liqmat wrote:

You know that nightmare where you are running down a hallway and the hallway keeps getting longer and longer? Yeah, I'm still ru […]
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lvader wrote:

I’m quite interested in this because I have a couple of case covers that need a paint job. i havn’t experimented yet but getting the right paint gloss level and colour is probably key.

You know that nightmare where you are running down a hallway and the hallway keeps getting longer and longer? Yeah, I'm still running.

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Cases are spray-painted. This can be seen from the haze of paint on the inside of parts, where the paint cover is not complete.
The slightly rough structure you see on some cases is an effect called "orange peel", so-called because the paint resembles the skin of an orange, and caused by using the wrong distance to the object needing painting. Some paints also have structure integrated in their formula.

Now take this from someone who has been building scale model kits for 25 years: You won't ever be able to get anything resembling the original level of gloss by applying paint with paint brushes or rollers instead of some sort of spray painting, unless you're very, very skilled at hand painting (and even then it's usually possible to see streaks).

Apply a primer suitable for metal, and sand that super smooth by using wet sanding and the proper kind of sand paper (600 grit wet-sanding and higher! what you have is waaaaay too low grit).
Apply more primer if needed, if so, repeat sanding. Paint with the right kind of paint (not wall paint), and if necessary finish off with the right kind of top coat you need for your objective (flat, semi-gloss, or gloss - for more gloss, apply more coats). Use spray cans, a wide area spray gun, or an air brush (further to the right is better). If you really want something very glossy, use Future floor wax dispensed with an air brush for the top coats (Google for exact instructions).
Try out your painting skills on pieces of scrap first. Especially getting the distance to the subject right is quite hard - for spray cans it's 25-30 cm. Another aspect of importance is temperature. If it's too cold, you'll have paint flow and adherence issues, if it's too hot the paint will dry too fast unless properly prepared (again, Google for tips).

Paint remover tip: Brake fluid will also work. Key is to keep an eye on the time it soaks.

Totally random, but this video... 😀
https://youtu.be/FXpWW1V5ObM
Enjoy!

Replaced the two power transistors on my PC Chips M919 mainboard with better ones, since the old ones catched fire. 🤣

yawetaG wrote:

Cases are spray-painted. This can be seen from the haze of paint on the inside of parts, where the paint cover is not complete. […]
Show full quote

Cases are spray-painted. This can be seen from the haze of paint on the inside of parts, where the paint cover is not complete.
The slightly rough structure you see on some cases is an effect called "orange peel", so-called because the paint resembles the skin of an orange, and caused by using the wrong distance to the object needing painting. Some paints also have structure integrated in their formula.

Now take this from someone who has been building scale model kits for 25 years: You won't ever be able to get anything resembling the original level of gloss by applying paint with paint brushes or rollers instead of some sort of spray painting, unless you're very, very skilled at hand painting (and even then it's usually possible to see streaks).

Apply a primer suitable for metal, and sand that super smooth by using wet sanding and the proper kind of sand paper (600 grit wet-sanding and higher! what you have is waaaaay too low grit).
Apply more primer if needed, if so, repeat sanding. Paint with the right kind of paint (not wall paint), and if necessary finish off with the right kind of top coat you need for your objective (flat, semi-gloss, or gloss - for more gloss, apply more coats). Use spray cans, a wide area spray gun, or an air brush (further to the right is better). If you really want something very glossy, use Future floor wax dispensed with an air brush for the top coats (Google for exact instructions).
Try out your painting skills on pieces of scrap first. Especially getting the distance to the subject right is quite hard - for spray cans it's 25-30 cm. Another aspect of importance is temperature. If it's too cold, you'll have paint flow and adherence issues, if it's too hot the paint will dry too fast unless properly prepared (again, Google for tips).

Paint remover tip: Brake fluid will also work. Key is to keep an eye on the time it soaks.

I am sorry if I gave the impression I was looking for advice. I'll let the end results speak for themselves.

Hint: That ain't wall paint.

Replaced the CMOS battery in my Compaq Presario 9232. Also, if anyone knows what type EXT_BATT goes in this thing, please chime in. I believe it is a 5.2V. (seems weird to me, since the button cell is 3V.. unless the EXT_BATT has an in-line circuit that reduces voltage down to 3V)

DigiKey part# for those interested:

Finally, Asus "engineers" were able to fix the download link for the Vista x64 LAN driver for my Asus P5E WS Professional motherboard, so I installed that driver this morning. However, that wasn't the reason why Windows Update kept getting stuck at "Checking for Updates." Apparently, according to this guide, there are security updates that, if not manually installed, make it so that it will take Windows Update hours, if not days, to find the updates. So, to avoid that hell, I followed the guide, and boom!, Windows Update found the remaining updates in less than 30 minutes. Now I finally have an up-to-date Vista x64 SP2 installation. Nice!

To better feel the Vista experience, I also played some of the most difficult Minesweeper I have ever played while listening to included Windows Media Player.

Can it get any better than this? Yes, yes it can, because I decided to answer the age-old question: Can it run Crysis?

It actually can. Wtih a Core 2 Quad Q9650, 8GB DDR2 high-speed RAM (I forget the frequency), and a GTX 760, running at 1080p with High detail settings, 2x AA, and no motion blur, I was consistently hitting around 60fps and up, with only demanding scenes like that famous early island bay scene bringing me down to the 30s.

I didn't take this screenshot.

Now I'm waiting for a cheap 120GB PNY SSD I bought from Newegg on sale to install Windows 7 Home Premium on this machine to have some fun with that, too. That OS, in addition to a Linux Mint SSD I also have in this machine, will surely help me better test graphics cards and other PC components, which was the original intent for this PC. 😀

derSammler wrote:

Replaced the two power transistors on my PC Chips M919 mainboard with better ones, since the old ones catched fire. 🤣

Classic PC Chips.

