This afternoon, after work, I stumbled upon this:

After a few seconds:

Aww... I love the smell of retro-PC 😜

Now, let'see what kind of retro is this... 3x PC have "Intel PIII" sticker outside the case, but another one seems to be 486-ish or Pentium-ish...

What the heck! I've *never* come across a stack of PCs laying at the curb in my life. I've lived in two different US states, and maybe 5 towns. Just doesn't happen where I am. 🙁

Love the "warning don't trip over this big pile of old PC's" tape
Doubt that passes EU's e-waste laws 😜 but at least they wont get in trouble for safety
and more important glad you could rescue them in time, look forward to see what you ended up with!

dav3yb wrote:

rick6 wrote:

http://i1383.photobucket.com/albums/ah283/rick62008/IMG_20160429_222708_zps07lpnkob.jpg […]
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Is there a particular brand that the little black case is? I've used several like it for cheap builds, most recently from rosewill that's all black. For some reason i rather like the design of it. Something a bit classic about it. I'd like to find other colors if i could, but the only ones i've been able to find are the ones from Rosewill.

I don't think there is any branding at all behind the case but i'll check it. I actually have another one like this, but it's the beige version. To be honest i was considering to throw them away, at least the beige one. Can't have them all!

No pictures yet. Just 15 minutes ago, I found an old Beat up IBM something model 330 486dx2 66 with VL-Bus.
I mean.... Really beat up. Going to have a look at it.

It is one of those Models with a sliding door on the front, covering up the drives. Still got one card, CPU and some men of some sort in it.

EDIT:
Making a tread about it, to post the pictures and ask for advice on if there is something special to look out for when restoring an IBM.

I have never ever seen a computer sitting on a curb waiting for trash pickup around here (monitors yes but not computers).

Unknown_K wrote:

I have never ever seen a computer sitting on a curb waiting for trash pickup around here (monitors yes but not computers).

This was more common years ago, but these days it's a rare sight (less than once a year if I get lucky).

I even found piles of computer stuff on several occasions, impossible to take all of it with me, so I had to quickly open up all those cases and strip the internal parts (couldn't even take all cards with me) before someone else would. It was a weird race 😁

Half-Saint wrote:

More stuff from the dumpster. This time I got an Iskra Delta Partner computer without anything else. It's a locally produced com […]
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More stuff from the dumpster. This time I got an Iskra Delta Partner computer without anything else. It's a locally produced computer by a company called Iskra Delta. Inside there's a standard 286 board with coprocessor and what seem to be Hercules graphics. There's also a massive hard drive (double height) and a floppy drive (probably 360K).

Everything is full of dust and I'd like to clean it before testing. The power switch is kind of wobbly and I suspect it's broken. Not sure whether I did it when I tried to set the case down the wrong way or it was that way already when I got it.

In another dumpster there was this lovely Sound Blaster, an S3 Trio and a Pentium 166 MMX from a beaten up socket 7 machine.

Can't add attachments, I'm getting an error "The extension jpg is not allowed."

Remember this? Well, looks like the motherboard is toast - as long as the PSU is connected to the AT power connector, you can't power on anything.

On the bright side, both the old 43MB Fujitsu M2242AS drive and Western Digital WD1003-WA2 controller work! I got it to boot on a 386 board. There's DOS 3.20 installed on it, some programs and even games. Judging by the timestamps, this PC was used until 1994.

> as long as the PSU is connected to the AT power connector, you can't power on anything.

There's a high chance it's only shorted tantalum caps.

h-a-l-9000 wrote:

> as long as the PSU is connected to the AT power connector, you can't power on anything.

There's a high chance it's only shorted tantalum caps.

OK but how do I know which one is shorted 😀

Half-Saint wrote:

h-a-l-9000 wrote:

> as long as the PSU is connected to the AT power connector, you can't power on anything.

There's a high chance it's only shorted tantalum caps.

OK but how do I know which one is shorted 😀

It's usually worth replacing the lot considering the same could happen at any moment with any of the others. Which is fine if you like soldering and have an endless supply of replacements. Most people don't bother because of the cost and lack of guarantee that it will actually fix it.

First you'd want to find the shorted rail with a multimeter. If it's not the +5V rail (chances are it's -12V), there won't be too many caps in question. You can just remove them until the short is gone. For the +5V rail my favourite method is not for the frightened 😀

I have a friend that cleans for a local radio station and they told him a few days ago that they are going to recycle a huge lot of their old computer equipment. They asked him if he knew anyone who would be interested in it, and he mentioned me. I went there today and it isn't exactly a gold mine, but there are some nice items there! I took 4 towers today and may go back for more in the coming days.

