Unsoldered a leaked battery from an old Parallel/Serial/Game/RTC ISA card. Luckily the damage is mostly just surface level coating around the battery area, no damaged traces - if this was installed in a PC, instead of laying flat in storage, the damage could have been much worse! I don't have any motherboards on which to test the card at present, but at worst it may need 1 resistor replacing which has a slight green coating (though it scrapes away pretty easily).

Also did some experimenting on my 386SX system, installed GEM/3 Desktop for old times sake. I'm looking to build a 286 PC soon and will probably go with GEM for it's GUI, so just getting reacquainted.

Cleaning (full disassembly and keycap+plastic shell+cable soaping) a black Apple Pro Keyboard right now... Transparent plastics give away everything "stored" inside 😵 Next up for thorough cleaning is an awesome Sharp PC-4600 laptop, pics to be taken soon 😀

Cga.8086 wrote:

liqmat wrote:

Hurricane Irma heading right for where I am staying for a few months on the west coast of Florida. It has shifted west and will be shredding the west coast of the state pretty bad. Packing up the equipment and moving everything to higher ground, but those winds look really ominous. Don't think anything less than a 486 is going to get me out of this one. See you guys on the flip side as I don't think electricity is on the menu for quite some time after this monster hits.

are you in florida right now ? that must be the last place i want to be haha
One question i got for you are there shops in florida where you can get old hardware? like a goodwill in florida got old stuff ?

Goodwill not so much anymore. They have wised up and put most anything of value on the nationwide Goodwill auction website. Computer shops are drying up rapidly. Garage sales, flea markets and Craigslist is where I see most interesting items. An occassional I.T. friend will dump a pile on me from customers who no longer want their old hardware. I travel non-stop all over North America and find garage sales the most interesting in whatever city I'm in. I do find it interesting some people in this forum have access to recycle centers because most I have encountered do not sell to the public in my experience. Once in a great while there will be a public school auction that has some decent systems.

Today I have blown up a generic powersupply, taking with a P4 3GHz (or at least the motherboard) My own stupid, impatient fault through 🙁

Found out via a "why not" test that my 7800GS OC AGP actually works.

No clue what I'm going to do with this. Its one of the fastest NVIDIA AGP cards. If nothing else it'll probably come in handy in a barter I guess.

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

Found out via a "why not" test that my 7800GS OC AGP actually works.

No clue what I'm going to do with this. Its one of the fastest NVIDIA AGP cards. If nothing else it'll probably come in handy in a barter I guess.

Any chance you could benchmark it to see how it compares to other AGP video cards of a similar vintage? it would be interesting to know which AGP Radeons can perform close to the 7800GS OC so I know what spare video card to get for my AMD64 build (just in case).

Not much today, but yesterday I tested the video memory on a few of my old laptops to see how much life is left on them, they all passed (the tool I used was Video Memory Stress Test CE v1.21 on the Ultimate Boot CD). I've also gotten around to attempting to fully charge the battery on my Dell Latitude C640 laptop, it stopped charging when it reached 92% full yet it actually held enough charge to stay that way when I powered it up to check during the writing of this post, In the past the battery typically died by the time I got around to using it so I guess I'm lucky for now.

KCompRoom2000 wrote:

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

Found out via a "why not" test that my 7800GS OC AGP actually works.

No clue what I'm going to do with this. Its one of the fastest NVIDIA AGP cards. If nothing else it'll probably come in handy in a barter I guess.

Any chance you could benchmark it to see how it compares to other AGP video cards of a similar vintage? it would be interesting to know which AGP Radeons can perform close to the 7800GS OC so I know what spare video card to get for my AMD64 build (just in case).

Not much today, but yesterday I tested the video memory on a few of my old laptops to see how much life is left on them, they all passed (the tool I used was Video Memory Stress Test CE v1.21 on the Ultimate Boot CD). I've also gotten around to attempting to fully charge the battery on my Dell Latitude C640 laptop, it stopped charging when it reached 92% full yet it actually held enough charge to stay that way when I powered it up to check during the writing of this post, In the past the battery typically died by the time I got around to using it so I guess I'm lucky for now.

I could see how it compares to my X1950 Pro AGP I guess.
The only problem is the only board I have to post it on right now is a Pentium III 733 board that would almost certainly bottleneck both. The reason I thought it was dead originally was because I tested it in my Dimension 4600 (which apparently doesn't support it). I would assume the X1950 Pro would be 10-20 percent faster just based on a quick guestimate I've come up with in my head. I suspect the X800 would loose by 10-20 percent at the same time but that's not a fair comparison due to the X800s lack of Shader 3.0 support.

Third night in since recapping, and I'm all but giving up on this IIcx motherboard. It's just too much of a pain in the ass to figure out what's going on with it, since I can't seem to find whatever broken traces or iffy solder joints are causing the problems I'm getting with it, ranging from completely nonfunctional soft power buttons to inexplicable lack of SCSI hard drive boot to unexplained crashes.

Alas, it's not exactly cost-effective to just throw in a IIci or Quadra 650/700 board in its place, to say nothing of how I'd have to cut up the case's I/O area to get those to fit.

Everything else seems to work; floppy drive (that I have to keep removing because the more questionable floppies I try to test keep leaving crap on the heads), 80 MB SCSI hard drive, PSU, at least 4 MB of the included RAM, just that the motherboard is way too much of a crapshoot. I don't know if it's worth trying to part this thing out in its current condition, though, even with the original box and documentation and disks and all; people want a WORKING computer.

TheAbandonwareGuy wrote:

Found out via a "why not" test that my 7800GS OC AGP actually works.

No clue what I'm going to do with this. Its one of the fastest NVIDIA AGP cards. If nothing else it'll probably come in handy in a barter I guess.

If that's a G70 and not a G71 core on that card, then you have quite the bargaining chip for someone looking for a flashable card for Power Mac G4 or G5 use, though the lack of larger ROM chips on the usual electronics markets that would hold a flashed Mac ROM can be a bit tricky for that.

I'd check the power supply voltages under load. A weak power supply can cause all these issues.

luckybob wrote:

I'd check the power supply voltages under load. A weak power supply can cause all these issues.

Already ahead of you there! "Rails check out at +11.9V, +5.12V, -12.01V, generally within the tolerances I'd expect. I definitely think the PSU's fine at this rate."

Yeah, the 12V's a smidge low, but I'm not expecting it to be much of a difference in what's mainly a 5V-reliant system.

I'm also not sure I'd have to do the sawtooth oscillator diode fix sometimes mentioned with Astec-branded PSUs like the one I have here. I certainly hope not, anyway; working inside those things makes me a bit nervous.

In any case, the PSU will power the IIcx fine if pins 9 and 10 are bridged, as far as I can tell. The motherboard is just being- wait a minute, I missed some broken traces, one of which cut off the 5V trickle line to the startup circuit and the other having disconnected C15 from circuit.

Soldering to one of the vias connecting top and bottom layers of the board can be a total pain, but I managed it for the TRKL line, and for the first time since I've had this thing, soft power WORKS.

Now I just need to check on the other issues, see if there's more traces I somehow missed. It's still not booting off the SCSI HDD like it used to...

Got my 50ns FPM module today and immediately "inserted" it into the LS486e... BUT, the speed was slower than with the 60ns module... which I suppose is EDO.
Luckily, I have already ordered an EDO module of similar timings which may, or may not, help me to put the "cherry" on this system's cake.
The FPM ram is now happily working inside the GA-486VS which had some stability issues with the 60ns ram at 50 mhz. All ram timings are now at "maximum" settings.
Unfortunately speedsys is still the only program not working correctly - be it 25 mhz bus speeds or 50.

Last night (and still continuing today), I got around to testing how well my AMD64 XP rig handles modern power supplies by temporarily using the 430W EVGA supply from my i3 rig to power up the AMD64 rig, I was a bit skeptical because I remember reading here that K7 systems need a heavy +5V rail and I wasn't sure if the same applied to K8 hardware so I gave it a shot, It works perfectly and is much nicer than the Apevia 500W supply that it used in the past. Now I can look into getting a nice Corsair PSU for this system in the near future as well as getting the side panel glass rebuilt once I have some money to spare.

