Got an HP Vectra VL400 MT today. 667MHz Pentium III 128mb RAM. Onboard gfx, sound, network. I put in a 2GB 7200RPM SCSI HD + Adaptec 2940UW PCI card.

Pictures http://imgur.com/a/tzqS7

It came with that weird long ISA card... not exactly sure what it is, maybe a data acquisition card?

All it says on the back of the card is "Foster & Freeman Grim2 12/91"

Googled the company that made it and found this...

http://www.ebay.com/itm/FOSTER-FREEMAN-GRIM-2 … T-/401217638336

Got this Socket 478 Pentium 4 motherboard, but this is one is different, comes with a PCIe slot and DDR2. Picked it up from the post office. Inspected it at home, one cap was a bit rounded, but nothing serious, worth seeing if it posts.

Fired it up and head a PANG and a fizzle. Quickly killed the power. One cap vented at the top a little. Removed the 4 identical caps, all 16V 1000uF caps sitting in front of the voltage regulators. I only had some 35V 1000uF Panasonic lying around, so in the went. Board fired up straight away 😁

Got this little bit of hardware setup and waiting.

Athlon 3500+ (S939)
1GB DDR400
Foxconn 761GXK8MB

Cooler is an AMD Wraith-like (same thing as the Wraith but no fancy cover) that came with my Athlon 880K.

Board has the SiS 761 chipset.. I just happened across it on ebay a couple months ago and absolutely had to have it. I'm picky about "full-size" boards (9.6x9.6) and their layouts.. what makes it special to me is that SiS chipset. My first computer that I "built" as a kid had a socket 478 board with an SiS chipset, loved that thing. (Following setup had a Uli chipset and an Opty 144... that was a fantastic setup. Stable as ever.)

Plans for it are an Audigy 2ZS and an ATI X850 video card.

I may order some mini mosfet heatsinks for the VRMs and I may be getting my hands on another Opteron 144 (I sold the one I bought in high school... I miss that thing).

Private_Ops wrote:

Cooler is an AMD Wraith-like (same thing as the Wraith but no fancy cover) that came with my Athlon 880K.

Nice. I'd love to have one of those. I use an older Phenom II cooler that came with a 125 W model. It cools ok, but boy is it loud...

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

Private_Ops wrote:

Cooler is an AMD Wraith-like (same thing as the Wraith but no fancy cover) that came with my Athlon 880K.

Nice. I'd love to have one of those. I use an older Phenom II cooler that came with a 125 W model. It cools ok, but boy is it loud...

I've seen them on ebay. Hard to get ahold of unless you buy a CPU that has one (or know someone that did and doesn't need it).

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

Got this Socket 478 Pentium 4 motherboard, but this is one is different, comes with a PCIe slot and DDR2. Picked it up from the post office. Inspected it at home, one cap was a bit rounded, but nothing serious, worth seeing if it posts.

Fired it up and head a PANG and a fizzle. Quickly killed the power. One cap vented at the top a little. Removed the 4 identical caps, all 16V 1000uF caps sitting in front of the voltage regulators. I only had some 35V 1000uF Panasonic lying around, so in the went. Board fired up straight away 😁

PhilsComputerLab - For those BIOS shots - do you use a VGA capture card? thanks!

Installing Win98SE on a Thinkpad 770Z. Issues installing the drivers because some of them (after finding them at all, since IBM transferred support for Thinkpads to Lenovo, and some time ago Lenovo dropped the older drivers from their site) are in an IBM proprietary self-extracting floppy format that regular archivers can't extract. The executable file makes you go through a few pages of EULA before extracting the embedded image to a physical floppy. No, it can't be redirected to anything else. I ended up using a virtual Win2k installation in VMware to extract the files to a floppy image connected to the emulated FDD, then extracted the actual drivers from the floppy image. That's because the Thinkpad doesn't have an actual FDD unit. 😀 (I have an Ultrabay floppy on the way but not here yet)

beastlike wrote:

PhilsComputerLab - For those BIOS shots - do you use a VGA capture card? thanks!

HDMI capture.

Also trying to install XP on a Thinkpad R52 (P4-1.73GHz, 256MB). This laptop came without a HDD, and the catch is - its BIOS supports only a very narrow range of drives. Any drive outside of that range will give you an error 2010 at boot, and won't function correctly. Here's a page detailing the problem: http://www.thinkwiki.org/wiki/Problem_with_no … kPad_hard_disks

I don't have any of the drives on that list (I wasn't aware of the problem when I ordered the laptop). Installed a Fujitsu 60GB drive that I had around, gives me error 2010 but continues to try and boot. Used an external USB FDD to boot a DOS 6.22 disk; fdisk sees the HDD as a 8GB one only. Made a 2GB FAT partition and installed DOS on it just to see if it will boot. On reboot it gives the 2010 error again of course, but then it proceeds to boot DOS.

I then tried installing XP to this unsupported drive anyway; made XP into a bootable USB drive and installed from there. Repartitioned the drive from the installer to remove the DOS partition and make a NTFS partition instead. The installer copies all the files to the partition and then reboots. Then I get the error 2010 again, and then it stops with "disk read error"

Guess that won't work.

Fortunately I was able to find cheaply on ebay a lot of 2 of the supported drives (Fujitsu MHV2060AH) and am waiting for them to be delivered. For the heck of it I also ordered an Ultrabay Enhanced HDD adapter which should work with this laptop, because drives installed in this manner apparently don't suffer from the error 2010 problem (the downside being that you have to remove the DVD/CDRW unit).

FWIW the Ultrabay HDD adapter part number is 41N5661. I'm placing this here for reference in case anyone else needs it, because I spent more than an hour trying to figure it out from compatibility lists, old IBM technical documents and forum discussions. There are many variations of the Ultrabay devices which are incompatible with each other, but this one should work on the R52.

setup the AST Bravo MS 5166 and it seems to work pretty nicely. It needs a new CMOS battery (ordered) and more RAM (currently at 32mb). I bought an ATI Rage XL to get better gfx.

Pictures http://imgur.com/a/JdJfX

At last I got around to trying this ESS card.

I used the drivers from VOGONS driver archive. They are very compact, fit on a floppy and are quite simple. No GUI though, it's all command line switches. