Tetrium wrote on 2022-02-03, 13:40:

It does make replacing the fan more difficult though, I've experimented with snipping out the old fan and adding a small CPU HSF fan on top of it using that strong black tape which you can tape basically anything down with 😜

It really depends on the kind of cooler you have. My favorite coolers for the Pentium 2 have metal hooks on a hinge that you can flip to secure or release. They are strong, durable, and the convenient hinge makes attaching them between processors for testing a breeze.

The worst heatsinks by far are those stupid friction fit plastic posts that fit into the Pentium 3 cartridges which are almost impossible to remove without breaking. In one instance I ended up damaging the SMD capacitors while trying to lever the heatsink off when the plastic posts wouldn't come out. In the end I was able to cut the posts with a pair of edge cutters and later repaired the damage to the processor itself.

This problem with cutting these plastic posts is that it blocks the holes which are necessary to mount a heatsink to the processor. To remove bits of posts which remain, I remove the PCB from the housing and push them out with a screwdriver. Sometimes this will cause the plastic housing to crack on the inside due to the impact of the tip on the frame, but this is often minor damage, is only visible from the inside, and is worth the trouble as the processor is otherwise useless without the mounting holes being clear of debris.

During the period where PII stuff wasn't worth enough to sell, I despaired of finding coolers, so a couple of CPU got decased, and I drilled and tapped M3 or M4 (forgot) holes into socket 370 sinks and screwed them on with longish bolts through the holes in the PCB. Suddenly my crappy 266 could do 333 on 83x4 🤣

Well, recently I was putting out the trash and when I was about to walk home, I saw something in the corner of my eye. Something rectangular and black, I could barely see it.
Turned out to be a trashed laptop. The product key was unreadable, battery was taken out and the hinges for the screen were clearly broken, so this was really trash. But I took it home regardless expecting it to have been salvaged clean of parts.
Turned out everything was still in there including a 320GB SATA 2.5in drive 😀
Haven't tested it yet. It's on my todo pile right now. I don't plan on using the rest of the laptop. Once I've scraped it for the remaining parts it's going back into the trash.

While I was tearing apart the Winbook, finished scrapping this HP AIO I took a $20 gamble on. I3-2120, 4gb ddr3 and a 1tb hitachi drive. Unfortunately with a brand new PSU it is dead as a door nail. Looks like it was in a flood, there is a water line an inch up.

$20 for a 1tb Hitachi with 1k power on hours? Yes please.

Repo Man11 wrote on 2022-01-19, 04:52:

But my score this evening was a good one: an Asus Z87-K motherboard with 8 gigs of HyperX DDR3, an i5 4670K, an R9 280X, and a Thermaltake case. With a test install of Windows 10, so far everything is working well.
Edit: sadly, the video card locked up just barely into a run of 3D Mark. I pulled it out and cleaned it, lubed the fans, and reapplied thermal paste, but now I get no display unless I use the onboard video. Ah well, easy come, easy go. I didn't expect it (the video card) to work at all as the Thermaltake case has a handle on the top, and the video card was stuck in the gap between the handle and the case when I picked this stuff up.

This mainboard is in my current main computer. But I have the i7 4770K.

Disruptor wrote on 2022-02-05, 21:03:

Repo Man11 wrote on 2022-01-19, 04:52:

But my score this evening was a good one: an Asus Z87-K motherboard with 8 gigs of HyperX DDR3, an i5 4670K, an R9 280X, and a Thermaltake case. With a test install of Windows 10, so far everything is working well.
Edit: sadly, the video card locked up just barely into a run of 3D Mark. I pulled it out and cleaned it, lubed the fans, and reapplied thermal paste, but now I get no display unless I use the onboard video. Ah well, easy come, easy go. I didn't expect it (the video card) to work at all as the Thermaltake case has a handle on the top, and the video card was stuck in the gap between the handle and the case when I picked this stuff up.

This mainboard is in my current main computer. But I have the i7 4770K.

Yeah, I could see using this as a primary computer even as old as it is if it were upgraded with more DDR3, a faster CPU, and maybe even an M.2 drive in the second PCIe X16 slot. With a pretty basic SSD, it boots up remarkably fast as is.

Tetrium wrote on 2022-02-05, 19:45:

Well, recently I was putting out the trash and when I was about to walk home, I saw something in the corner of my eye. Something […]
Show full quote

Well, recently I was putting out the trash and when I was about to walk home, I saw something in the corner of my eye. Something rectangular and black, I could barely see it.
Turned out to be a trashed laptop. The product key was unreadable, battery was taken out and the hinges for the screen were clearly broken, so this was really trash. But I took it home regardless expecting it to have been salvaged clean of parts.
Turned out everything was still in there including a 320GB SATA 2.5in drive 😀
Haven't tested it yet. It's on my todo pile right now. I don't plan on using the rest of the laptop. Once I've scraped it for the remaining parts it's going back into the trash.

