usually think everything is worth a lot of $. 😀

To be fair I did find cool stuff over the years locally: diskettes,Tandy Sensation, IBM PS/2 Model 55, NEC PowerMate 286 Plus, Trinitron CRTs and generic clones. I also passed on a lot of stuff as well. I really prefer shipping so I can just pick it up on my porch in the evening. No driving around / negotiating / testing / small chat and so on.

How would I go about adding a cd rom drive? I've got some old dos games on disc i want to play.

What kind of machine? 286? 386? 486? Pentium?

Its a 486sx. I want to try to install Windows 95, but no cd rom drive and the fdd's fail on startup and the 5.25's light is always on. Also it won't read the 3.5 in win 3.0, says system error.

There's a pic of it!

Reminds me of a Packard Bell I used to have; I think it had a 486DX2/50. It was my main 486 machine up until I got my Toshiba T2150CDT. IIRC, it had a failed 5.25" floppy drive much in the same fashion as yours. I'd still check the BIOS out (Ctrl-Alt-S I believe) just to make sure all the drives are set up properly.

Nice machine.

1: Check the CMOS battery.
2: Check the FDDs in another PC. FDDs could be bad or FDD controller could be bad.
3: You sould be able to buy an IDE CD-ROM and connect is as a slave to the primary (& probably only) IDE on the MOBO. Or you can get a SCSI or priorietary CD-ROM with sound card / controller card.
4: IMO Windows 3.11 is really the best version for a 486SX.

I've a similar model
here ya go

old pic, here are some specs
486SX-25
6MB RAM
DOS 5.0/Win3.1
120MB HDD
5/25 1.2MB and 3/5 1.44MB fdd
Oak OTI77 1MB SVGA

I read somewhere that a floppy drive will behave like that, (light always on) if its cable is plugged in the wrong way.

Nice find! I've only come across 1 Win 3.0 PC in the wild and that was in the mid 90's. Find anything else of interesting on it?
Looking forward to seeing what you end up doing with it
Not a fan of later Packard Bells' but like the design of this one

I broke a bunch of pins off the IDE connectors, don't ask me how, and I decided to cut em all off and do a little trick of putting pins in the cable and letting it sit. Damn that was a stupid choice. Ill get it fixed though. But Ill upgrade to 3.1 and add the cd rom as a slave.

Wtf... I have no words...