Living wrote on 2026-03-29, 11:21:

After almost 27 years i finally have my own Athlon Slot A, bought from a collector that happen to encounter in FB Marketplace. ( […]
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After almost 27 years i finally have my own Athlon Slot A, bought from a collector that happen to encounter in FB Marketplace. (when i found it i was like Homer when he learns about the free trampoline in the newspaper)

* The motherboard its an Asus K7m rev 1.04 with the A5 rev chipset (Super Bypass enabled via the last Beta bios). I think this is the famous case of the motherboards that came in blank boxes due to fear of Intel. The quality is superb, all the capacitors are Rubycon and not a single one is bulged (this was prior to the capacitor plague)

.........

i did a quick test and it destroys my k6-2+ @ 600Mhz even at 500Mhz by 50% in most of the games (back in the day i jumped from a k6-2 500Mhz directly to a Thunderbird 900Mhz, the difference was massive but i thought in that time that it was mostly due to raw clock speed advantage)

Nice find , enjoy it.

Must have been some kind of OEM board (like the ones found in HP Pavilion series)
I see it doesnt't have sound , but does have the AMR slot and all 3 ram slots.

What bios did it came with ?

giantenemycat wrote on 2026-03-31, 15:50:

I was also able to get this going. As I suspected, taking out the USB card and PC speaker allowed it to boot up just fine. Everything works, including HDD and CD-ROM. 40MB RAM. Windows ME installed, but it's pretty bare. What interests me is it's slow as all hell, now this reminds me of the ME experience I had on my first family PC.

I honestly haven't seen Windows Me running on a PC since I worked at a repair shop in the early 2000s. I will have to install it sometime to remind myself of what it was like. I remember, at the time, actually liking setting up WinMe systems because they had so many more drivers pre-installed compared to Windows 98\SE. We had nifty "shop CDs" (complete with custom interface and disc labels, 🤣) that contained as many of the drivers, runtimes and other things that we needed to set up most computers... but Me systems tended to not need much at all to work.

It's funny how different things were then. Now, the idea of just using whatever old drivers the OS came with (because Windows update didn't automatically update drivers like in later versions) seems weird. Back then, it was like "Hey, these drivers actually work and don't cause a BSOD, potentially requiring an OS reinstall! Use them and then DON'T TOUCH ANYTHING!"

... also, 40MB on WinME sounds excruciating! My Gateway with Win98 (first edition) and a PII 400 came with 64MB in early 1999. My brother was running a Pentium 200 MMX with 96MB of EDO back then too. Can't imagine having so little to run Me.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2026-03-31, 18:25:

I honestly haven't seen Windows Me running on a PC since I worked at a repair shop in the early 2000s. I will have to install it […]
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giantenemycat wrote on 2026-03-31, 15:50:

I was also able to get this going. As I suspected, taking out the USB card and PC speaker allowed it to boot up just fine. Everything works, including HDD and CD-ROM. 40MB RAM. Windows ME installed, but it's pretty bare. What interests me is it's slow as all hell, now this reminds me of the ME experience I had on my first family PC.

I honestly haven't seen Windows Me running on a PC since I worked at a repair shop in the early 2000s. I will have to install it sometime to remind myself of what it was like. I remember, at the time, actually liking setting up WinMe systems because they had so many more drivers pre-installed compared to Windows 98\SE. We had nifty "shop CDs" (complete with custom interface and disc labels, 🤣) that contained as many of the drivers, runtimes and other things that we needed to set up most computers... but Me systems tended to not need much at all to work.

It's funny how different things were then. Now, the idea of just using whatever old drivers the OS came with (because Windows update didn't automatically update drivers like in later versions) seems weird. Back then, it was like "Hey, these drivers actually work and don't cause a BSOD, potentially requiring an OS reinstall! Use them and then DON'T TOUCH ANYTHING!"

... also, 40MB on WinME sounds excruciating! My Gateway with Win98 (first edition) and a PII 400 came with 64MB in early 1999. My brother was running a Pentium 200 MMX with 96MB of EDO back then too. Can't imagine having so little to run Me.

