ncmark wrote:

I just got a SECOND rude awakening trying to get some more DDR RAM for this Athlon box. Forget about getting it in the brick and mortar stores - all they have now is DDR2 and DDR3. It also seems to be very hard to find online. 😢

That has been a problem for the past few years now but you can get lucky once and a while. If nothing in stores or online start hitting the yard sales and dumpsters for old p4 rigs. They almost always have ddr ram installed. Its the 1gb ddr 400 pc3200 sticks that are hell to get.

I found some places that are still selling PNY DDR memory - you can also still order it from Crucial. Which would be better?

just get them off ebay

I haven't seen a slot-loading drive in a long time. Do they still make them?

SquallStrife wrote:

I wonder if you could modify the Wii optical drive to work in a PC.. It's slot-loading AND reads GameCube disks.

I reckon a lot of the magic is in the hardware controller (much as it is with floppy drives).

Jorpho wrote:

I haven't seen a slot-loading drive in a long time. Do they still make them?

as 2011, they still made 'em.
http://www.geek.com/articles/chips/pc-manufac … drives-2011063/

slot-loading mechanism was newer than tray-loading which already began since early cd-rom drives.

iirc those slot-loading drives being advertised as: less 'scratcy risk' than tray-loaded one,
though i'm not sure if that claims were true or not.

BUT, I do remember of disc jamming experiences on slot-loading drive!

less scratchy? hah! I've seen all sorts of problems with slot loading drives, including lots of dust build up!

I'm hunting for some 128-pin SDRAM for my Quantum3d box. I've given thought to turning it into a small home server, just to see if I could.

I hope you're planning to run just win2k or NT4 as the server... anything using plan SDRAM is going to be sloooow

but like I said... look on ebay
I just got some elpida DDR and DDR2 SODIMM RAM off ebay for both my newer and older laptops.... all passed memtest86 with flying colors!