Been testing a batch of 124 sticks of ram.
8 ended up being dead, all 64MB Pc-100 but 1 32MB PC-100.
Found 1 x 512MB PC-133. Viking tech 😀

The 3 16MB Pc-100 wouldn't POST, but I don't think they are dead. Probably I need a compatible board.
I already had issues testing 16MB sticks in the past but can't find where I put them, if they are in my basement good luck to me remembering where.

Garage sales again. Saw this Trident CD sampler sitting out and grabbed it for some pocket change. Nothing really new here other than I didn't realize Trident bundled game demo CDs with their video cards. Usually their packaging was very basic with just driver software in my experience.

Nexxen wrote on 2025-11-11, 23:56:

Been testing a batch of 124 sticks of ram. 8 ended up being dead, all 64MB Pc-100 but 1 32MB PC-100. Found 1 x 512MB PC-133. Vik […]
Show full quote

Been testing a batch of 124 sticks of ram.
8 ended up being dead, all 64MB Pc-100 but 1 32MB PC-100.
Found 1 x 512MB PC-133. Viking tech 😀

The 3 16MB Pc-100 wouldn't POST, but I don't think they are dead. Probably I need a compatible board.
I already had issues testing 16MB sticks in the past but can't find where I put them, if they are in my basement good luck to me remembering where.

Congratulations for your patience.
Strange that only the 16 MB ones don't work, if I understand correctly, however today I tried some RAM on a VIA VPX, and those with a capacity greater than 64MB double-sided, installed on the PC do not work, they are working RAM, maybe you should try on another PC.
I don't know where you found so much RAM, in the past few days, I was looking for several RAM 72 PIN of small cut, 4 8 MB or possibly 16 MB, but I gave up, the asking price for a pair is excessive, so I gave up.

PC@LIVE wrote on 2025-11-12, 00:26:

Congratulations for your patience. Strange that only the 16 MB ones don't work, if I understand correctly, however today I tried […]
Show full quote

Nexxen wrote on 2025-11-11, 23:56:

Been testing a batch of 124 sticks of ram. 8 ended up being dead, all 64MB Pc-100 but 1 32MB PC-100. Found 1 x 512MB PC-133. Vik […]
Show full quote

Been testing a batch of 124 sticks of ram.
8 ended up being dead, all 64MB Pc-100 but 1 32MB PC-100.
Found 1 x 512MB PC-133. Viking tech 😀

The 3 16MB Pc-100 wouldn't POST, but I don't think they are dead. Probably I need a compatible board.
I already had issues testing 16MB sticks in the past but can't find where I put them, if they are in my basement good luck to me remembering where.

Congratulations for your patience.
Strange that only the 16 MB ones don't work, if I understand correctly, however today I tried some RAM on a VIA VPX, and those with a capacity greater than 64MB double-sided, installed on the PC do not work, they are working RAM, maybe you should try on another PC.
I don't know where you found so much RAM, in the past few days, I was looking for several RAM 72 PIN of small cut, 4 8 MB or possibly 16 MB, but I gave up, the asking price for a pair is excessive, so I gave up.

Thanks, it was boring as hell. Memtest on a floppy and a lot of patience. On a floppy because it's faster than CD and works great anyway.
It took a lot of time but after a while I started to skip 100% pass and settle at 50 or less %.

The non working sticks will get the heatgun treatment, just for fun though.

Yes, I'll probably need less than a P-III to test the 16MB. Early Pentium or 486.

Guess what, the guy basically gave them away to me (rifilati alla "altrimenti non prendi il resto...").

One last stick isn't detected at all, see pic. Guess raiding mobos made this Viking brand tilt the drakkar.
It has both sides like in the pic, I guessed 32 but could be 64. I didn't check.

that is an EDO dimm, not SDR. you will want to test that in an first gen power pc mac, or some Pentium pro era boards. I think some/most socket 7 boards could use EDO dimms, but not all.