IIRC, WinME was also a lot better at automagically solving IRQ conflicts.

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2026-03-31, 18:25:

I honestly haven't seen Windows Me running on a PC since I worked at a repair shop in the early 2000s. I will have to install it […]
Show full quote

giantenemycat wrote on 2026-03-31, 15:50:

I was also able to get this going. As I suspected, taking out the USB card and PC speaker allowed it to boot up just fine. Everything works, including HDD and CD-ROM. 40MB RAM. Windows ME installed, but it's pretty bare. What interests me is it's slow as all hell, now this reminds me of the ME experience I had on my first family PC.

I honestly haven't seen Windows Me running on a PC since I worked at a repair shop in the early 2000s. I will have to install it sometime to remind myself of what it was like. I remember, at the time, actually liking setting up WinMe systems because they had so many more drivers pre-installed compared to Windows 98\SE. We had nifty "shop CDs" (complete with custom interface and disc labels, 🤣) that contained as many of the drivers, runtimes and other things that we needed to set up most computers... but Me systems tended to not need much at all to work.

It's funny how different things were then. Now, the idea of just using whatever old drivers the OS came with (because Windows update didn't automatically update drivers like in later versions) seems weird. Back then, it was like "Hey, these drivers actually work and don't cause a BSOD, potentially requiring an OS reinstall! Use them and then DON'T TOUCH ANYTHING!"

... also, 40MB on WinME sounds excruciating! My Gateway with Win98 (first edition) and a PII 400 came with 64MB in early 1999. My brother was running a Pentium 200 MMX with 96MB of EDO back then too. Can't imagine having so little to run Me.

The drivers are a good point, especially for USB mass storage. Obviously you can "hack" support onto 98(SE) and maybe even 95 if you're crazy enough, but ME was the first to do it natively. I suspect that was the draw for the owners of this PC, considering all the camera/photo stuff (recent documents had DSC .jpg files pointing to an external volume).

I have tried to replicate the ME experience on a PC in the same series as our first family PC, which was slow as balls to startup and shutdown. Even trending towards the lowest possible configuration it could have had - Pentium 166 and 32MB, it runs fine. Consider that's after doing an upgrade from OSR2, which we did back then on the original PC. Also with Office 97 and its "OSA/findfast" startup entries, and system restore kept on. We didn't have the internet for the entire life of the PC, so there wouldn't have been many vectors to get junk on there. Not sure what the missing link is.

giantenemycat wrote on 2026-03-31, 19:11:

Ozzuneoj wrote on 2026-03-31, 18:25:

I honestly haven't seen Windows Me running on a PC since I worked at a repair shop in the early 2000s. I will have to install it […]
Show full quote

giantenemycat wrote on 2026-03-31, 15:50:

I was also able to get this going. As I suspected, taking out the USB card and PC speaker allowed it to boot up just fine. Everything works, including HDD and CD-ROM. 40MB RAM. Windows ME installed, but it's pretty bare. What interests me is it's slow as all hell, now this reminds me of the ME experience I had on my first family PC.

I honestly haven't seen Windows Me running on a PC since I worked at a repair shop in the early 2000s. I will have to install it sometime to remind myself of what it was like. I remember, at the time, actually liking setting up WinMe systems because they had so many more drivers pre-installed compared to Windows 98\SE. We had nifty "shop CDs" (complete with custom interface and disc labels, 🤣) that contained as many of the drivers, runtimes and other things that we needed to set up most computers... but Me systems tended to not need much at all to work.

It's funny how different things were then. Now, the idea of just using whatever old drivers the OS came with (because Windows update didn't automatically update drivers like in later versions) seems weird. Back then, it was like "Hey, these drivers actually work and don't cause a BSOD, potentially requiring an OS reinstall! Use them and then DON'T TOUCH ANYTHING!"

... also, 40MB on WinME sounds excruciating! My Gateway with Win98 (first edition) and a PII 400 came with 64MB in early 1999. My brother was running a Pentium 200 MMX with 96MB of EDO back then too. Can't imagine having so little to run Me.

