Some days, Thinkpads happen.

Today an X21 happened to me.

$15 CDN thrift find, lightly battlescarred but holding up. This is about as far as it gets, can't see it's HDD. Don't think it wants to boot from a USB stick unless I get specific about format. Think maybe I better find the instructions of how to do a 32MB floppy format on a stick. Gonna try the older linux sticks I've got though.

Though might be able to boot compact flash, not sure, will maybe try that tomorrow.

Edit: urgh, shouldn't post late at night mistook this for the "bought" thread.

BitWrangler wrote on 2026-01-18, 05:57:

Some days, Thinkpads happen. […]
Show full quote

Some days, Thinkpads happen.

Today an X21 happened to me.

$15 CDN thrift find, lightly battlescarred but holding up. This is about as far as it gets, can't see it's HDD. Don't think it wants to boot from a USB stick unless I get specific about format. Think maybe I better find the instructions of how to do a 32MB floppy format on a stick. Gonna try the older linux sticks I've got though.

Though might be able to boot compact flash, not sure, will maybe try that tomorrow.

Edit: urgh, shouldn't post late at night mistook this for the "bought" thread.

Hey, people have been posting in wrong places on the internet since it's inception. So, that is also a retro activity.

😁

Testing out throttling my Pentium MMX 233 build via SETMUL and CPUSPD. Gave me a 3D Bench score of 33.3, about the same as a mid-range 486.

Out of curiosity, I performed the same benchmark on my Pentium 4 3.4 GHz with cache disabled and got an identical score.

Shponglefan wrote on 2026-01-19, 01:46:

Testing out throttling my Pentium MMX 233 build via SETMUL and CPUSPD. Gave me a 3D Bench score of 33.3, about the same as a mid-range 486.

You should be able to go much lower than that. I got a score of 12.7 on a Pentium MMX 200 using SetMul L1D BPD VPD and with the motherboard's L2 cache disabled. As I recall, BPD and VPD will stack on top of disabling L1 and L2 caches, giving you even more slowdown.

BTW, the slowest I could get from that machine was a score of 8.7 when running the CPU at 100 MHz (2x50) and using the aforementioned settings. I might have been able to squeeze out a few more points by loosening memory timings, but I didn't bother with that.

Gave the Arctic Silver massacred R300 some love.. looks way better now..

Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2026-01-19, 06:35:

You should be able to go much lower than that. I got a score of 12.7 on a Pentium MMX 200 using SetMul L1D BPD VPD and with the motherboard's L2 cache disabled. As I recall, BPD and VPD will stack on top of disabling L1 and L2 caches, giving you even more slowdown.

Yes, I did test it with L1 and L2 cache disabled and got a score of 14.9. Haven't tried the other MMX settings on top of that yet.

I may also try it with throttling the processor speed itself, but haven't tried that yet either.

I just thought it was funny that disabling L1 and some of the MMX features yielded performance on par with my Pentium 4 with cache disabled. To me this just reinforces how good the Pentium 4 is as a retro machine when throttled.

And it's done! I've fully restored the machine now.

Original configuration:

Intel Pentium II 266MHz
64MB SDRAM
2.1GB HDD
ATI Rage Pro Turbo AGP 4MB
ESS ES1869 (integrated)
3Com EtherLink III Network Card with all possible connectors (modern RJ45, BNC, AUI)
1.44MB FDD
52x CD-ROM

Upgrades, reversible:

Intel Pentium III 550MHz
ATI Rage 128 Pro 16MB
256MB RAM
32GB Industrial SSD (+ SATA-IDE adapter)

It's a beauty.

A pair of Toshiba laptops, the 200CDS i modded with a TFT screen, the 430CDT i got working with barely any battery damage, It has a password lock on it though

Windows9566 wrote on 2026-01-20, 03:17:

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A pair of Toshiba laptops, the 200CDS i modded with a TFT screen, the 430CDT i got working with barely any battery damage, It has a password lock on it though

I had a working 200CDS until it didn't and still not working after some troubleshooting and help.
Modding the screen isn't hard but, IIRC, you need the correct video card mods (it's the same across but with different resistors and caps).