I've gotten around to posting the 3DMark '01 and '03 benchmark results for this system on the usual Mega Threads in the Video section.

Later, I'll be testing the hardware to see how long this system will last and if any components need replacing, I have the Ultimate Boot CD at my disposal for this task.

I finally replace the old hard drive with a new CF on my Compaq LTE 5300, after a ton of "invalid partition table" i cloned my Pentium 133 msdos partition and it worked, just had to install Windows for workgroups and its working, with a lot of games added to the CF.
My next task is to find a suitable CMOS battery replacement.

Set up my old Amiga again. I know it's not quite Windows, but thought it's still retro! I love the thing. Sadly a ton of my floppy disks have died, but I've bought some new ones, and am trying to save the ones that do work.

sketchus wrote:

Set up my old Amiga again. I know it's not quite Windows, but thought it's still retro! I love the thing. Sadly a ton of my floppy disks have died, but I've bought some new ones, and am trying to save the ones that do work.

Funny....
I am doing the opposite. Writing adf to disk these days. If you can get a hold of the TOSEC collection for Amiga, then you might not have to save the old ones you have.

IIcx updates:

-The RAM is as weird as ever. If I install mixed RAM in a bank - say, the suspected faulty 4 MB SIMMs - with the known good 1 MB SIMMs, the system will gladly boot up fine, but with only 4 MB total. There's two more SIMMs I don't know the capacity of yet, sadly, but they behave much the same as the 4 MB ones.

Also, it's like it can't see bank B at all, only bank A. This isn't exactly helping the RAM situation one bit, Connectix RAM Doubler be damned. I hope I don't have to dig around for more broken traces on this PCB.

-Out of frustration with the SCSI controller not picking up the internal HDD, I decided to plug that Caere Typist scanner's controller box into the back, leave it on, hope it resolves some termination issue... and it booted right up off the HDD like it used to. Gotta love that SCSI voodoo!

At any rate, I'm just glad not to have to go through all that System 6 floppy swapping again.

sketchus wrote:

Set up my old Amiga again. I know it's not quite Windows, but thought it's still retro! I love the thing. Sadly a ton of my floppy disks have died, but I've bought some new ones, and am trying to save the ones that do work.

I've already been through floppy hell just testing all these old disks I got with the IIcx, occasionally getting read errors, or - worse - the grinding noise of some less-than-reputable floppy disks leaving their magnetic material all over the floppy drive heads, forcing me to take out the drive and swab off the heads.

Doing a Frankenpad project, which I guess isn't exactly retro but it involves putting a ThinkPad T61 mobo in a T60 shell. Usually people do it for 15" for the 1600x1200 screen but I had 14.1" T60 + T61 so I used those. The T60's shell and chassis were in great shape but the T61's casing had a couple of cracks. Haven't gotten around to the Frankenpad T61 pictures yet but here's the reverse Frankenpad T60 in T61 shell.

http://imgur.com/a/apDkV

brostenen wrote:

sketchus wrote:

Set up my old Amiga again. I know it's not quite Windows, but thought it's still retro! I love the thing. Sadly a ton of my floppy disks have died, but I've bought some new ones, and am trying to save the ones that do work.

Funny....
I am doing the opposite. Writing adf to disk these days. If you can get a hold of the TOSEC collection for Amiga, then you might not have to save the old ones you have.

Wow, googling that, I saw some games I'd totally forgot I had. It's shocking how fragile floppy disks can be.

I've already been through floppy hell just testing all these old disks I got with the IIcx, occasionally getting read errors, or - worse - the grinding noise of some less-than-reputable floppy disks leaving their magnetic material all over the floppy drive heads, forcing me to take out the drive and swab off the heads.

That grinding noise is something else isn't it? I have a couple of drive cleaning discs I can run. Combined with a bit of isopropyl they're pretty good.

Packing everything in boxes 😀

Moving?