That's because of drying-out ball bearings. None of these drives were made to be used 20 or more years later.

Nice, clean and what a thing of beauty.

Abit Siluro ti4600 128mb

Bige4u wrote:

...a thing of beauty.

Agreed.

Flea market result of the day! 😁 2 EUROS for this beauty! NO BRAINER! Untested though ...

ELSA Erazor X -A32 nVidia GeForce 256 SDR 32MB AGP

Robert B wrote:

Flea market result of the day! :D 2 EUROS for this beauty! NO BRAINER! Untested though ... […]
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Flea market result of the day! 😁 2 EUROS for this beauty! NO BRAINER! Untested though ...

ELSA Erazor X -A32 nVidia GeForce 256 SDR 32MB AGP

I like uncommon card designs

"New" mouse. Color matches better with the rest of the system than the previous bright white Intellimouse 1.3A. Overall in great condition, but it is missing one of the feet.

derSammler wrote:

That's because of drying-out ball bearings. None of these drives were made to be used 20 or more years later.

It's not only that, but most of these drives were not that quiet even with newish.

When new, they may not have quite the same high pitched harmonics, but they still were not at all quiet.

CrFr wrote:

"New" mouse. Color matches better with the rest of the system than the previous bright white Intellimouse 1.3A. Overall in great condition, but it is missing one of the feet.

IMGP1474_.jpg

They are terrible mice though in use and construction. The MS mice were much better quality.

Caluser2000 wrote:

They are terrible mice though in use and construction. The MS mice were much better quality.

I don't even care 😀 It's more about the looks. If I wanted a good mouse, I would just plug in some Intellimouse Optical instead of these crappy ball mice. But then it wouldn't look nice with these other beige devices I have. Maybe some day, when I have too much time in my hands, I will implant an optical mouse into this shell.

But I wouldn't call this terrible. Moves quite nicely. Buttons are bit too stiff. Also ergonomically this is almost as bad as the first PS/2 mouse IBM made. Build quality seems just fine to me.

Today I've bought a Geforce 4 Ti 4200 with 64 MB RAM to replace a low-end TNT2 M64.

So yesterday I was in Lille's flea market. Came back with a lot of good stuff 😁

First items : A Compaq Armada E500 With a celeron 550MHz, 5GB hdd and 64MB of RAM. Works well, the battery works too (but only for 15 mins). I merged it with parts from an other armada E500 I had to end up with a 850MHz P3 and a bigger screen. Only issue now is that the 850MHz PIII mobo has a problem with audio (I've made a post here : Compaq Armada E500 noisy speakers).
The other item is a Lifetec LT9888 which has a Pentium II 233MHz, 32MB of RAM and 3GB hdd. A madman installed Windows 2000 SP4 on a 1GB partition. The poor thing had no more ram left and no more swap left ... So I removed 2K from there x).

This is a nice laptop as well, but I've seen a crack on a hinge that wasn't there before, I fear that the plastic have become super brittle ...

Anyways, let's continue :
Next items :

🤤
mmmh floppy disks 😁. There must be a thousand of them in there. I couldn't take it home yet though, I'll see the seller later to bring that home. I've taken some disks home though. I took DR-DOS 6.0 disks that were in there to my home to test them and a bunch of 3.5" disks.

Unfortunately the DR DOS disks were stored outside of their protective paper, so the disks got a bit nasty and they need cleaning to be read ... on the other hand, disks that were stored properly survived quite well. Whew I thought this was going to be a huge disappointment, but thankfully only disks that were left unprotected got bad it seems.

Next item:

an amstrad CPC 6128 ! I've tested it, and it works 😁

... well for the most part at least. This is the FDD's belt. Thankfully they can be found easily.

Next item :

An amstrad PCW8256 !
it's just the computer/monitor though, I don't have the keyboard nor the stand for it, but that's still pretty cool !
Also, it has the same failure as the CPC ... oh well that's not a big deal. But that means I can't test it right now (it needs a floppy to boot)

I also found a boxed version of Heroes of Might and magic II with two CDs and some mac related books.

Got a bit sidetracked. It was sold as defective. Actually the power input had to be changed and one solderpad was broken.

A friend gave me this board from his girlfriend's old PC for the price of 2 beers.

Soyo SY-6BA+IV, P3 500MHz Katmai, originally came with 128MB of RAM, added a few more sticks to make 384MB.

oeuvre wrote:

I'm not sure exactly if it is a voice modem but the FM synth is pretty good.

It is.
I have multiple Packard Bells and these are the stock combo cards for models that supported data/fax/voice options in Windows and Navigator. The headers for TV and FM tuner options are dead giveaways.

CelGen wrote:

oeuvre wrote:

I'm not sure exactly if it is a voice modem but the FM synth is pretty good.

It is.
I have multiple Packard Bells and these are the stock combo cards for models that supported data/fax/voice options in Windows and Navigator. The headers for TV and FM tuner options are dead giveaways.

Yep. With pretty standard Rockwell modem hardware too. Once - must have been around 2000/2001 - I got an old Packard Bell P60 system and one of these Aztech modem/sound cards (also PB, but definitely newer than the P60), stuck it in and installed Linux. It was my second ever attempt at running Linux and unlike the previous time (Mandrake on in i810 system long before either i810 or AC'97 codecs were supported by Linux) it just worked first time 😜

I don't think I've seen a floppy disk "in the wild" for a decade. Just super pricey and dicey eBay lots. I think everyone locally just throws them in the trash.

Well appart from few boxes of 10 3.5" disks here and there, sometimes a box of like 50 disks, I never found that many disks in a flea market ! And I've never found 5.25 disks in a flea market period, so this is super cool ^^

PcBytes wrote:

A friend gave me this board from his girlfriend's old PC for the price of 2 beers.

Soyo SY-6BA+IV, P3 500MHz Katmai, originally came with 128MB of RAM, added a few more sticks to make 384MB.

that's alot of ide.

Deksor wrote:

So yesterday I was in Lille's flea market. Came back with a lot of good stuff 😁

Your flea markets make me green with envy!

wirerogue wrote:

PcBytes wrote:

A friend gave me this board from his girlfriend's old PC for the price of 2 beers.

Soyo SY-6BA+IV, P3 500MHz Katmai, originally came with 128MB of RAM, added a few more sticks to make 384MB.

that's alot of ide.

I know, that's because of the HPT366 RAID controller. I theoretically can stick about 7 HDDs in there and make a server 🤣. 4 in RAID, and 3 through the usual Intel chipset IDE interface