I smoke around computers and nothing bad happens. It just makes the dust harder to clean out. Long term... Screw it, I won't be around to see it because the cigarettes will kill me long before anything happens. I have actually used cigarette smoke to test cooling systems for hot-spots.

alexanrs wrote:

Is that an outside wall? If so, why are all those wires exposed?!

Yeah, but they're satellite cables so they don't carry much power. The main focus is that the lead has come away from the wall. It is actually a larger problem than apparent in that photo;

The porch is supported by PVC pipe, though they were originally on steel and I do not know why they replaced it. I didn't think PVC drain pipe was used as a structural material but I guess the city council did not get the memo on that. As you can see, the pipe is bent and the porch visibly leans to one side. The whole thing is actually moving away from the house and is now over an inch away from the wall - meaning all the weight is on those PVC tubes and it is right over the front door.

Interestingly, between yesterday and today, the house used almost £3 of electricity with nothing switched on or even plugged in (The house is completely empty). So that was weird. More immediately noticeable was that somebody had been in and unlocked the doors. As this was early afternoon, I assumed the council had been in to do something before I got there, would have explained the floorboard being put back and tidying the lengths of tack strips I had ripped up. I returned tonight to remove the tack strip (If I get out of the contract, the council will bill me for leaving trash there, even though it is their trash) and somebody had tidied it again - I had moved it earlier - moved the loft hatch, replaced the board again and propped a door open with a brick... Nobody has broken in, so it must be somebody who has a key outside of council hours. This implies I have a plain old intruder, possibly hiding out in the loft. Luckily I never left tools or anything in the house. Me and my friend also saw someone looking in through the window but did not mention it until we had left, implying somebody was actually there. I did not give chase because it was dark and I have no idea who they are or what they are trying to do.

^ Oh my. Hope you figure that out.

Inspired by Phil's recent P4 escapade I decided to build myself a Netburst box. Ended up with the motherboard out of a HP d530 business minitower the school loved so much way back when. Upgraded it from its stock 2.4GHz Northwood chip to (judging solely from the doubled cache) a 2.8GHz hyperthreading capable Presshot.Oh my. May rescind that upgrade, it all depends on how the machine performs and its temps. Amusingly it complains of being in need of a microcode update, I'll get to that at some point but it still boots so I'm not too concerned at the moment. Shoved 4x1GB RAM sticks in it because I had it laying around and I'm not likely to make another DDR1 machine. Runs Windows XP Pro SP3 on a 250GB SATA hard drive, of which I have about 5 (seriously, the onboard SATA was very convenient). The graphics is courtesy (currently) of a spare MX 100 I had laying around, need to buy a specific card for this machine. Since it runs XP and I'm not looking to run anything 2000 and older (have the PIII for that) I might splurge on a 6800 Ultra, or I might go the Radeon route. Depends on the price/performance ratio of each option, I'm not exactly wealthy. I futz about with vintage machines specifically because they're usually much cheaper than modern ones. Pics coming when I get around to it, same as with the PIII.

Not a retro activity at all, but I added an 8TB hard drive to my file server. Not counting the backup drives, this rig can now hold 18TB of data.

Bring on the UHD Blu-Ray movies baby!

brostenen wrote:

I smoke too, yet outside these day's. Until 2003 and again between 2010 and 2013 i smoked inside. I took up retro computing in 2 […]
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kithylin wrote:

I hope you don't really smoke sitting in front of your computers... that really, legitimately does kill components over time, ya know.

I smoke too, yet outside these day's. Until 2003 and again between 2010 and 2013 i smoked inside.
I took up retro computing in 2014, so yeah... Anyway.

I have never had anything spontanious dying from smoking. Shure I had some shortening of circuits.
I had this CT-2760, bought online, wich died spontaniously within 2 weeks.
Though it was from a non-smoker home, it was perhaps just too old. Not cigarettes by any chance.

I think it is a myth being exaggerated. Shure it can kill, if you exhale 60 cigarettes a day straight into
a computer. Though it is more likely that laser-pickups need to be cleaned first before everything dies.
Static electricity, bad caps, exploding PSU's, bad ventilation and moist air. I thnk those are killing
more computer equipment than cigarette/pipe/cigar smoke.

I've repaired many computers before from smoker's homes and they usually end up literally every surface inside of it on every component covered in thick brown sludgey goop. I usually have to charge people extra as hazard charge for working on those machines. It's more that kind of stuff that kills computers over time.. gums up fans, makes fans stop working, etc. I just wish folks knew enough to not smoke in front of computers.. seems you do though, hopefully. I just try to spread the word to save poor machines from early smoker's demise if possible, that's all.

Standard Def Steve wrote:

Not a retro activity at all, but I added an 8TB hard drive to my file server. Not counting the backup drives, this rig can now hold 18TB of data.

Bring on the UHD Blu-Ray movies baby!

