Well I think as a starter, ME will be used for my K6 build, together with unofficial SP

disabling system restore in Me helps with stability

I'm trying to get a ret... ehm Ebay seller to not wrap the rare motherboard I bought in bubble wrap and I'm having zero luck...

ESD bag...He dosn't seem to know what it is...
ESD safe bubble wrap... ESD what?...
Aluminium foil (with the button cell battery removed)... He dosn't have any foil and can't remove the battery anyhow...
Common newspaper paper (with graphite print)... He dosn't have any...
Any sort of paper! ... He dosn't have any.

What does he have? ... One of those thin single layer bubble wrap bags and a box... He is going to ship my precious in it... to Ebays Global shipment mangleing center to be manhandled by other ret.... ehm Ebay employees...

Now and then I wish I could kill with my mind...

I'd file a complaint to the eBay company itself since the seller doesn't have the appropriate items.

bjwil1991 wrote:

I'd file a complaint to the eBay company itself since the seller doesn't have the appropriate items.

Then I would have to try to explain to the Ebay ret.... ehm employees what static electricity is...

I'm sure it will be fine...

Skyscraper wrote:

I'm trying to get a ret... ehm Ebay seller to not wrap the rare motherboard I bought in bubble wrap and I'm having zero luck... […]
Show full quote

I'm trying to get a ret... ehm Ebay seller to not wrap the rare motherboard I bought in bubble wrap and I'm having zero luck...

ESD bag...He dosn't seem to know what it is...
ESD safe bubble wrap... ESD what?...
Aluminium foil (with the button cell battery removed)... He dosn't have any foil and can't remove the battery anyhow...
Common newspaper paper (with graphite print)... He dosn't have any...
Any sort of paper! ... He dosn't have any.

What does he have? ... One of those thin single layer bubble wrap bags and a box... He is going to ship my precious in it... to Ebays Global shipment mangleing center to be manhandled by other ret.... ehm Ebay employees...

Now and then I wish I could kill with my mind...

Take a chance on the bubble wrap and return it if it arrives DOA.

appiah4 wrote:

Skyscraper wrote:

I'm trying to get a ret... ehm Ebay seller to not wrap the rare motherboard I bought in bubble wrap and I'm having zero luck...

Take a chance on the bubble wrap and return it if it arrives DOA.

That is my plan! 😀

So far I have had good luck with the bubble wrapped hardware.

I had good luck as well with the motherboard, CPU, RAM, Ethernet, and somewhat the video card I purchased last year. The board, CPU, RAM, and Ethernet card works without issues, still to this day, but, the GPU was suffering from shadowing from the text in Windows, but DOS handled the card very well. Every sound card I purchased online, won during a contest, or at thrift stores had the anti-static bags around them (which is nice) and they still work.

oeuvre wrote:

why not BOTH?!

RUN ALL THE OPERATING SYSTEMS!

NextStep on a 486!
DRDOS with DesqView!
CP/M on a Kaypro!
VMS in a Virtual Machine!
Haiku!

And if somebody throws a few hundred dollars at me, MorphOS on a Powermac G5 (or even better a Talos II Power9 workstation for... well, more than a few hundred).

Skyscraper wrote:

I'm trying to get a ret... ehm Ebay seller to not wrap the rare motherboard I bought in bubble wrap and I'm having zero luck...

ESD bag...He dosn't seem to know what it is...
ESD safe bubble wrap... ESD what?...

I bought a big roll of ESD safe bubble wrap for that kind of thing. I wish I had more strong film ESD bags, though.

He doesn't have aluminum foil...

I'd hate to bake at his house.

Yesterday, when I was at the doctor's office, I spotted this old guy in the corner.

With my doctor's consent, I was able to take it and the accompanying keyboard (which looks like to me it could be a clone or variant of those famous IBM keyboards) home with me.

It appeared to be a Pentium II machine that was used in conjunction with an external x-ray device, from what I could gather.

After taking an 8-hour "nap", I got to work on taking it apart and cleaning it. First, before that, I wanted to see its internals and what was on there to begin with.

I opened up the PC so its dusty interior could get some nice fresh air while I turned it on in probably over a decade to find Win95 "plus" installed with a "Hologic" interface that loads upon reaching the desktop.

That Hologic software worked with the SCSI Hologic ISA card that was installed to control whatever x-ray or otherwise machine that was below the PC in my doctor's office.

After satiating my curiosity, I began the slow, tedious process of taking everything apart to then clean it and reassemble it. While the Iomega 3.5" Jazz 1GB drive was one of the PC's most notable features, on the inside, I found even more interesting pieces of hardware: A 2GB Quantum Fireball SE IDE hard drive (which I have since did a full format of to completely erase all data that was ever on that drive, to respect both past patients privacy as well as to also guard myself against legal action 😀 ), a solid-built and cool-running little drive -

- as well as what appears to be one of the famous S3 Virge graphics cards, an S3 Virge Stealth 3D 2000 by Diamond -

I would have liked to have said I finished working on it by now, but, as my luck would have it, one of the standoff screws on the Intel motherboard was badly threaded and won't come out of the case's standoff. I am now waiting for a metal filing kit so I can actually remove the screw from the standoff and go about cleaning and further working with the board.

In the meanwhile, I cleaned the power supply (wearing Neoprene gloves when working with it, so, you know, I don't die of electrocution) -

- as well as put a fresh coat of thermal paste between the PII 300MHz and its passive heatsink (although this resulted in the retention clips being a bit bent here it there; they still apply just enough pressure though *thumbs up* ). It was a pain to do so, though.