Nexxen wrote on 2025-11-12, 00:49:

Thanks, it was boring as hell. Memtest on a floppy and a lot of patience. On a floppy because it's faster than CD and works grea […]
Show full quote

PC@LIVE wrote on 2025-11-12, 00:26:

Congratulations for your patience. Strange that only the 16 MB ones don't work, if I understand correctly, however today I tried […]
Show full quote

Nexxen wrote on 2025-11-11, 23:56:

Been testing a batch of 124 sticks of ram. 8 ended up being dead, all 64MB Pc-100 but 1 32MB PC-100. Found 1 x 512MB PC-133. Vik […]
Show full quote

Been testing a batch of 124 sticks of ram.
8 ended up being dead, all 64MB Pc-100 but 1 32MB PC-100.
Found 1 x 512MB PC-133. Viking tech 😀

The 3 16MB Pc-100 wouldn't POST, but I don't think they are dead. Probably I need a compatible board.
I already had issues testing 16MB sticks in the past but can't find where I put them, if they are in my basement good luck to me remembering where.

Congratulations for your patience.
Strange that only the 16 MB ones don't work, if I understand correctly, however today I tried some RAM on a VIA VPX, and those with a capacity greater than 64MB double-sided, installed on the PC do not work, they are working RAM, maybe you should try on another PC.
I don't know where you found so much RAM, in the past few days, I was looking for several RAM 72 PIN of small cut, 4 8 MB or possibly 16 MB, but I gave up, the asking price for a pair is excessive, so I gave up.

Thanks, it was boring as hell. Memtest on a floppy and a lot of patience. On a floppy because it's faster than CD and works great anyway.
It took a lot of time but after a while I started to skip 100% pass and settle at 50 or less %.

The non working sticks will get the heatgun treatment, just for fun though.

Yes, I'll probably need less than a P-III to test the 16MB. Early Pentium or 486.

Guess what, the guy basically gave them away to me (rifilati alla "altrimenti non prendi il resto...").

One last stick isn't detected at all, see pic. Guess raiding mobos made this Viking brand tilt the drakkar.
It has both sides like in the pic, I guessed 32 but could be 64. I didn't check.

Well in fact the 16 MB ones I tried on a BX and a TX, and they work, clearly they are not good for the newer Windows systems of the 98, because already with 32 it would be slow.
Well anyway before the thermal 🔫 gun, you could take a look at it, if they are big enough that is 128 MB or more, they could have a broken track or something like that, in case you recover some.
I tried the SDRAM on a VIA VPX S.7, and luckily 🍀 I had a 64 MB EDO SDRAM, otherwise I would have been left with only 32 MB, probably also the one in the photo, on an S.7 or a BX (or similar) it works.

luckybob wrote on 2025-11-12, 01:47:

that is an EDO dimm, not SDR. you will want to test that in an first gen power pc mac, or some Pentium pro era boards. I think some/most socket 7 boards could use EDO dimms, but not all.

This is going to be done, thanks for the tip!

Edit: notches aren't for socket 8 EDO RAM, but it worked with an old P-166.
64MB and PC-66 100% memtest pass EDO RAM.
Guess it wouldn't play nice with a P-III down to 66 FSB.

Oh boy. I think I fixed a minor but nagging irritation that has been bugging me for a while. For some reason I wasn't able to get this to work in the past, but it is working now.

If you view a sold ebay listing and want to look at the photos, it has that stupid "SOLD" banner in the corner but also has a huge invisible box that covers about a third of the image which prevents you from mousing over (zooming\scrolling) that whole area.

If you use uBlock Origin, go into the settings, go to My Filters and paste this in as a new rule (the top line is just there to keep it organized):

1! Nov 12, 2025 https://www.ebay.com
2www.ebay.com##.x-photos-cvip-wrapper

Now that banner and the big invisible box are gone. Yay!

It may cause issues elsewhere but I haven't seen any problems yet. Presumably, if they add any other big banners to listings (advertising a sale or something) in the future, this will probably block those too.