The drivers are a good point, especially for USB mass storage. Obviously you can "hack" support onto 98(SE) and maybe even 95 if you're crazy enough, but ME was the first to do it natively. I suspect that was the draw for the owners of this PC, considering all the camera/photo stuff (recent documents had DSC .jpg files pointing to an external volume).

I have tried to replicate the ME experience on a PC in the same series as our first family PC, which was slow as balls to startup and shutdown. Even trending towards the lowest possible configuration it could have had - Pentium 166 and 32MB, it runs fine. Consider that's after doing an upgrade from OSR2, which we did back then on the original PC. Also with Office 97 and its "OSA/findfast" startup entries, and system restore kept on. We didn't have the internet for the entire life of the PC, so there wouldn't have been many vectors to get junk on there. Not sure what the missing link is.

Maybe you had something weird going on that made the hard drive controller work in PIO mode? That is one of the few somewhat common things I can think of that would completely cripple performance without rendering the computer unusable due to errors or instability.

Or... maybe drive compression was being used because of low disk space? I don't have much first hand experience with this feature at the time, but I think that would turn an otherwise usable budget PC with a small hard drive into a complete dog.

Drivespace compression has certain uses, and use case limitations.

1)It can only be used on a fat16 volume.

2)The volume must be equal to or less than 1GiB in size.

3) The drivespace compression driver eats 64kib of memory.

4) The version for win95 with pluspack, or on win98, (drivespace3), has options to crank the compression level higher, but this really hits the cpu hard.

I dont realistically see a 'reason' for an ME era computer to have a 1gb or smaller drive. Even budget drives from this era would be much bigger than this.

I know about / have experience with this, because I use it to compress ramdisks. (Like memdisk hosted ones, or ones abusing the 'scandisk / mount' behavior). If you have correctly mastered a small disk image this way, you can boot a fully self-contained win9x ramdisk with grub2 and memdisk on 'more modern' hardware without burning a partition for it. (The disk image can live in your linux partition, along with dozens of other disk images that are loadable this way)

On such anachronistic hardware, the cpu costs are negligable; accesses still *greatly* exceed those possible with ata133 and pals.

A full win98se deployment can live very comfortably with lots of room to spare on a 512mb compressed ramdisk. (Minimum size is 384mb)

Anyway. Enough about that. 😁

More than likely, the IDE speed was incrementally pushed down to PIO speeds because of the way Win9x handles interface crc errors.

If there are lots of bad reads, win9x reacts to this by dropping the transfer rate until the errors go away. It then writes a value in the registry that records what this speed was, and will never try to operate faster than that afterward (unless you manually fix it).

Slapping a fast HDD on a channel with a slow ATAPI drive was a common culprit, as was using a 40 conductor cable instead of an 80 conductor one.

wierd_w wrote on 2026-03-31, 19:46:

Drivespace compression has certain uses, and use case limitations. […]
Show full quote

Drivespace compression has certain uses, and use case limitations.

1)It can only be used on a fat16 volume.

2)The volume must be equal to or less than 1GiB in size.

3) The drivespace compression driver eats 64kib of memory.

4) The version for win95 with pluspack, or on win98, (drivespace3), has options to crank the compression level higher, but this really hits the cpu hard.

I dont realistically see a 'reason' for an ME era computer to have a 1gb or smaller drive. Even budget drives from this era would be much bigger than this.

I know about / have experience with this, because I use it to compress ramdisks. (Like memdisk hosted ones, or ones abusing the 'scandisk / mount' behavior). If you have correctly mastered a small disk image this way, you can boot a fully self-contained win9x ramdisk with grub2 and memdisk on 'more modern' hardware without burning a partition for it. (The disk image can live in your linux partition, along with dozens of other disk images that are loadable this way)

On such anachronistic hardware, the cpu costs are negligable; accesses still *greatly* exceed those possible with ata133 and pals.

A full win98se deployment can live very comfortably with lots of room to spare on a 512mb compressed ramdisk. (Minimum size is 384mb)

Anyway. Enough about that. 😁

More than likely, the IDE speed was incrementally pushed down to PIO speeds because of the way Win9x handles interface crc errors.

