PeterLI wrote:

We already had the discussion about holding on to things. The scrapper needs to make a living so holding on to dead MOBOs with acjd eating through it is not an option. I do not have the time / space to hoard defective parts either or troubleshoot / repair them. Plus nobody would pay $100s in gas / postage to pick them up / have them sent. Anyway: there are still thousands of tons of retro equipment out there anyway. 🤣

I wasn;t suggesting to hold on to dead components. Dead and often unrepairable damaged motherboards are simply a waste of space

As are dead VGAs / IOs, busted up cases and even working NICs / modems / tape drives et cetera.

A lot of us here seem to feel the need to hold on to everything, but personally I've found it therapeutic to be able to let go of stuff. I was holding on to so many parts and systems that it was making it hard to separate the wheat from the chaff, plus I felt it was weighing me down and occupying too much physical and brain space. These past few months I've sold / given away / recycled most of my retro stuff and I've found the experience quite freeing.

PeterLI wrote:

smeezekitty wrote:

Dead and often unrepairable damaged motherboards are simply a waste of space

...even working NICs / modems / tape drives et cetera.

Perhaps from the profit motive standpoint. But from the perspective of preserving historically significant technology regardless of it's current utility, I couldn't disagree with you more, Peter.

Reinstalling xp home edition on my Pentium4 media pc. Added in a 40gb WD drive manufactured in 2006 to use as a boot drive 🤣 anyone know if a Ti-500 is enough for 480p video with VLC?

Another day of testing parts. Ran into a couple of frustrations that gave me that retro feeling 😁

First up was an NFS-7 V2 board that was working quite well with an XP1800+, until I tried a 2500+ in it that looked OK (though I think I've previously cooked this chip). From then on it refused to boot with the XPs - it shows signs of activity but then cuts out completely. Curiously it would boot perfectly with a Duron 900 - reminded me of the old Duron trick to clear the BIOS settings. I then took the CMOS battery out, left it for a bit, tried to start it with the clear CMOS jumper on, and with nothing hooked up - still the same problem. Maybe the 1800+ is also borked.

Then I tested three SiS 6326 AGP boards I got in a job lot - and none of them worked in either of my Socket A boards. Seems like they're one or two pins too short for the AGP slots. Might take a pic of it, but couldn't find any info about it other than that they're a bit of a workhorse video card that sold in the millions! http://vintage3d.org/sis.php#sthash.iL8eGN0X.dpbs Anyone have any idea what type of motherboard these would work in? Super 7?

Finally I found out that one of my recent roadkill pickups (Socket 370 1GHz Celeron) had a burned out VRM and seems to have taken out the hard drive and memory, and probably the CPU as well. Gives me a spare ATX case but I can't trust the power supply now. I've salvaged what I can from the motherboard, but wondered - does anyone take caps or other soldered on parts off dead motherboards for reuse?

And the postage gods smiled on me today - I sold a V2 8MB card and sent it Cash On Delivery last year. There was no tracking information because the post office stuffed up and didn't enter it into their system, and the buyer claimed never to have received a delivery card in three months. I lodged a dispute with our postal system, who told me that they couldn't find it. Today it returned in the mail, but the post office said because the buyer didn't pickup I needed to pay $22 in fees to get it back! After pointing out the problem of them not recording it in the system, and my dispute, they gave it back to me for free. Maybe I will just use it instead of selling it. Moral of the story - never send anything COD!!!

MMaximus wrote:

A lot of us here seem to feel the need to hold on to everything, but personally I've found it therapeutic to be able to let go of stuff. I was holding on to so many parts and systems that it was making it hard to separate the wheat from the chaff, plus I felt it was weighing me down and occupying too much physical and brain space. These past few months I've sold / given away / recycled most of my retro stuff and I've found the experience quite freeing.

Totally agree with this. Also, the process of going through and having a clearout often unearths cool things you'd forgotten about and can make immediate use of, sell for a decent amount of money or donate to charity.

QBiN wrote:

PeterLI wrote:

smeezekitty wrote:

Dead and often unrepairable damaged motherboards are simply a waste of space

...even working NICs / modems / tape drives et cetera.

Perhaps from the profit motive standpoint. But from the perspective of preserving historically significant technology regardless of it's current utility, I couldn't disagree with you more, Peter.

I'd agree with that. Also NICs would be one of the most useful peripherals to hang on to, especially ISA 8 and 16 bit cards.

My FTP and CODUO server (and gereral back up server for documents) went down the other day. It was only a 2003 (or so) packard bell I got from work. It had been running 24/7 since June last year pretty much but something seems to have blown. Maybe the CPU? Or perhaps the main board.