Also, anyone who looks at listings for retro parts on ebay knows that this does count as a retro activity. I have been able to do so much awesome research from sold ebay listings over the years. 😁

RetroBus wrote on 2025-11-11, 00:40:

What an Awesome Find! thats great! […]
Show full quote

vintageonthemoon wrote on 2025-11-10, 21:52:

i recently found next to my house an old pc in a pile of junk probably someone is doing some serious house cleaning, complete packed with motherboard, cards, hdd, floppy drive and CD-ROM. the board is slot 1 MSI MS 6117 ver 1.1 with PII 300mhz, 64mb of ram, pci graphics card ATI 3D Rage II + dvd with 4mb, a generic ISA sound card (ad1816) and kingston Ethernet ISA card and 230w power supply that works fine and after cleaning all the dust, all the capacitors in the power supply looks fine.

What an Awesome Find! thats great!

I was lucky enough to be given a mystery box from a friend his workplace was getting rid of, nothing as good as a slot 1 Im afraid, but was pretty good early 2000's Athlon XP system, and like you couldn't believe how clean it was inside!
Video Below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYxRqXf0VDk

Thanks, i saw you're videos, i really enjoy PC retro enthusiasts like LGR, Phil's Computer lab, Retro recall and many others. it's nice that people are getting into pc retro stuff, i actually lerned alot from these guys on retro builds. i started getting intro retro pc's since 2022, and boy it's a rabbit hole of a hobby, i already have few builds with win 98 installed.

anyway im already planning to do some upgrades to that pc (msi ms6117 ver 1.1) that i found, currently it's using 30gb IDE hard drive, due to the one that came with the pc died, replacing the 2 sticks of ram 32mg (64mb) to 2 sticks 128mb pc-100 (256mb), changing the cpu from 300mhz to 333mhz the maximum this board supports, (originally wanted PII 400mhz, but the board's fsb is limited 66mhz, and PII 350mhz onwards fsb is 100mhz, so even with flashing to the lastest bios which i did, did not fix fsb limitations), replacing ati 3d rage+dvd pci card with voodoo 3000 agp (yes i have one, flashed it, replaced the crappy heatsink with a better one with fan, add heatsink on the little chips), replacing the generic sound card for ESS ES1868F ISA card for sound, adding Belkin USB 2.0 pci card for file transfer (USB 1.1 is very slow), i heared via usb 2.0 pci cards are a hit or miss with non-via motherboards during that period, i already using 1 usb 2.0 via pci card that i own on another slot 1 build with VIA apollo pro 133 chipset (im avoiding the chinese clones since there's known for being trash), Ultra66 ATA IDE PCI Controller to improve performance and the bypass the storage limitations hopfully works around 80gb HDD storage.

here's photo of the build open case before i did serious cleanning/changes

Finished a little while ago to make two 32 MB CISCO CF bootable, maybe I used a DOS version a little too recent (5.0), but I took up about 2 MB, later I added Phil's 386BENCH, so these memories will go on PC 286-386, at most on some 486, although I currently have them on a ZIDA 5SVA-E (S.7) with Cyrix M II-300 at 233 MHz, in this PC I had a 4 GB disk 🇬🇧 Fujitsu with Windows 98SE, but something must have been ruined, I can't start Windows anymore, maybe I should reinstall but I wouldn't want to lose the stored files, images and card drivers.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2025-11-11, 05:08:

Well, this is a weird one. […]
Show full quote

Well, this is a weird one.

The attachment 20251111_000108.jpg is no longer available

The attachment 20251111_000114.jpg is no longer available

This PNY FX 5200 card clearly has all of the RAM locations populated, and is clearly marked as "128MB" on the sticker, yet the BIOS screen at startup says it has 64MB, and various programs in Windows agree. With 8 8Mx16bit chips it should also have a 128bit bus, but programs say that it is 64bit.

What's the deal here? I can't find any physical damage on it. It's actually in very good condition.

I've tested a lot of cards but this is an unusual issue to find, especially on a card with no visible damage. In testing the card works perfectly, other than performing like a 64bit card.

Just a follow up to this. If anyone has this exact FX 5200 design with 8 RAM chips (128MB, 128bit), can you please upload some high resolution pictures of it so I can try to spot any differences?