The oldest tower is a Gateway 2000 with a Pentium 1 (MMX probably), a Matrox PCI card, an Ensoniq ISA sound card (the ones with the red and green jacks and the music note on the main chip) and... sadly a horrible mouse nest in it. I'll probably clean it out a little and harvest the board and other parts if they aren't totally ruined. The chassis is really nasty inside though.

The rest of the systems are quite clean for their age. Two are beige Dell Dimension systems with Zip Drives and Pentium III slot 1 CPUs. One is a custom built system in a decent looking early 2000s ATX tower. There are a couple of late 90s Gateway mini towers and several of the various Dell P4 models of the early to mid 2000s. I'm on the fence about if I should do anything with those, as they aren't the garbage all-plastic ones that ALWAYS have bad caps, but I don't really have the space to store systems that I have no use for (and that aren't worth much). I hate to see usable systems go straight to the recycler, but I don't want to be a hoarder.

I also got an old ART audio effects processor that looks to be in okay shape. I see that one similar to this sold on eBay recently for $75+$30 shipping, so that's not bad at all. It has a midi in and out too, which is interesting... but I have no idea what I'd use this for. I just grabbed it because it was old-ish and heavy and looked expensive... and because midi ports. :p

There was also a pretty fancy looking mixing+EQ+effects board (can't remember the brand) that had likely seen better days but was probably a pretty expensive item in its day. So I grabbed that as well.

I also snagged a TEAC stereo receiver which looks to be of decent quality. Probably 100 watts per channel stereo (no surround), and it can handle 4ohm loads. My custom built floor speakers may like this. 😀

Once I get things cleaned up a little I'll post pics of the stuff I brought home.

Was in one of regional centers to fix some stuff and found stuff that was almost in trash can:

some crappy coaxial nic,goldstar printer controller and sli bridge from gigabyte

nice all-in-one Goldstar Prime 2 controller and pair of edo ram

pair of working Leadtek PX6200 128mb

Microsoft Ps2 Trekker 2.0 mice (smoother mechanical mice i've try so far)

and the jewel an VLB video card Cirrus Logic CL-GD5428

This is my first VLB video card and funny thing but all my first cards was from Cirrus Logic: isa that i used with 386 and pci combined with tv tuner (pixelview if i remember correct)

Indrid Cold wrote:

This afternoon, after work, I stumbled upon this: […]
Show full quote

This afternoon, after work, I stumbled upon this:

After a few seconds:

Aww... I love the smell of retro-PC 😜

Now, let'see what kind of retro is this... 3x PC have "Intel PIII" sticker outside the case, but another one seems to be 486-ish or Pentium-ish...

thats me every time i stumbled upon computers in the bin

poor Chevrolet Spark 🤣

where do u live?

Scored a neat vintage condenser mic (works great but annoyingly noisy), and a DB15 Mac -> VGA adapter out of a box of random cables just now. Pretty useful little score ... now I'll finally be able to set up the PowerMac 7200 that I've had for more than A YEAR and see if it works. 😉

Holyshitbonanza.

More pics & story here

I can't *believe* someone kept this for 30-odd-years, all together, in this condition, and then threw it out.

I can believe it, somebody probably died and the people doing cleanup tossed the Tandy stuff in the trash as worthless.

I got given this beast today, it was on it's way to the dump! Luckily a friend saved it at the 11th hour. Only fault it had was a dead CMOS battery, this stopped the SATA drives from being enabled so no boot.
It's a really nice machine, Pentium 4 3.2 GHz "Prescott", MSI 865 Neo2-P motherboard, 1GB DDR 400 RAM, 2x 160 GB SATA hard drives, Nice silver fronted Sony DVD burner to match the case, Q-TEC GOLD 550 watt PSU.
The case is really nice quality and the two side mounted fans are AKASA's with coloured LED's, only sorta crappy bit is it has a MSI Geforce 4MX 4000 AGP card, despite the rest of the specs/looks this was never used as a games machine.
New battery and sorted out the BIOS settings and it's working great with it's original install of XP, just glad it didn't go to the land fill, that would have been such a shame.

Best,
Chris

So amazingly, a couple of hours later I also got this machine, dropped off by the same friend, apparently she had been telling the story of the other machine to another friend and she had said, I have a old machine here too, take it.
It's a Pentium Dual core(wolfdale) E5400 2.7 GHz, Intel G45 based ACER motherboard, 3 GB RAM & 500 GB hard disk. Amazing the really capable machines people are ditching now. This machine has be made obsolete by the owner with an iPad, wonder how many other machines like this have hit landfill for the same reason?
Anyhow, it works perfectly on it's registered Win7 install.