saturn wrote:

voodoo 5 in the trash. Let find the bloke that did that...

I agree. The person who did that deserves to have a million CPU pins get stuck into his skin 🙁

But hey, at least it was found and someone got a V5 for cheaps! 😁

Tetrium wrote:

saturn wrote:

voodoo 5 in the trash. Let find the bloke that did that...

I agree. The person who did that deserves to have a million CPU pins get stuck into his skin 🙁

But hey, at least it was found and someone got a V5 for cheaps! 😁

What cpu pins... what about the glass from fiber optic cables?

In addition to the crazy warm weather we're having today (seriously - 70°F in Tennessee in December!), I found this crazy thing over at the dump. One of those "Somebody really tried to throw this thing away?" type deals:

http://lowendmac.com/2005/imac-g5-isight/

Nice one, even running Tiger too. Throw some more RAM in and use it for the next decade!

Modern(ish) Macs are a huge paradox; they are expensive, high-end machines when new & are lauded for their design and build quality. Then people treat them like disposable trinkets and throw them away two years later. They have to have one of the worst depreciation curves of any piece of tech. On the one hand I love being able to pick up former $5000 workstations for peanuts, but on the other hand I'm appalled by the sheer waste & insanity of the 'upgrade' treadmill.

Posting this from my garbage-rescued G5 tower. 😜

Somewhat related - I found a new, sealed, boxed copy of Tiger a couple days ago. Granted it wasn't being thrown away, but it was on a dusty shelf behind some dusty books and cobwebs at my work & I'm pretty sure no one had ever looked at it in the last 7 or 8 years. So you better believe I scooped it up.

iMac G4 & G5 are caps blowers.
https://www.google.com/search?q=imac+g5+capac … KHdkODfgQsAQIQg

PCBONEZ wrote:

iMac G4 & G5 are caps blowers.
https://www.google.com/search?q=imac+g5+capac … KHdkODfgQsAQIQg

Remind me to bring that up next time some 68k snob starts going on about PPC machines not being "real Macs." 😜

Found this in the doorway of a charity shop locally. My first IBM! Not a classic, obviously, but I did have a nice surprise when I got it home. Firstly it booted first time (CMOS battery still good) and Windows 98 loaded with its custom theme (remember the one that changes your pointer into a squid? Me neither!) and where I expected a bog standard PII under the hood, I was instead treated with a K6-2 500! I've got a 450 which already overclocks better than any CPU I've ever had so I'm looking forward to trying this one out for scalability. ATi Mach64 with 8MB built in and a 20GB HD running off a nondescript ALADDiN V board. Would make an excellent NT/2000 system!

brassicGamer wrote:

Found this in the doorway of a charity shop locally. My first IBM! Not a classic, obviously, but I did have a nice surprise when I got it home. Firstly it booted first time (CMOS battery still good) and Windows 98 loaded with its custom theme (remember the one that changes your pointer into a squid? Me neither!) and where I expected a bog standard PII under the hood, I was instead treated with a K6-2 500! I've got a 450 which already overclocks better than any CPU I've ever had so I'm looking forward to trying this one out for scalability. ATi Mach64 with 8MB built in and a 20GB HD running off a nondescript ALADDiN V board. Would make an excellent NT/2000 system!

rps20151214_195137_554.jpg

Lol I just scrapped one of these! I had good reason though, it was in really bad shape. Before I had originally rescued it the last person must have thrown it onto the ewaste pile it the recycling center because it was all busted up and dented. Worked good though but ended up not being something I wanted to hang onto so I got rid of it and pulled all the useful parts.

King_Corduroy wrote:

Worked good though but ended up not being something I wanted to hang onto so I got rid of it and pulled all the useful parts.

Before I saw it, I fully expected to pull the parts and dump it but given it's in fully working order (could do with a wipe, maybe some bleaching) I thought I deserved to be saved. A computer never gets slower, but it might not be able to keep up with the demands you place upon it! Appropriate demands are something most people do not understand.

That's true, my demands are generally low but since I already have around 43 computer systems and five of them already networked and set up for my use it was pretty pointless to hold onto it. 🤣

A couple more rescues from a friend of mine, including 1000mhz Pentium III, a 233 MMX chips.

Sorry about the cheesy photo.

Appears to be a Voodoo 3 1000, Diamon Viper TNT 61, and a Western Digital Video card.
Haven't had a chance to test yet.

WD ISA VGA card is missing two BIOS chips.

Today, the neighbor threw out their Intel Celery machine from around 2001. This is an 800MHz Coppermine Celeron in a Gigabyte GA-6VMM motherboard... Far from the best, but it's free so who gives a damn, it is still win. The hard drive is flaky and the XP install is gebrochen, the PS/2 keyboard slot also doesn't work properly if at all, but I am sure the problem with it is rather small.

Also got a keyboard, the exact same BTC model I had when I was running a Duron - I loved that keyboard. Plus I got an LG 15" CRT which is odd, because when the guy turned up asking if I wanted it I was in the middle of posting to a local forum saying I wanted CRT monitors... I had also dreamed something like that just hours before, I also dreamed about a large spider landing on my synth which happened in the middle of me playing with the machine... Ah, may as well post that too, because part of pulling machines right out of a shed and putting them in your home is that they usually come with spiders attached;

So.... Neighbours threw out their "pet" (including a computer)

Ever been asked how to clean mouse pee off a motherboard?
.
Fun is cracking open a case to have 100 or so cockroaches come barreling out.
.

Maybe the owner was raising ingredients for a protein shake.

What's surprising is the number of people who don't realize a computer tech's obligations don't extend to forming a criminal conspiracy to hide disgusting online proclivities.

