I've pulled a few XP keys from systems I've bought, and I really should grab some of the keys from the software on my Powerbook G4 (particularly Office 2008).

Yeah...
I never save anything that are personal. Quick look and delete the partition.
"Boot N' nuke" is great at this stuff.

If the person I'm getting the HDD from requests it, I will run Darik's Boot and Nuke (it can take a long time to run, so I don't do this if I don't have to). Otherwise, I use Gparted to blow away all partitions, then run SpinRite on the drive to determine (and hopefully improve) it's health. If it's remotely healthy, I bin it with some notes to help me when I next reach for it. If it's not worth using due to bad sectors, impending SMART failure or physical damage, then I will crack it open and extract the rare earth magnets. They are fun to use as industrial strength fridge magnets. 😉 Just keep them away from things that can be damaged by magnets.

Skyscraper wrote:

the second most interesting item, the newest system in the bundle was a Socket-775 box with a Gigabyte P35-DS3 motherboard.

I love a good 386, especially one with games on it. 😀 And that 775 board is a pretty good one. Although the P45 is a more stable chipset for overclocking, the P35 still has some pretty good options but no crossfire or SLI support sadly. Embarrassingly it's my best board!

Most systems I buy don't have hard drives anyway, so I rarely have to worry.

brassicGamer wrote:

Skyscraper wrote:

the second most interesting item, the newest system in the bundle was a Socket-775 box with a Gigabyte P35-DS3 motherboard.

I love a good 386, especially one with games on it. 😀 And that 775 board is a pretty good one. Although the P45 is a more stable chipset for overclocking, the P35 still has some pretty good options but no crossfire or SLI support sadly. Embarrassingly it's my best board!

Yea the P35 chipset is nice, I probably have close to 15 P35 boards by now. 😀

P35 do support Crossfire but only on some boards depending on layout.

This graphics card, that I ordered a while ago, arrived today. It was labelled as a Dell 8800 Ultra 512 MB, but it looked like a standard 8800 GTX with this handle at the rear that you see on some OEM graphics cards. I took a punt, it was quite cheap and it is indeed a full 8800 Ultra with 768 MB and all the clocks check out 😀

Got some cool stuff lately! Just today my 1997 Packard Bell Multimedia L197 came in the mail, paid 20 for the machine and 20 something for shipping and it came lightning fast. First thing I did was scrub it down though since it was absolutely filthy but it seems like it needs some drivers sorted out and a new Cmos battery, this should be fun 🤣.

I also overpaid for this 1991 Apple Macintosh Classic locally (60$) but I got a bunch of cool stuff with it so I wasn't too bummed. 😜

Again this one was filthy and I had to reallly scrub it down. 🤣

IMHO $60 for a working classic with keyboard is not overpriced. I've seen the keyboards get that much on ebay.

Picked up a free 500watt Vantec 20pin powersupply WITH the 6 pin AUX cable. Opened it up and there are around 7 fuhjyyu caps, of course. Ah well, make a great recap project and future P4 supply at some point.

A 20pin PSU with a 6-pin AUX cable? Looks more like an early high-end Athlon PSU to me. It depends on its rails. though.

vmunix wrote:

The Audiotrix has an awesome synthesizer but the SB pro compatibility is not very good, it does work but it's not perfect(...)

Did Media Trix ever claim full DOS Sound Blaster Pro 2 compatibility for the AudioTrix Pro? As far as i know it is mainly SB Pro compatibile in Windows but i don't have one of these cards to check.

Scored an iomega external zip drive that can handle 750mb diskettes and motorola advisor linguist pager(useless now but i have some warm memories about that model)

wow, finding a 750mb zip drive is like finding a unicorn... dont think i've ever seen one till now.

luckybob wrote:

wow, finding a 750mb zip drive is like finding a unicorn... dont think i've ever seen one till now.

Honestly that was just a part of haul that i grabbed,other part is never used 750mb and 250mb diskettes and 250mb compatible internal atapi zip drive with it driver disk 🤣

Even ZIP 250's were not that common, never seen a 750 out in the wild (CDR killed that whole market).

What CD-R's didn't do, Iomega's quality *click* control *click* did them in. *click* (of death)

And they were so tone-deaf that they actually named a smaller version Clik!

luckybob wrote:

wow, finding a 750mb zip drive is like finding a unicorn... dont think i've ever seen one till now.

True, even seen fewer USB 750MB ZIP drives than I seen USB LS-120 drives.

I do remember having one 750MB external ZIP drive, but as it was my only ZIP drive capable of reading the 750MB ZIP disks, I never actually wanted to use it until I got a couple spares...which I never did.

Unknown_K wrote:

Even ZIP 250's were not that common, never seen a 750 out in the wild (CDR killed that whole market).

The USB ZIP 250 was quite common years ago, they were selling boxes full of em for €5 each (untested of course), got 3 of em very cheap that way.
Imo the 250MB USB ZIP drives also look nicer than the 750MB one

Does this count?

The hoarding of 90s (And later, 80s) music has begun. This is one of my favorite songs so it seemed like a good place to start and amazingly was actually for sale, I suspect a few of the others I wish to own on decent medium (Opposed to worn out tape) won't be so easy to track down. As this is on CD and not Vinyl, I guess I will have to drag out my Sony CDP-101 after I move, though I will have to fix the eject, think the belt is worn out.

happycube wrote:

What CD-R's didn't do, Iomega's quality *click* control *click* did them in. *click* (of death)

And they were so tone-deaf that they actually named a smaller version Clik!

Early cd burners SUCKED. It was always a gamble if you were making a coaster. Because if ANYTHING was running in the background it always seemed to pop up during the write process and cause a buffer under-run and ruin the disk. Under-run protection was the best thing to happen to cd-r

Oh and I also had the zip disk and they were AMAZING for the era they were in. Even had one that clicked. I wasn't allowed to install games on my dad's computer, so I ran everything off the zip drive. It was great, until the drive ate the disk.