I have been acquiring stuff for about 3 years now, I desperately needed to do some 'inventory management', so I have been getting rid of stuff. So far only the things that went to the recycling center (some defective core(/2)(/duo) OEM stuff, a few motherboards with physical damage (broken-off slots, deep scratches). When I brought everything to the recycling center, I spotted 2 beige systems in the bin, one AT with a 3-digit MHz display and a 8x CDROM and a more modern beige ATX case with a soundcard in the bottom slot (ie. ISA). I tried taking them but no dice, the guy wouldn't budge. I even tried a little bribe. What a waste.

I also decided that my cut-off for harware will be Pentium III / Slot A. Nothing newer than that. But maybe some Socket A also. I just don't care about anything newer. Also, I need to use or at least test my hardware.

No more hoarding! No more buying cheap boxes of old stuff! (let's see how long I can do that haha).

EDIT: also I don't need to keep 9 Sound Blaster 16, 5 AWE32, 7 AWE64. Or 26 S3 Trio/Virge PCi variations. Etc.

Been checking over some of my old home theatre gear, and noticed these two are going to need a recap

Cyrix200+ wrote:

I tried taking them but no dice, the guy wouldn't budge. I even tried a little bribe. What a waste.

Same problem in my area. One day they will be in a good mood and let me pick what I want and the next day they wont let me in the door. Finally had to look elsewhere. Too inconsistent.

liqmat wrote:

Cyrix200+ wrote:

I tried taking them but no dice, the guy wouldn't budge. I even tried a little bribe. What a waste.

Same problem in my area. One day they will be in a good mood and let me pick what I want and the next day they wont let me in the door. Finally had to look elsewhere. Too inconsistent.

The "recyclers" remind me of the old Cash for Crushers crap, watching running used cars (and innumerable parts) being destroyed because of bureaucrats and tax credits.

Around here they charge you e-waste fees and then waive them if you give your old hardware to them, so most of the supply for ordinary folks has dried up, but boy there's a lot of used parts on eBay from China!

Today was sorting out the bins, and fixing the Tandy 1000 to make a video of it. The power supply connector or the circuit board on it has some kind of issue I'll probably have to flow solder into later, but for now I have a piece of rubber pushing it back so it makes contact, seems a lot happier now.

Installed a capacitor to fix a Voodoo 3 3000 that was being scrapped and previously broken off / missing, and also found a turbo display for my AT case and installed it.

Not sure if this counts as retro, or modern. But, I got the latest Ultimate Boot CD for sector remapping on a hard drive that's not working correctly.

I put the CD into my IBM ThinkPad R40 2682 that has the 20GB HDD installed, ran the test, and no bad sectors on there, or remaps. Even SMART said the HDD was healthy as well (which is a good sign, but, I will image the HDD onto my Windows 10 laptop in case I need to upgrade or replace the HDD).

After that was done, I turned off the laptop, disconnected the AC adapter and battery, removed the 20GB HDD (got hot) and inserted the 60GB Hitachi Travelstar, and oh, boy. Does this get interesting. I attempted to remap the sectors/clusters on the HDD as the drive isn't working properly and it gives me either UNC or IDNF error codes. When I try to zero or erase the drive, I get NRDY (not ready) messages on a heavy amount of sectors. Will do some more tests later on today when I get home.

After some unexpected Amibay activity just before departure on holiday, I've been testing a pile of cards. Most worked, two did not (and a non-PnP ISA card requiring resource config util didn't do anything as I couldn't find the prog). Biggest surprise was that an IBM Dolphin MWave card 'just worked' out of the box under Win98. Had expected that to be a lot harder...

Is that just a 5.25" handle?

Happy to report, and you'll be happy to hear, I successfully got the 60GB hard drive to work for the fixer-upper Dell Inspiron 600m laptop and XP is running smoothly and actually boots this time. However, SMART has errors (just only the reallocation count is too high), but the drive does work now and I couldn't be happier.

oeuvre wrote:

Is that just a 5.25" handle?

...or are you just happy to see me?

I installed ToshUtils on my Tecra 510CDT to see if it would give me additional options to control the speed of the fan that is making all that noise. Sadly, it did not. Which is funny, because I was pretty sure that on other models you can disable the fan that way (c.f. http://home.icequake.net/~nemesis/linuxlaptop … ba/tecra500cdt/)

The plan now is to replace the fan, which likely means taking the whole damn thing apart. I hope that does it, but I'm still wondering whether something else is going on, since the different BIOS settings for cooling (Quiet/Performance) don't seem to have an impact on fan speed.

oeuvre wrote:

Is that just a 5.25" handle?

If you're talking about my AT case with the 5.25 bay handle, no, that is a Lian Li IDE bay caddy with a Compact Flash to IDE module inside.

Installed my new Zalman fan on an ATI Radeon 9800 pro. Behold the beauty of it 😀

halfsink

Been working on my channel a lot recently - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCc6sYw9FvwuK … w_as=subscriber

I've got a few new vids in the works too, some recorded today
- Yacht-Z for Windows 3.1x
- Setting up DDO to put extremely large hard disks in a 486 (w/CD-ROM support)
- Setting up MS-DOS 6.22 w/Supplimental Disk
- Setting up Windows For Workgroups 3.11 to be utterly stable

I'm planning sto start doing some let's plays here and there. Just need to finalize adding footage and editing everything. So finally, I'm actually doing something with my Retro-PC Youtube Channel.

Turbo -> wrote:

Installed my new Zalman fan on an ATI Radeon 9800 pro. Behold the beauty of it 😀

I just carried out a similar task on my 9800 Pro. Fitted an Arctic Silencer on mine.

creepingnet wrote:

Been working on my channel a lot recently - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCc6sYw9FvwuK … w_as=subscriber […]
Show full quote

Been working on my channel a lot recently - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCc6sYw9FvwuK … w_as=subscriber

I've got a few new vids in the works too, some recorded today
- Yacht-Z for Windows 3.1x
- Setting up DDO to put extremely large hard disks in a 486 (w/CD-ROM support)
- Setting up MS-DOS 6.22 w/Supplimental Disk
- Setting up Windows For Workgroups 3.11 to be utterly stable

I'm planning sto start doing some let's plays here and there. Just need to finalize adding footage and editing everything. So finally, I'm actually doing something with my Retro-PC Youtube Channel.

Hey, nice work on the channel! I too have had my own channel in the works for ...years... now. I know how hard it is to actually invest the time to get videos finished and uploaded

Bancho wrote:

I just carried out a similar task on my 9800 Pro. Fitted an Arctic Silencer on mine. […]
Show full quote

Turbo -> wrote:

Installed my new Zalman fan on an ATI Radeon 9800 pro. Behold the beauty of it 😀

I just carried out a similar task on my 9800 Pro. Fitted an Arctic Silencer on mine.

Man that thing is beautiful. If the 9800 Pro had a black PCB it would look super relevant even today 😜

Rare PC Technologies 286 Express card made for the 8088 Tandy 1000s. The daughterboard houses the 8088 and connects the cards to the motherboard's CPU socket through the ribbon cable, so you don't lose your XT speeds. You can toggle between the the 8088 and 286, as well as enable/disable cache with keyboard shortcuts.

The 1000SX has 4 speeds now:

8088:
4.77mhz
7.16mhz

286:
7.16mhz w/Cache (8KB)
7.16 w/o Cache

The socket in the main card is for a 80287 which is on the way. Many thanks to the gentleman on VCF who sold this to me -- I had given up trying to find one.

those cards are so cool.