Regardless, I chucked the server hdd into my old main PC (AthlonXP 1700 (running @ 1.1ghz), 512mb ram and Asus A7V8X-X main board and a silent Club3D FX5200 of the time, and although the cpu fan is louder, i've somewhat got used to it. That is why I liked the Packard bell, the Cpu fan ran at only 2k rpm, and although that made it quieter, it made the CPU have a temperature of just over 60c. Maybe the constant heat had something to do with it. It resides in my room, so I gather i'll have to just get used to it again, which I am slowly..

Anyway, installed all the Windows 2000 relavent drivers for the new old machine and it's been running fine for about a week now. 😊 I need a new BIOS battery seeing as the old one keeps reverting to 2002.

Caluser2000 wrote:

QBiN wrote:

Perhaps from the profit motive standpoint. But from the perspective of preserving historically significant technology regardless of it's current utility, I couldn't disagree with you more, Peter.

I'd agree with that. Also NICs would be one of the most useful peripherals to hang on to, especially ISA 8 and 16 bit cards.

+1 keeping ISA NICs. They are getting less and less common.
I don't care about usual ISA and especially PCI 56K modems though. They have become more than useless now.

smeezekitty wrote:

Caluser2000 wrote:

QBiN wrote:

Perhaps from the profit motive standpoint. But from the perspective of preserving historically significant technology regardless of it's current utility, I couldn't disagree with you more, Peter.

I'd agree with that. Also NICs would be one of the most useful peripherals to hang on to, especially ISA 8 and 16 bit cards.

+1 keeping ISA NICs. They are getting less and less common.

Added bonus is you can fit EPROMS with XT-IDE Bios extention and the possibility of other Bios extensions.

Caluser2000 wrote:

Added bonus is you can fit EPROMS with XT-IDE Bios extention and the possibility of other Bios extensions.

True. An 8bit XT compatible NIC with a free boot ROM socket for XT-IDE would be a great find.

Seems my newly aquired Acorn A5000 needs some attention so testing components from it on an A4000.

Giving my portables a bit of a clean up.

Got most of the parts of a Socket 4 build together, just needs tidied up now. Only 16mb of ram ATM but that is going to change

The hdd that shipped with my Compaq Prolinea 4/66 was playing up. It was ok for about an hour or so after startup the failing to access data. I've put it down to a heat issue with one of the components failing on it's PCB. Today I hooked it up as a slave to the replacement drive and used Wfw file manager to transfer all the data over before the old drive began to play up again. Did the job quite nicely.

Caluser2000 wrote:

Seems my newly aquired Acorn A5000 needs some attention so testing components from it on an A4000.

IMAG0171.JPG

I love playing with the Acorns.. I only have an A3010 though which years ago I bought a NIC for.. My plan to connect it to the Internet (I'm forever trying to acheive an oldest year that I can say I have been on the 'net with..1986 is current.) but the lack of hard disc meant I couldn't expand the stack nor browser on the floppy with only something like 1mb RAMdisc left... I believe from memory the NIC obligated the requisitioning of 500kb?

I need at least the A3020 with a hard disc in really.. 😊 😊

JidaiGeki wrote:

Anyone have any idea what type of motherboard these would work in?

Anything AGP 1.0 compatible really, I guess nforce 2 is too new.

Blurredman wrote:

Caluser2000 wrote:

Seems my newly aquired Acorn A5000 needs some attention so testing components from it on an A4000.

IMAG0171.JPG

I love playing with the Acorns.. I only have an A3010 though which years ago I bought a NIC for.. My plan to connect it to the Internet (I'm forever trying to acheive an oldest year that I can say I have been on the 'net with..1986 is current.) but the lack of hard disc meant I couldn't expand the stack nor browser on the floppy with only something like 1mb RAMdisc left... I believe from memory the NIC obligated the requisitioning of 500kb?

I need at least the A3020 with a hard disc in really.. 😊 😊

Yeah hard disks are the way to go. Even on a 4meg Acorn system getting everything going will be tight. Good luck though.

I was surprised how easy it was on my Zenith z286LP Plus using just the packet driver and Arachne. Using winpkt and using trumpet winsock for tcip with Windows 3.1 running in Standard Mode was pretty straight forward as well. Getting a suitable win 3.1 browser to function is a different matter altogether, as most require 386Enh Mode. Was fun trying anyway though.

I recoreded Duke3D theme using different HW with one of my retro PC

Cx 5x86@100mhz
Biostar MB8433-UUD with "2012 Bios"
48MB EDO Ram
Voodoo2
Cirrus Logic VGA
GUS Max 1.8 <-- I am the original owner.
Reveal K2Y-PRO16 + Diamond Wave Table
128gb SSD hard drive (because That's what I had laying around).