The spider is fine, seems to like my house anyway. I expect he's probably looking for a female given the time of year. Isn't causing me any problems anyway so I moved him to the kitchen and left him to his own devices.

As for the computer, the internals were actually very clean aside from the odd web. I think they probably took decent care of the machine while it was in use anyway, they do keep their house in good order so that probably extends to their other possessions.

I used to live in a mouse infested house some years ago, yeah, that was a pain in the ass. Don't see roaches around here though, only time I did see them was in school, at least, I think they were roaches. They sure liked the space behind the fridges anyway.

Disgusting online activity isn't something I would be liable to encounter on this one. I won't be going through the contents of the hard drive and will instead erase it if it even works enough for that. As they are an elderly Jehovah's Witness couple I doubt there would be much of anything interesting on there anyway, the contents are probably extremely boring. That and I like them enough that I really have no desire to go through their files. Plus they have never once tried to shove their religion down my throat - in fact, they have pretty much nothing to do with me and vice-verse, which suits me fine. My interaction with them goes as far as that we both say "Hi," If we pass each other on the front yard.

Sometimes though, when I get drives of unknown origin, I do like to take a look. I have never found anything too horrible, just instructions for drug manufacture or fetish porn (it was all legal thankfully, that is one thing that scares me about unknown drives) and a few banking details stored in plain text - such things are common place and I really don't care about them, they just get erased and forgotten. Once though there was a drive I was determined to get into because the guy who gave me it was a friend, he was usually laid back and trusted me... Not that time. It was the last time I saw him and he started freaking out about me going through the drive, which I promised I would not do. The system he gave me had two drives so he tore one out and destroyed the board on the bottom of it. It took me a few years, but his behavior (he actually got rather aggressive) rang alarm bells and I wanted to know why...

...Funny thing is, I think he destroyed the wrong drive. The one he left alone, and actually said I could go through, contained the more questionable content; he had stored some of his card numbers, things related to his tenancy, a copy of the anarchists cookbook, things for his university course and a bunch of phone numbers for people he knew including drug dealers and various women... Also a lot of photos from holidays, parties and family events. I didn't really look at this and formatted the drive. The drive he destroyed contained almost nothing but some very crappy music, some course work and some fetish porn - it wasn't even that bad - these files were boring as hell and told me nothing I didn't know; I knew he liked shit music, I knew he was doing a course at university, I knew he liked squirters, knew he read the anarchists cookbook and knew he liked his drugs - he was open about these things. The only thing I questioned were a set of encrypted files, they weren't encrypted well and I managed to decrypt them, they were just more of the same stuff that was on the first drive regarding banking, rent and university. The information on that drive was so far out of date it would have been impossible to really use it, it even referred repeatedly to an address he had lived at years ago it was so old. I still do not know why he flipped out the way he did, possibly it was drug influenced, but I ended up wiping the drive and dropping it in the trash because it was busted anyway. He had hidden nothing I couldn't have gotten better from the drive he said I could look at if I wanted to. Plus I knew all of it already because he had told me everything on numerous occasions. Fuck knows where he is now. Despite him occasionally behaving like that, he was actually a good guy and I liked hanging out with him, sure he had his issues, but so does everyone and it was always a laugh.

I may post more photos of the Celeron today, the camera was being nothing but trouble yesterday.

PCBONEZ wrote:

Ever been asked how to clean mouse pee off a motherboard? . Fun is cracking open a case to have 100 or so cockroaches come barre […]
Show full quote

Ever been asked how to clean mouse pee off a motherboard?
.
Fun is cracking open a case to have 100 or so cockroaches come barreling out.
.

I've worked in the business for nearly 30 years.. The worst I've seen is a PC that was owned by a woman with 25+ cats. The side panel was rusted to the case at the bottom seam with cat urine. Dear god..

B

Stopped *twice* on the way home to rescue some stuff from the side of the road today. The highlights:

• A P2/300 on a Seanix Kootenay SEA440LX board with an AGP 4MB S3 Trio64V, two Dawning 530MPC-S ISA cards (some kind of serial card for interfacing with medical gear(??)) & two 3.2GB drives running an incredibly broken install of Win98 ("loads" to a crashed Active Desktop.)
• A K62/550 on a QDI Legend with an ISA ESS Audiodrive & AGP Rage II, also running a working-ish Win98 on a 4.3GB drive. Has an incredibly obnoxious ad for a computer shop in Winnipeg(!) as its full-screen BIOS boot logo. Came with eGames MiniCar Racing installed which was fun for 20 seconds and then it crashed and brought the whole thing down with it. Its 250W PSU, on which is scrawled "somewhat noisy but works OK", is one of the quietest '90s PSUs I've ever heard. Both towers incredibly clean & nice shape considering they were probably sitting in someone's garage for however long.

• A couple of classic AT keyboards without "windows" keys (score!)
• An Adaptec APA-358 MiniSCSI EPP parallel-port SCSI interface (double score! If you're me and you like putting SCSI on odd systems.)
• A first-gen USB MicroTek scanner
• A sealed-in-package OEM(?) copy of Chessmaster 3000 (no box - the disks & manuals are just shrink wrapped together.)
• A few other odds and ends (mint Logitech USB mouse, brand-new-in-clamshell socket 478 cooler, bunch of CD-ROM drives, box of 3.5 HD floppies, etc.)

Not sure what to do with all this, the SCSI interface, keyboards & scanner I have some use for, the rest not really but I hate seeing things go to landfill. I might wipe the towers and set them up with FreeDOS + a bunch of shareware games and see if I can get a few bucks for them. If someone in the PNW wants either system for the cost of what I paid 😉 feel free to PM me on the VCF.

Edit:
(^^ I opened the shrink wrap, sue me 😜 )

[Another edit: still removing old broken Ph*tob^cket links in 2019...]