I don't know what I am going to really do with this machine, but I couldn't bare the idea of letting this machine go to the landfill, though. 😀 Probably going to throw in a used SATA I hard drive from ebay and connect that up with a SATA PCI interface card I have lying around, install Windows 98 SE on it, and uh, enjoy what I have accomplished, I guess.

Of my awe catgirl series I recorded a part 3 since there's AWE32 emulation nowadays

the_ultra_code wrote:

Yesterday, when I was at the doctor's office, I spotted this old guy in the corner.

With my doctor's consent, I was able to take it and the accompanying keyboard (which looks like to me it could be a clone or variant of those famous IBM keyboards) home with me.

What a nice looking bulky tower 😊
Just out of curiosity, did it came with any Hologic installation disk?

peido wrote:

What a nice looking bulky tower 😊
Just out of curiosity, did it came with any Hologic installation disk?

No, just what you see. I don't think there was any of that accompanying software around the setup, and I didn't care to look for such things any how. There was also no media in either the optical, floppy, or the Iomega Jazz drive.

Since I don't plan on ever using any Hologic software or hardware any time soon, I'm going to recycle that Hologic SCSI ISA card, the ISA modem card that was also in the PC, the PC's floppy drive (I have USB floppy drives, if I ever need to make an image of a floppy with WinImage, and an extra Gotek USB Floppy emulator drive if I need floppy (which I am if I am going to install Win98 SE), so I won't need that 😀 ), and another PCI modem card from another LGA775 Pentium 4 Dell machine I received almost a year ago at my local Best Buy, which as since been disassembled.

the_ultra_code wrote:

Since I don't plan on ever using any Hologic software or hardware any time soon, I'm going to recycle that Hologic SCSI ISA card, the ISA modem card that was also in the PC, the PC's floppy drive (I have USB floppy drives, if I ever need to make an image of a floppy with WinImage, and an extra Gotek USB Floppy emulator drive if I need floppy

Please don't recycle floppy drives. USB floppy drives can't be plugged into a KryoFlux to image more esoteric things, like copy-protected DOS 720K floppies, Microsoft "over-formats" for packing more than 1.44MiB into distribution floppies, and 400/800K Apple GCR floppies.

(As I understand it, the KryoFlux compensates for the fixed spindle speed by sampling the magnetic flux at a high enough resolution to compensate in software.)

If you don't want to keep it, try to find it a good home. Heck, even if you have a bad drive, try to find someone willing to take a crack at repairing it. They're only going to get harder to find over time.

ssokolow wrote:

Please don't recycle floppy drives. USB floppy drives can't be plugged into a KryoFlux to image more esoteric things, like copy-protected DOS 720K floppies, Microsoft "over-formats" for packing more than 1.44MiB into distribution floppies, and 400/800K Apple GCR floppies.

(As I understand it, the KryoFlux compensates for the fixed spindle speed by sampling the magnetic flux at a high enough resolution to compensate in software.)

If you don't want to keep it, try to find it a good home. Heck, even if you have a bad drive, try to find someone willing to take a crack at repairing it. They're only going to get harder to find over time.

Welp. Um... I kinda just did... 😒

I'll take that plea of yours to heart now, though. I'll at least put the time and effort into trying to sell them on ebay, if that'll make you feel any better. I just didn't feel like spending more of my time doing that, although those points you brought up regarding certain images does now make me somewhat regret what I did.

Sorry to ruin your day. That's never my intention. 🙁

ssokolow wrote:

If you don't want to keep it, try to find it a good home. Heck, even if you have a bad drive, try to find someone willing to take a crack at repairing it. They're only going to get harder to find over time.

If it makes you feel any better, I have like a dozen of them in a box, and a spare (but needs work) Mac superdrive. Not sure that drive will ever work again, but it's a source of parts, anyway.

I will confess to once disposing of an 8" drive that I'd moved around for years with no use, but that was an ugly move for hardware - someone (not me) dropped my Cromemco off the back of a truck, I'll probably never see one of those again.

A few days ago, I noticed that the fan on my Toshiba 430CDT was not actually working. No idea how long it wasn't working for actually now that I think of it. Could've been like that since the day I got it. Whoops. Anyway, since it's kind of a pain to open it all the way up to where you can actually get at the fan, I just kind of took a ruler to the outside of the case and measured the fan and came away with 30mm. Ordered a replacement and it arrived today, so I opened it all up to replace it and -- whoops! -- actually it should be a 25mm fan. D'oh. Also, the fan itself has a custom shape with two mounts for screws which are important to how the CPU heatsink is secured against the motherboard and laptop case (I noticed those before when I cleaned the inside a while ago, but assumed they were part of the heatsink and not the fan itself). So using a generic replacement wouldn't have been a good idea anyway probably... though, could probably do it that way in a pinch. Anyway, found a place selling the exact same fan (refurbished) so have to wait a couple more days.

I finally installed WinXP MCE 2005 on my Super P3. I've always liked the MCE theme, and it runs great on this machine. The MCE interface runs at a full 60 fps. It even plays that MCE demonstration video (with the people playing pool) completely stutter-free. That's a 720p WMV-HD encoded video!

Specs of the machine are:
PIII-S @ 1575
2GB DDR-300 CL2
6800GT AGP
X-Fi
QDI Advance 12T
XP MCE 2005 SP3...yeah baby!