If there are lots of bad reads, win9x reacts to this by dropping the transfer rate until the errors go away. It then writes a value in the registry that records what this speed was, and will never try to operate faster than that afterward (unless you manually fix it).

Slapping a fast HDD on a channel with a slow ATAPI drive was a common culprit, as was using a 40 conductor cable instead of an 80 conductor one.

Sorry, I was thinking of NTFS compression with Windows XP, not Drivespace (which I think is only available for floppies in Windows Me). I have very little experience with either and got the timing of mixed up on when disk compression was available. Thank you for the info. 🙂

In the topic of "useful information" concerning drivespace3 compression...

When you do this to the system volume, windows creates a folder called "Failsafe.drv" on it that contains a useful setup. It's a very cut-down version of win3x kernel, that can run a handful of GUI utilities, among which is a version of defrag that works on fat32 volumes. It does not care about a foriegn DPMI host running. I have successfully run it under HDPMI32I.

It's useful to copy this folder into your toolbox, and use it for freedos or svardos, which lack a really good defragmenter. I can confirm that it works fine on svardos.

TASOS wrote on 2026-03-31, 17:35:

Nice find , enjoy it. […]
Show full quote

Living wrote on 2026-03-29, 11:21:

After almost 27 years i finally have my own Athlon Slot A, bought from a collector that happen to encounter in FB Marketplace. ( […]
Show full quote

After almost 27 years i finally have my own Athlon Slot A, bought from a collector that happen to encounter in FB Marketplace. (when i found it i was like Homer when he learns about the free trampoline in the newspaper)

* The motherboard its an Asus K7m rev 1.04 with the A5 rev chipset (Super Bypass enabled via the last Beta bios). I think this is the famous case of the motherboards that came in blank boxes due to fear of Intel. The quality is superb, all the capacitors are Rubycon and not a single one is bulged (this was prior to the capacitor plague)

.........

i did a quick test and it destroys my k6-2+ @ 600Mhz even at 500Mhz by 50% in most of the games (back in the day i jumped from a k6-2 500Mhz directly to a Thunderbird 900Mhz, the difference was massive but i thought in that time that it was mostly due to raw clock speed advantage)

Nice find , enjoy it.

Must have been some kind of OEM board (like the ones found in HP Pavilion series)
I see it doesnt't have sound , but does have the AMR slot and all 3 ram slots.

What bios did it came with ?

Thanks, i will.

1007 (11/99), in line with the date on the processor. Likely a Mid range combo from Q1 2000

I bought a SIS 540 motherboard for about $10, which works well with the K6-III+ 500MHz. It is for the IBM 2193 computer, model Pro283.

The known drawback is that the onboard AC97 sound card is CS4299, which does not have a DOS driver.

Just got this awesome Wyse 2108, an interesting 8MHz 286 from 1987/88. I'm so stoked about this old machine, it is very different from my other DOS computers. It is in very good and original condition, front panel and FDD bezel could use some retrobrighting in the coming summer, but that is not a high priority.:

I just did quick test in my workshop, threw in a VGA card in place of the original C&T EGA/CGA, got post+screen and checked voltages and all good. It doesn't boot, because I don't yet have the setup diskette made so I can't tell if the 20MB MFM HDD or floppy works. HDD seems to spin up and sounds completely normal, at least. Of course I need to replace the battery, there is what I assume original 3.6V external battery behind the front plate, so it is easy peasy and no battery damage anywhere.

These are interesting machines. The front panel LCD is simply awesome and you can configure it to display your own messages if you want to. It uses ISA backplane design with a huge dual CPU/MEM card, there is really nothing but slots and some glue logic on the backplane. The PSU is as far as I can tell integrated with the MB, there are no wires going on from the PSU to MB. Keyboard connector is Wyse RJ11 terminal keyboard connector, but gladly keyboards for these seem to be pretty much of AT signaling and this came with an adapter which seems to work just fine (computer reacted normally to keyboard presses after it tried to boot using regular AT keyboard). Lot's of beautiful proprietary nonsense 😁

This will be fun to work on during ester weekend. I sincerely hope that the HDD works as I'd like to keep this very original. I will add some 8-bit sound card and NIC, but otherwise I'd like to skip XTIDE and all that jazz with this system. If the HDD is broken, maybe it is time to source similar working drive from somewhere...