The 430, can you desolder the bios and flash a new one to get rid of the password or is it stored elsewhere?

IIRC, if you connect certain pins on LPT parallel port on your Toshiba laptop, it will erase the bios password. 😉

tehsiggi wrote on 2026-01-19, 10:34:

Gave the Arctic Silver massacred R300 some love.. looks way better now..

She looks beautiful now 😉. If you had to reball or reflow that GPU (pre-heater + hot air), how would you stop those little smd caps from flying? Only thing I can think of it’s to cut little strips from tin foil tape and place them over the caps? (I think kapton would just fly away with the caps when cut in thin strips).

zuldan wrote on 2026-01-20, 10:43:

tehsiggi wrote on 2026-01-19, 10:34:

Gave the Arctic Silver massacred R300 some love.. looks way better now..

She looks beautiful now 😉. If you had to reball or reflow that GPU (pre-heater + hot air), how would you stop those little smd caps from flying? Only thing I can think of it’s to cut little strips from tin foil tape and place them over the caps? (I think kapton would just fly away with the caps when cut in thin strips).

For hot-air: Lower airflow. but yes, covering them in small pieces of tape should suffice.

nali wrote on 2026-01-17, 18:45:

I think I've also never seen a P2/P3 Slot 1 with paste.
In fact I have no idea when paste became a regular thing, for years I stopped other's computers circa 2003 😀

Those usually have some sort of thermal pad, so it's not the same as just putting a heatsink on a CPU.

I've mostly been mucking about with my FM Towns computer that i acquired about a year ago, I went through a whole journey of acquiring parts , doing lots of repair work , especially on the Towns crt that got damaged in transit , and dealing with OS stuff.

To help fixing a modern laptop, I found a POST codes reader based on a Raspberry Pi Pico.
Very easy to build, and works perfectly.
I suppose it can be an alternative for old laptops too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C4Kq1r9A0k0
https://github.com/MrGreensWorkshop/RasPiPico … sPostCodeReader

Finally finished up the Amiga 2000 build by replacing the black rubber feet with cork ones that would've been there originally.

Ended up getting a German keyboard as a little nod to how popular it was there.

I put in a 40MHz 030 accelerator, 2MB chip RAM, 16MB fast RAM, Video Toaster, TBC-IV, and Personal Animation Recorder (which is what the Quantum drive is for).

Working on my Sony PCG-FXA32 laptop. It's not quite a fast Win98 laptop but also has DOS sound issues which is a fun challenge.

I've replaced the IDE drive with a CompactFlash which immediately changed it from a loud laptop to a quiet one!

AppleSauce wrote on Yesterday, 01:43:

I've mostly been mucking about with my FM Towns computer that i acquired about a year ago, I went through a whole journey of acq […]
Show full quote

I've mostly been mucking about with my FM Towns computer that i acquired about a year ago, I went through a whole journey of acquiring parts , doing lots of repair work , especially on the Towns crt that got damaged in transit , and dealing with OS stuff.

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These ase seriously cool computers, it is awesome that you got it fixed. Looks stunning!

I was testing some video cards today and I've been running into a really annoying problem when using Wintune97. Sometimes it lists the wrong Video Card as being in the system and I can't seem to find any way to make it list the right one. When this happens it will list some different card that I have had in the system at some point. Right now it keeps saying I have a Trident Blade3D even though I'm testing an SIS 6326 (all drivers installed and Windows lists it properly). I have tried deleting all references to the one it is detecting from the Windows registry, and I have even tried starting Wintune with the database file deleted\moved so it has to start a fresh database... it still finds the same wrong video card.

Anyone have any idea where it is finding the video card and what I can do to delete or reset this? I wouldn't even care that it gets it wrong once in a while if I could just correct it manually or have it detect it again... but I don't want benchmark runs to be tainted with incorrect specs that can't be fixed.

This is all under Windows 98SE.

Had a hell of a time trying to build a Athlon 64 bit system,.. you know when things just don't go right, you start swapping hardware all over the place desperately trying to just make it work. Video of the saga below

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Y-17mPxBGo