I just looked through my collection and was surprised that I don't have any other 128bit FX 5200 cards at all. I have a Quadro FX500 with a similar layout but it is different enough on the back that I don't really learn anything from comparing them. The biggest difference I have noticed between FX 5200-based cards I have is that the two rows of 4 tiny smd caps near the upper left corner on the back are different on some. Some have the caps in the lower row. Some are in the upper row. The FX500 has them in the lower row, where as my 5200 with half the RAM missing has them in upper row. But then, I have another 64bit card that has them in the lower row as well. Definitely need to see an identical card to be sure!

Been trying to repair some Cirrus Logic VLB cards to no success. One of them actually now gets detected by the BIOS and POSTs, and the monitor gets some kind of signal (the No Signal error disappears) but the screen remains blank. I'm stumped as to what to check next.. The capacitors on the card all look pretty badly worn, maybe a full recap might be in order..

vintageonthemoon wrote on 2025-11-12, 21:04:

Thanks, i saw you're videos, i really enjoy PC retro enthusiasts like LGR, Phil's Computer lab, Retro recall and many others. it […]
Show full quote

RetroBus wrote on 2025-11-11, 00:40:

What an Awesome Find! thats great! […]
Show full quote

vintageonthemoon wrote on 2025-11-10, 21:52:

i recently found next to my house an old pc in a pile of junk probably someone is doing some serious house cleaning, complete packed with motherboard, cards, hdd, floppy drive and CD-ROM. the board is slot 1 MSI MS 6117 ver 1.1 with PII 300mhz, 64mb of ram, pci graphics card ATI 3D Rage II + dvd with 4mb, a generic ISA sound card (ad1816) and kingston Ethernet ISA card and 230w power supply that works fine and after cleaning all the dust, all the capacitors in the power supply looks fine.

What an Awesome Find! thats great!

I was lucky enough to be given a mystery box from a friend his workplace was getting rid of, nothing as good as a slot 1 Im afraid, but was pretty good early 2000's Athlon XP system, and like you couldn't believe how clean it was inside!
Video Below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYxRqXf0VDk

Thanks, i saw you're videos, i really enjoy PC retro enthusiasts like LGR, Phil's Computer lab, Retro recall and many others. it's nice that people are getting into pc retro stuff, i actually lerned alot from these guys on retro builds. i started getting intro retro pc's since 2022, and boy it's a rabbit hole of a hobby, i already have few builds with win 98 installed.

anyway im already planning to do some upgrades to that pc (msi ms6117 ver 1.1) that i found, currently it's using 30gb IDE hard drive, due to the one that came with the pc died, replacing the 2 sticks of ram 32mg (64mb) to 2 sticks 128mb pc-100 (256mb), changing the cpu from 300mhz to 333mhz the maximum this board supports, (originally wanted PII 400mhz, but the board's fsb is limited 66mhz, and PII 350mhz onwards fsb is 100mhz, so even with flashing to the lastest bios which i did, did not fix fsb limitations), replacing ati 3d rage+dvd pci card with voodoo 3000 agp (yes i have one, flashed it, replaced the crappy heatsink with a better one with fan, add heatsink on the little chips), replacing the generic sound card for ESS ES1868F ISA card for sound, adding Belkin USB 2.0 pci card for file transfer (USB 1.1 is very slow), i heared via usb 2.0 pci cards are a hit or miss with non-via motherboards during that period, i already using 1 usb 2.0 via pci card that i own on another slot 1 build with VIA apollo pro 133 chipset (im avoiding the chinese clones since there's known for being trash), Ultra66 ATA IDE PCI Controller to improve performance and the bypass the storage limitations hopfully works around 80gb HDD storage.

here's photo of the build open case before i did serious cleanning/changes

Thankyou! That looks great! Love teh slot 1 systems thay are my Fav era of computing! ATI rage cards seem to be everywhere! But the Voodoo 3 that is legendary! I also have a P2 board that is limited to 66MHz FSB just like yours, its the 440LX chicpset, the 440BX is the one that goes to 100

A mate of mine recently donated a Intellimouse Optical and I reviewed on the channel, man I loved this mouse so much back in the day

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XND4K5EqRqs

RetroBus wrote on 2025-11-15, 06:16:

A mate of mine recently donated a Intellimouse Optical and I reviewed on the channel, man I loved this mouse so much back in the day

Nice review! It never occurred to me that the Intellimice were the first mass-market mice with 5 buttons. However, with how seamless the integration with Windows has been - it would have had to have been a Microsoft product. 😁 The first 5-button mouse I used was the Logitech MX310, which came out at least 2 years later.