Could stick that RetroNAS distro on there to see how it does for that.

edir: Dis... if you ain't seen it popping up in active/new RetroNAS - open source server software for your retro machines

BitWrangler wrote on 2022-02-06, 02:47:

Tetrium wrote on 2022-02-05, 19:45:

Well, recently I was putting out the trash and when I was about to walk home, I saw something in the corner of my eye. Something […]
Show full quote

Well, recently I was putting out the trash and when I was about to walk home, I saw something in the corner of my eye. Something rectangular and black, I could barely see it.
Turned out to be a trashed laptop. The product key was unreadable, battery was taken out and the hinges for the screen were clearly broken, so this was really trash. But I took it home regardless expecting it to have been salvaged clean of parts.
Turned out everything was still in there including a 320GB SATA 2.5in drive 😀
Haven't tested it yet. It's on my todo pile right now. I don't plan on using the rest of the laptop. Once I've scraped it for the remaining parts it's going back into the trash.

Could stick that RetroNAS distro on there to see how it does for that.

edir: Dis... if you ain't seen it popping up in active/new RetroNAS - open source server software for your retro machines

I very much doubt the laptop is in working condition.
I don't even have the charger nor does it have a battery.

I forget that normal people don't just have half a dozen spare laptop PSUs hanging around 🤣

a part of past months salvage...

BitWrangler wrote on 2022-02-06, 14:13:

I forget that normal people don't just have half a dozen spare laptop PSUs hanging around 🤣

Tbf I never even owned a laptop until fairly recently when I received a handsmedown for free 😜
That and I was always into actually building PCs, from parts to whole system and laptops don't really give me that same fix for obvious reasons 😜
And as I have tons of parts already, I needed to make choices what to focus on and for me this was standard PC hardware.

weedeewee wrote on 2022-02-06, 16:12:

a part of past months salvage...

Wait, WHAAAAAAT???

BitWrangler wrote on 2022-01-26, 15:40:

Modems, inspect any real old ones carefully, (Probably slower than 28k) might have an x86 embedded CPU

I had no idea - were they using an NEC V30 or something? Do you know of an example off the top of your head?

Boom! 1988 is here and I've always had a weakness for amber monitors--

Has a text mode 747 simulator installed on the drive that seems eerily familiar.

LightStruk wrote on 2022-02-07, 18:34:

BitWrangler wrote on 2022-01-26, 15:40:

Modems, inspect any real old ones carefully, (Probably slower than 28k) might have an x86 embedded CPU

I had no idea - were they using an NEC V30 or something? Do you know of an example off the top of your head?

More likely the less "pluggable straight into a PC motherboard" types like V40,50 etc.. but known models with x86 are hard to find, most famous is the Intel 14.4 EX an external model, then there was an IBM v32bis external that had an 80188. Most stuff I find with some microprocessor on it's an atmel or something. Some of the x86 embedded part numbers are hard to recognize and AMD, Harris, NEC etc had their own formats.

Anyhow, I keep looking, would be nice to find one you can make a tiny XT clone with or something.

appiah4 wrote on 2022-02-07, 18:28:

weedeewee wrote on 2022-02-06, 16:12:

a part of past months salvage...

Wait, WHAAAAAAT???

Yes, exactly.
also, I got six mainboards, two of them listed on the ultimateretro page, a c64, a c128, 3 RLL/MFM harddrives, 2 5"1/4 1.2MB fdds, 2 3"1/2 fdds, and an assortment of 30/72 pin simms and dimms.
oh yeah and a terminal keyboard for which I can't find any information except for one guy who did a mod on the keyboard to connect it to a pc.
Now I still need the time & drive to test/try them all.
and I almost forgot about the ibm ps1, missing the front plate

Not sure if everything available I've laid eyes on in the flesh in the last 2 years is half that amount, and most of that was yard sale and thrift stuff I bought, leaving a few winmodems and NICs behind... last freebie find was that C2 quad some months back. So yah, that's some going in a month.

Though this year I wanna nail the timing of "Hippy Christmas" in the neighboring college town... https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?te … ppy%20Christmas ... previous years I only got over there a week or two late when all that was left was broken flatpack furniture that had been rained on to pulp.

The worst thing is that the salvaged part is only a small part of everything that was thrown away that I've laid eyes on. 😐

ODwilly wrote on 2022-02-05, 20:21:

While I was tearing apart the Winbook, finished scrapping this HP AIO I took a $20 gamble on. I3-2120, 4gb ddr3 and a 1tb hitachi drive. Unfortunately with a brand new PSU it is dead as a door nail. Looks like it was in a flood, there is a water line an inch up.

$20 for a 1tb Hitachi with 1k power on hours? Yes please.

I'm always amazed by how some electronics can survive being out in the elements, sure many won't but often there is something still working

maybe cpu and ram still works?

2 400MHz sun cpus with vrm and 4 256MB memory modules, nic and vga. I would've taken the whole machine but it was almost entirely gutted and it was the size of a small cabinet on wheels.
4 3com 3c905cx nics
1 tplink Gigabit nic, realtek chipset
1 hp nvidia quadro 285
1 nvidia fx5500
1 ati rage xl
1 SB0670 (I thought it also had a gameport but this one has a 28pin connector labelled AD_LINK. At least I got the front panel cable with this one 😀)
1 SupremeFX II
assortment of sdr,ddr2, ddr3 and ddr3 ecc reg memory modules
3x PIII-866
1 Athlon 1800
1 i7 920
1 E5520
1 i7-2600k
and
1 IBM 6x86MX PR300

I think I might have a slight hoarding twitch when it comes to computer parts 😁