Tested the Voodoo 1 I restored in my P133 PC and it works. As a DOS PC, it has fairly limited use of the card, but I can't say no to Glide Tomb Raider, or Descent 2. Screamer 2 has strange texture bugs but I doubt it has to do with my card.

I now need to find some cool Windows 3.1 software to install, so I am open to suggestions 😀

Last night, I tried to get the HDD detected in my Packard Bell Pack-Mate 28 Plus using the secondary channel and XT-IDE Universal BIOS showed the HDD as smiley face icons with the number 5 at the end and that didn't work out too well (went back to square one and hooked up the HDD to the primary channel and got back to work without issues). Speaking of hard drives, I took the HDD that was in my Socket 7 machine (slim 4.6GB Fujitsu Laptop HDD), placed it into my HP Pavilion N3350, and it wouldn't boot. As luck would have it, I had a boot diskette handy and did an fdisk /mbr and sys C: to get the HDD to boot. Before I did that, I copied the Video and Sound/Modem drivers to the hard drive.

Forgot to mention this as well: I also swapped the 10K RPM 52x CD Drive with the 32x (7200 RPM) CD drive that I pulled out of the broken PowerMac G3 from several months ago in my Packard Bell Pack-Mate 28 Plus and it's a heck of a lot quieter than before and I'm happy with the results.

This evening I've been trying to figure out the pinout of the PS/2 mouse port on the Lucky Star 5MVP3 v4 for my adapter - it's not listed in the 5MVP3 manuals that are still available, but there is a valid pinout in the 5MVP4 manual:
http://www.elhvb.com/mboards/luckystar/manual … 4/5mvp4_v10.pdf

Looks like this, which was exactly backwards of what I thought, the test mouse still works after not working for a bit 😁

Oh also I made a rear slot adapter for this CF card adapter I bought that I couldn't figure out where else to fit in the case, using a vented slot cover (I think from an arctic cooling accelero s1?) and some plastic siding:

Now to figure out why this board won't detect a K6-IIIm 450 (2.0v) cpu, it hangs on boot with that fitted, which I guess means it needs a bios update?

I would call burning ISOs to physical media & labelling them elaborately with permanent marker a "retro activity."

YES, I own a legit copy of this (in a convoluted sense of the concept of 'ownership.')

I was messing around with my Compaq Armada 1130T to get it ready to be put on Ebay.

Judging from the software and labels it was used for network diagnostics at Deutsche Telekom in the late 90's.

It struck me what a nice screen this little machine has. It is sharper and the colours are better than on my go to Siemens laptop, and the screen expansion works relatively well. It also has a lot of integrated stuff; must be one of the first machines to have in-display function icons (I'm sure there is a word for this...) that pop up when you increase brigthness via the function keys etc., rather than having an extra lcd-display for this kind of stuff. It also has this funky proprietary Compay BIOS and a bunch of diagnostics. It also has a hibernate function that works really fast, pretty much instantaneously pops back to desktop. Neat 😀

Anyway, if it had a sound card it would make a pretty decent little Pentium 1 machine. I guess one could add a parallel port OPL2/3... maybe if no one buys it I'll still do it ^^

Another pic...

shame on me, no Skeletor.

bjwil1991 wrote:

Last night, I tried to get the HDD detected in my Packard Bell Pack-Mate 28 Plus using the secondary channel and XT-IDE Universal BIOS showed the HDD as smiley face icons with the number 5 at the end and that didn't work out too well (went back to square one and hooked up the HDD to the primary channel and got back to work without issues).

Have you tried connecting the drive with a different IDE cable on the secondary channel? You possibly have already tested this, but I thought I'd mention it as in the past I've had weird issues like that where a drive is detected as random gibberish and found the cable to be the culprit.

Messing around with my "capture PC." Dual VisionRGB Pros. 😎 Although I think simultaneous 1024x768 streams @ 30FPS over "old PCI" might be pushing it.

^^ not sure what's going on with the scaling on the second input there. Probably configured something wrong.

PTherapist wrote:

bjwil1991 wrote:

Last night, I tried to get the HDD detected in my Packard Bell Pack-Mate 28 Plus using the secondary channel and XT-IDE Universal BIOS showed the HDD as smiley face icons with the number 5 at the end and that didn't work out too well (went back to square one and hooked up the HDD to the primary channel and got back to work without issues).

Have you tried connecting the drive with a different IDE cable on the secondary channel? You possibly have already tested this, but I thought I'd mention it as in the past I've had weird issues like that where a drive is detected as random gibberish and found the cable to be the culprit.

Tried different cables, all the same.

henryVK wrote:

Compaq Armada 1130T

I recently acquired an Armada 7380DT, the internal bios battery leaked and the laptop is non functional.
I don't know if the 1130T is similar, but just wanted to warn you.

I have been testing old socket3 class hardware, as I am in the process of sizing down my collection. As much as I love all my parts, I really need more space. So I had to bite the apple and downsizing yet again. 🙁 So today have been used to test, and taking pictures for sales add's

I finally found why my 8088 wasn't able to read from floppy disks anymore !

I had checked everything (card, cable and drives) and none of what could be expected was the issue. The real issue was ... The ram. I took ram chips from a dead IBM 5160 motherboard and added them into the board, but apparently they didn't really work. Once I had them removed, the drives came back to life.

It took me so long to figure that out, whew !!

peido wrote:

henryVK wrote:

Compaq Armada 1130T

I recently acquired an Armada 7380DT, the internal bios battery leaked and the laptop is non functional.
I don't know if the 1130T is similar, but just wanted to warn you.

I've had this one lying around for a while, but it's generally good advice to take these old dead CMOS batteries out before they leak.

Cheers