After my happy discovery of a Savage2000 in a mystery box that I'll be keeping, I bought another mystery box with no expectations at all.

It can contain no rare surprise and I bought it for the case... because someone in my family "lost" the side panels of my original AOpen HX-08.

Now I'll have to wait and see if there's a surprise reason to not transplant my original K6-2 into this: Caps not blown? No missing RAM? No noisy CPU fan? No other excuse to not swap the motherboards? ...

giantenemycat wrote on 2026-03-31, 15:50:

What interests me is it's slow as all hell, now this reminds me of the ME experience I had on my first family PC.

Are your video drivers enabling BitBlt?

I just booted the Savage2000 in its original box and no drivers had been installed so WinXP was rendering the entire desktop on the CPU, combing that in RAM, then copying the frames to VRAM. The whole system was terrible unresponsive. WinME might behave similarly with standard VGA driver.

Rather than download and copy driver files over USB, I dropped in a GeForce2Ti that WinXP automatically recognises and the whole system turned snappy.

CharlieFoxtrot wrote on 2026-04-01, 17:38:

Just got this awesome Wyse 2108, an interesting 8MHz 286 from 1987/88. I'm so stoked about this old machine, it is very differen […]
Show full quote

Just got this awesome Wyse 2108, an interesting 8MHz 286 from 1987/88. I'm so stoked about this old machine, it is very different from my other DOS computers. It is in very good and original condition, front panel and FDD bezel could use some retrobrighting in the coming summer, but that is not a high priority.:

The attachment Wyse 2108.jpg is no longer available

The attachment Wyse 2108 inside.jpg is no longer available

I just did quick test in my workshop, threw in a VGA card in place of the original C&T EGA/CGA, got post+screen and checked voltages and all good. It doesn't boot, because I don't yet have the setup diskette made so I can't tell if the 20MB MFM HDD or floppy works. HDD seems to spin up and sounds completely normal, at least. Of course I need to replace the battery, there is what I assume original 3.6V external battery behind the front plate, so it is easy peasy and no battery damage anywhere.

These are interesting machines. The front panel LCD is simply awesome and you can configure it to display your own messages if you want to. It uses ISA backplane design with a huge dual CPU/MEM card, there is really nothing but slots and some glue logic on the backplane. The PSU is as far as I can tell integrated with the MB, there are no wires going on from the PSU to MB. Keyboard connector is Wyse RJ11 terminal keyboard connector, but gladly keyboards for these seem to be pretty much of AT signaling and this came with an adapter which seems to work just fine (computer reacted normally to keyboard presses after it tried to boot using regular AT keyboard). Lot's of beautiful proprietary nonsense 😁

This will be fun to work on during ester weekend. I sincerely hope that the HDD works as I'd like to keep this very original. I will add some 8-bit sound card and NIC, but otherwise I'd like to skip XTIDE and all that jazz with this system. If the HDD is broken, maybe it is time to source similar working drive from somewhere...

I once inherted a set of these in the late 90s.

You dont need a special setup disk. A 360k diskette with dos and gsetup work fine.

wierd_w wrote on Yesterday, 13:21:

CharlieFoxtrot wrote on 2026-04-01, 17:38:

Just got this awesome Wyse 2108, an interesting 8MHz 286 from 1987/88. I'm so stoked about this old machine, it is very differen […]
Show full quote

Just got this awesome Wyse 2108, an interesting 8MHz 286 from 1987/88. I'm so stoked about this old machine, it is very different from my other DOS computers. It is in very good and original condition, front panel and FDD bezel could use some retrobrighting in the coming summer, but that is not a high priority.:

The attachment Wyse 2108.jpg is no longer available

The attachment Wyse 2108 inside.jpg is no longer available

I just did quick test in my workshop, threw in a VGA card in place of the original C&T EGA/CGA, got post+screen and checked voltages and all good. It doesn't boot, because I don't yet have the setup diskette made so I can't tell if the 20MB MFM HDD or floppy works. HDD seems to spin up and sounds completely normal, at least. Of course I need to replace the battery, there is what I assume original 3.6V external battery behind the front plate, so it is easy peasy and no battery damage anywhere.