I have a nice-looking black Microsoft mouse, but it is only the Wheel Mouse Optical V1.1A. It does not have the side buttons, therefore using it would hurt my productivity, as I'm addicted to back-forward, and also while gaming the extra buttons come in very handy.

RetroBus wrote on 2025-11-15, 06:15:

vintageonthemoon wrote on 2025-11-12, 21:04:

Thanks, i saw you're videos, i really enjoy PC retro enthusiasts like LGR, Phil's Computer lab, Retro recall and many others. it […]
Show full quote

RetroBus wrote on 2025-11-11, 00:40:

What an Awesome Find! thats great! […]
Show full quote

What an Awesome Find! thats great!

I was lucky enough to be given a mystery box from a friend his workplace was getting rid of, nothing as good as a slot 1 Im afraid, but was pretty good early 2000's Athlon XP system, and like you couldn't believe how clean it was inside!
Video Below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FYxRqXf0VDk

Thanks, i saw you're videos, i really enjoy PC retro enthusiasts like LGR, Phil's Computer lab, Retro recall and many others. it's nice that people are getting into pc retro stuff, i actually lerned alot from these guys on retro builds. i started getting intro retro pc's since 2022, and boy it's a rabbit hole of a hobby, i already have few builds with win 98 installed.

anyway im already planning to do some upgrades to that pc (msi ms6117 ver 1.1) that i found, currently it's using 30gb IDE hard drive, due to the one that came with the pc died, replacing the 2 sticks of ram 32mg (64mb) to 2 sticks 128mb pc-100 (256mb), changing the cpu from 300mhz to 333mhz the maximum this board supports, (originally wanted PII 400mhz, but the board's fsb is limited 66mhz, and PII 350mhz onwards fsb is 100mhz, so even with flashing to the lastest bios which i did, did not fix fsb limitations), replacing ati 3d rage+dvd pci card with voodoo 3000 agp (yes i have one, flashed it, replaced the crappy heatsink with a better one with fan, add heatsink on the little chips), replacing the generic sound card for ESS ES1868F ISA card for sound, adding Belkin USB 2.0 pci card for file transfer (USB 1.1 is very slow), i heared via usb 2.0 pci cards are a hit or miss with non-via motherboards during that period, i already using 1 usb 2.0 via pci card that i own on another slot 1 build with VIA apollo pro 133 chipset (im avoiding the chinese clones since there's known for being trash), Ultra66 ATA IDE PCI Controller to improve performance and the bypass the storage limitations hopfully works around 80gb HDD storage.

here's photo of the build open case before i did serious cleanning/changes

Thankyou! That looks great! Love teh slot 1 systems thay are my Fav era of computing! ATI rage cards seem to be everywhere! But the Voodoo 3 that is legendary! I also have a P2 board that is limited to 66MHz FSB just like yours, its the 440LX chicpset, the 440BX is the one that goes to 100

i agree there is something special about slot 1 motherboards and i do have a slot 1 board with 440BX chipset but it's not working well at the moment, yeah but for now im done hunting slot 1 motherboards (unless i find one locally), i already have 3 of them, the MSI MS-6117 (VER 1.1), MSI MS 6199VA (VER: 2) and ECS P6BXT-A+ (REV: 1.3) that i got/found locally. Getting slot 1 motherboards them on ebay is a waste of time, getting crazy expensive and comes with a risk of getting damage on arrival, it happened to me 3 times with socket 775 (it got crack damages on the sides broke-off some key traces), socket 478 (just fixed it recently, one of the mosfet chips broke off from the board + bad caps) socket 370 motherboards (fixed kind-of, the plastic grip that holds the cpu heatsink hooks broke off, i hate socket 370 cpu design so much, very easily breaks) that i ordered while back on ebay.

