Was doing my daily eBay browse and saw a complete lot of a computer tower with a MHz display, a pair of speakers, a keyboard, mouse, some headphones and a boxed 56k external modem for about $50. Generic listing called "COMPUTER SYSTEM", make sure to use those generic terms for good deals! 😁 (This one was being sold in Canada) I snapped it right up and today it came.
It was a complete grab bag. The tower's front was the only thing shown, so as far as i knew i was just getting an empty AT case with a CD-ROM and floppy drive installed. I opened it up today and found out, holy crap, it was a complete system!
I first thought someone removed the hard drive, but I saw a molex connector hooked up to something under the CD drive, and holy crap, IT'S A QUANTUM BIGFOOT!
Hooking it up, after about 5 minutes ( 🤣 🤣 ) it booted straight into a copy of Windows 98, First Edition. It's pretty sluggish, obviously was originally a Windows 95 machine, but it does boot (!) and here are the specs:
IBM 6x86MX PR200 @ 166 MHz
16MB 72-pin EDO RAM
Quantum Bigfoot 1.2GB 5.25" Hard Drive
Cirrus Logic CL-GD5446 1MB PCI Video card
Trident 4DWave-DX PCI Sound card
Generic PC Chips Socket 7 motherboard (if someone can ID its model, please tell me -- need it for my spec sheets I keep for all my retro systems 🤣 )
Generic 8-bit ISA card with a parallel port on it (redundant, as the PC Chips board has a ribbon already connecting to one? 😕 )
Diamond PCI 56k modem
Generic 250watt AT PSU
The Quantum Bigfoot when reading or writing data makes a quiet, but insanely high pitched screeching sound. Is it the bearings going? I'm a bit worried, since ScanDisk also revealed roughly 28 MB of bad sectors 😵
It's weird, there are sockets for faster SDRAM but someone just filled up two of the four sockets with the slower EDO RAM. It's a very strange animal indeed.
Also the display is configured to 200 instead of 166, I might keep it this way just as it is because it looks cool 😁
I also have two 386 systems coming in the mail -- will post those when they arrive. Bought all three with my Christmas gift money, which is gone now 🤣