Some day I want to upgrade my file server.. not sure when. It has the capability to handle a lot of small 2.5" drives (if I had the right adapter) and can handle 2 raid cards in the same machine.. I could, in theory, connect up 16 hard drives to it. I would probably use 1 - 1.5 TB drives though in two raid-5 arrays. Not sure what I would end up ultimately but probably 8TB one 8TB the other.

kithylin wrote:

I've repaired many computers before from smoker's homes and they usually end up literally every surface inside of it on every component covered in thick brown sludgey goop. I usually have to charge people extra as hazard charge for working on those machines. It's more that kind of stuff that kills computers over time.. gums up fans, makes fans stop working, etc. I just wish folks knew enough to not smoke in front of computers.. seems you do though, hopefully. I just try to spread the word to save poor machines from early smoker's demise if possible, that's all.

Seconding this.
I volunteer at a recycling center, and the worst machines we get in (next to the ones with mouse crap in them) are the systems where someone's been smoking at the desk next to it since it was new. Seized fans, yellowed plastics, and blocked heatsinks are the order of the day. Plus, all of the dust is this black, goopy, tarry residue that's impossible to clean off.

What you do with your body is your business, but please - think of your equipment.

Marijuana smoke is the worst (I live in Washington state so just trust me on this xD) I stay away from the stuff myself but honestly if I own something/and or paid money for it what I do with it or to it is my own business 😀

kithylin wrote:

I've repaired many computers before from smoker's homes and they usually end up literally every surface inside of it on every component covered in thick brown sludgey goop. I usually have to charge people extra as hazard charge for working on those machines. It's more that kind of stuff that kills computers over time.. gums up fans, makes fans stop working, etc. I just wish folks knew enough to not smoke in front of computers.. seems you do though, hopefully. I just try to spread the word to save poor machines from early smoker's demise if possible, that's all.

Black thick stuff... Man!! You honestly don't think they cooked really heavy and greasy food every day, and not having any ventilation in the kitchen?
Really sounds like it. Plus them smoking like 80 cigarettes a day too. Yuck...
Never ever had a machine with this kind of film on it. Though I smoke what's equivalent to 30 or 40 a week.
I am thinking in terms of grams of tobacco. I have seen a lot of computers looking like a vacume cleaning machines bag. Only being in service for 3 months.
As I said.... Shure if you smoke 60 a day it might kill the machine. Smoking 30 a week makes no difference.

Having a home you have not vacume cleaned ever and never cleaned for dust, Will kill a computer in 6 months.

Today I got this Unichip 367C (Am386DX-40) motherboard to boot up without throwing a keyboard error! Luckily, nothing had been damaged despite the corroded battery which had to be removed, however two pins behind the keyboard BIOS chip were so bent they shorted:

WARNING: lousy smartphone pics ahead

Messed with my PS5... Abit PS5 that is. It is everything the Batman should have been and more, even my crappy PCI IDE board hasn't dampened it. It is interesting to observe the skew in benchmark results, it is marginally slower in Quake (by a fraction of a frame) and marginally faster in Doom versus the Batman for example. Interestingly, 15.1fps seems to be a bottleneck as I cannot top it regardless of what card I use though I expect if I overclocked to 66MHz I would see a change. I am not going to do that... OK, maybe just for a few minutes at some point... I'm not bothered anyway, the machine fills the gap it was supposed to fill. It serves the purpose of my existing Pentium but better, at least for me, and is far more interesting with the board being closer to a 486 board than a Pentium one - has a Pentium chipset and all that, but no built-in I/O anywhere.

Listened to a lot of crappy 80s and 90s music whilst working on it too. All my machines have stupid theme music and I have chosen [ur=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9v0m5lZ_E38]Megatronic - Into the fire[/url] for this one. It is from the right time period (1994) so it has that going for it I guess. I like it anyway. This is just another way of compensating for my horrible memory because I remember names and music better than I remember other stuff, therefore if I associate music with the machine i can usually remember exactly what is in the case and what the installed software does without having to mess about with stuff.

The FDIV bug is pretty fun, a computer that cannot do math correctly is technically a failure but as I don't have to rely on it, I take amusement in the idea that some calculations being performed might be wrong and that a formula in a spreadsheet could have disastrous consequences if the output were taken as a given. Unfortunately, I never learned how to do spreadsheets and failed that unit during my years in the education system because I was too busy getting high and trying to get into girls panties to be bothered with learning how software I would never use was supposed to work. I don't really regret that.

Unfortunately, I have misplaced the I/O controller i wanted to use so I have loaned the one from the 386 for now. The one I wanted to use should turn up during the move, so I'll just have to remember what box it was in. I won't really be able to do anything for a while afterwards anyway I would think. The one which came with the board is good and will probably replace the seperate cards in my 286 as I never liked that implementation very much, the only reason I am not using it in the Pentium is that I need a floppy a feature it does not have. The 286 has a floppy controller already, on the card controlling the hard drive. All in all, this was a good one to end my run with at this location.