MS6199VA (VER: 2) is my favorite slot 1 board that i own/worked on so far, got it as part of a whole pc (paid much less then what the guy who sold me the computer originally wanted) with PIII 650mhz and 3 stickes of ram in total of 320mb of pc-100 ram, the board a was completely dead because of bad capacitors. (MSI was the biggest victim of the capacitor plague during the late 90's) and ISA slots themselves were missing, that's where i find out its an OEM board by Compaq, after recapping it (it was very bad around the cpu, the ram and between the PCI slots), it came back to life working normally, then re-soldered the missing ISA slots (it took me 2 HOURS and lots of patience!) and when i put an ISA card in there they got picked up right away. add missing jumper pins to J3 section of the board to disable bios write protection ( i didn't know about this until i read about it on the retro-web, the manual doesn't mention this at all) so i can flash the bios, since the bios it originally came with is limited to 10gb of storage, but after flashing it successfully to 128gb storage support with the OEM version which is the limit the motherboard supports, im aware it has the VIA apollo pro 133 chipset, they are notorious for being super picky when it comes to certain cards and slower then intel 440BX, but it works very well for me, after installing VIA 1-4 drivers it's stable (so far).

the ECS P6BXT-A+ (REV: 1.3) motherboard got it to finally work after sitting in storage for few months and it has the latest bios on it so it saved me the work of flashing it. it's also Compaq OEM, got it from a garage sale of old computer parts, the board is in pretty good condition, the buttom left of the board there's winbond chip had some slight corrosion, but able to remove as much as possible using baking soda and white vinegar, let it sit for a while then used fiber glass pen to remove the corrosion and rust, then clean with 99% isopropyl alcohol and thankfully the chip was not damaged, the caps seems alright not bulging or leaking, that board came out right before the capacitor plague hit. but i might recap in the future, the only thing that died was the 1 of 3 the sticks of ram when booting, maybe that's why nothing was working also the speaker was not attached so i didn't get any beeps. for now this might be my replacemt for Slot 1 PIII build it has intel 440BX chipset, MS6199VA is didn't give me much issues, but dealing VIA chipsets can be a serious pain at times.

TEAC FD-55BR 360K 5.25" floppy drive returned back to live 😀
Stuck with the repair for so long time, even draw a motor board schematic to identify an issue. Leave it here, may be this will help somebody in the future (as soon I am not a specialist this drawings may contain errors).
When the motor was completely removed from the board it was possible to check the Index IR LED and it was dead. Then swapped in a IR LED from a donor 1.2MB drive board. Both sensors work now; drive formats and writes perfectly.

Susanin79 wrote on Yesterday, 11:34:

TEAC FD-55BR 360K 5.25" floppy drive returned back to live 😀
Stuck with the repair for so long time, even draw a motor board schematic to identify an issue. Leave it here, may be this will help somebody in the future (as soon I am not a specialist this drawings may contain errors).
When the motor was completely removed from the board it was possible to check the Index IR LED and it was dead. Then swapped in a IR LED from a donor 1.2MB drive board. Both sensors work now; drive formats and writes perfectly.

Awesome work. 😀

Just cleaned (also) a TEAC, but a 3,5" FD-235HF. Great drives.

Picked up a Pentium MMX from market place for a great price! But it was listed as untested and had quite a roadtrip to go and get it!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVo3nd2b2jQ

RetroBus wrote on Yesterday, 21:30:

Picked up a Pentium MMX from market place for a great price! But it was listed as untested and had quite a roadtrip to go and get it!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XVo3nd2b2jQ

Sweet!

I like that you documented the whole journey as opposed to just starting from having it already.

As a casual viewer, I feel like it'd be easy to not realize that retro computing is not just having the computers but the effort and anxieties involved in acquiring them hehe.