These are interesting machines. The front panel LCD is simply awesome and you can configure it to display your own messages if you want to. It uses ISA backplane design with a huge dual CPU/MEM card, there is really nothing but slots and some glue logic on the backplane. The PSU is as far as I can tell integrated with the MB, there are no wires going on from the PSU to MB. Keyboard connector is Wyse RJ11 terminal keyboard connector, but gladly keyboards for these seem to be pretty much of AT signaling and this came with an adapter which seems to work just fine (computer reacted normally to keyboard presses after it tried to boot using regular AT keyboard). Lot's of beautiful proprietary nonsense 😁

This will be fun to work on during ester weekend. I sincerely hope that the HDD works as I'd like to keep this very original. I will add some 8-bit sound card and NIC, but otherwise I'd like to skip XTIDE and all that jazz with this system. If the HDD is broken, maybe it is time to source similar working drive from somewhere...

I once inherted a set of these in the late 90s.

You dont need a special setup disk. A 360k diskette with dos and gsetup work fine.

Ok. I already got the setup software delivered with the system (it can be found for example at archive.org). I made a bootable diskette and used the setup.exe after that.

I made a battery replacement today, did the bios setup and while I experienced some oddities while tinkering with it I now got it to the point that I’m pretty positive that everything is working 100%. It has now DOS 5 installed and tomorrow I’ll continue installing sound, 10baseT nic and software.

I was given something a while back which I've only recently got around to testing due to having no nostalgic attachment to Pentium 4 setups at all. Apparently the CPU is quite rare as I can't find any sold listings anywhere to know what I should put it up for if I decide to get rid! I've run xp on it, and with a Sapphire X1950 Pro it was producing some great performance in the 3Dmark Suite and Quake 3! It's a Pentium 4 socket 478 Extreme Edition at 3.4Ghz, the board I believe to be a very average at best, P4i65G.

Also purchased an aopen HX08 complete with fairly average internals, need to work out what to build in that one! 😀

RetroAddict wrote on Yesterday, 19:42:

Also purchased an aopen HX08 complete with fairly average internals, need to work out what to build in that one! 😀

Oh man, what a coincidence - where did you find that?

MattRocks wrote on Yesterday, 20:27:

RetroAddict wrote on Yesterday, 19:42:

Also purchased an aopen HX08 complete with fairly average internals, need to work out what to build in that one! 😀

Oh man, what a coincidence - where did you find that?

On the old bookface marketplace! The case and innards, plus a monitor and a generic keyboard and mouse cost me very little. I had the smaller aopen case back in 2000 but it’s so rare to see anything like that for sale down here I couldn’t resist! I have the seller of your mystery box favourited too 😂

MattRocks wrote on Yesterday, 13:15:

Are your video drivers enabling BitBlt? […]
Show full quote

giantenemycat wrote on 2026-03-31, 15:50:

What interests me is it's slow as all hell, now this reminds me of the ME experience I had on my first family PC.

Are your video drivers enabling BitBlt?

I just booted the Savage2000 in its original box and no drivers had been installed so WinXP was rendering the entire desktop on the CPU, combing that in RAM, then copying the frames to VRAM. The whole system was terrible unresponsive. WinME might behave similarly with standard VGA driver.

Rather than download and copy driver files over USB, I dropped in a GeForce2Ti that WinXP automatically recognises and the whole system turned snappy.

The Savage2000 is a terrible card. The TnL engine only works somewhat correctly under S3 MeTaL, and its slower than a TNT2 Ultra in a lot of games despite being pitched as a GeForce DDR/Radeon DDR competitor. Generally buggy drivers, and underwhelming performance in DX6 titles as well.

I've just purchased a K6-III+ 400MHz from eBay.

This is my second K6 CPU after finding a K6-2 550MHz inside an IBM Aptiva a few months back.