Tried, with partial success, to connect an ancient USB drawing tablet from the Win9x era to a modern system running Win10 x64, mostly just to see if it was even still working. It's recognized as a standard USB HID device and the cursor responds to movement, but it keeps randomly acting like I'm pressing down on the pen tip even when it's a good half inch above the tablet surface.

I'm so proud that I managed to repair the broken IDE port on my Amiga 600. I recently bought an Indivision ECS but while I was working on the machine I disconnected the IDE CF card and 6 or 7 of the pins snapped off and stayed in the IDE cable plug. 🙁

Last night I finally had the time and all the equipment I needed to do the repair properly - new pins from a dead board, Hakko temperature-adjustable soldering iron, decent fine solder, flux, and balls of steel.

It all went quite well and the system booted straight into workbench when I started it up again. This was by far the most delicate soldering work I've ever done so I'm well chuffed.

More PC-related I finally decided to put my 286 machine together in the XT-clone box I recently acquired. It's more or less period correct and the range of games you can play with a 286 is much greater than with an XT. I don't have a second floppy cable that allows 5.25" and 3.5" drives to be connected at the same time but they are just IDC cables so I might make 1 combined cable from 2 separate ones so I can use both drives on that 286 - I remember seeing a lot of 286 machines around with dual drives back in the day and I have black ones as well so they match the case.

Also tried to retrobrite the XT keyboard that came with my XT clone. I didn't have any thickening agent so I just soaked the keys in a solution of hydrogen peroxide and oxy powder and left them in the sun for about 8 hours. I think the solution was a bit weak though because the keys are lighter but still quite badly yellowed in places. I still have 2/3rds of the Hydrogen Peroxide left so I'm thinking I make up the proper paste and re-coat them next weekend as well as the actual body of the keyboard itself.

Finally got around to testing two SD to IDE converters. Will make a video review out of it, but quite happy with them. The pricing landscape has changed, I remember a few years ago the prices of SD to IDE adapters were multiples of those of CF adapters. This has changed. And furthermore SD cards are now much easier to source, whereas CF cards are becoming somewhat more specialised products.

Have you tested then on an 8 bit PC?

EDIT: That is what I get for posting from my cell phone early in the mornin. What I meant is: have you tested them in an 8088 machine with 8-bit ISA slots? On something like a XTCF card? AFAIK the fully fledged XTIDE card will allow devices that only support 16-bit operating modes to work, but the cut-down XTCF or Muti-IO controllers operating in 8-bit mode will not, and CF cards do support 8-bit modes.

Today...

A power of testing motherboards / video cards I thought were broken.

One of my main rigs works fine with alot of my components... however does not work fine with other compents, to my surprize.

Some of my favourite parts have come back to me! and I'm very happy! 😁

alexanrs wrote:

Have you tested then on an 8 bit PC?

Not sure if you're referring to my post, but no, I do not have anything that old I'm afraid.

Please do read it after my editing xD i expressed myself horriby.
I meant a XT computer, or even a 286/386 PC with an 8-bit XTCF card or a Multi-IO in an 8-bit slot and using the XTIDE Universal Bios. Since 8-bit support is optional, I suspect that for older (80's) machines CF cards are still the way to go.

Have been taken pictures of my Unisys PW/2 Series 300 machine. And it looks like it is in astonishing good condition.
The pictures are not that great, because of my phone (Lumia 630), and there are no flash in it.

Then I tested the monitor first, and then I dared to fire the machine up, after a quick inspection.
I wanted to see if anything would blow up, and yeah, the magic smoke is still trapped deep within the machine.
The battery is quite dead, and I needed to run the setup (bios) disk in order to set the date and time.
Plus the HDD number was missing. After 10 minutes, it was up and running as it was 1996 again.
It has been resting and sleeping since my parents bought a P133 in 1996. 20 years without powered on. 😳

Now... I need to resize the images, and then I will make a tread (or post in my Unisys tread).
What I was surprised on, was the EGA card. I think it's a non-standard-standard or something.
The resolution seems to be a bit above EGA. I could be wrong, yet something tells me that it's some
enhanced version of the EGA standard.

Another thing that struck me, was that the BIOS battery is not one of those barrel acid fuckers.
It's not even a Dallas clock battery. It is just some battery wich I believe to be non recargeable.
Please comment on the picture of the battery. I will post a picture of that too.

I attempted to upgrade my 486-66 to a 468-100. It was an interesting learning experience....lets just leave it at that.

bbhaag wrote:

I attempted to upgrade my 486-66 to a 468-100. It was an interesting learning experience....lets just leave it at that.

Oh no. Voltage?

Been taking the Mist FPGA computer through its paces with the Commodore 64 core. Works quite well. A few games don't work or have glitches, but most games work just fine 😀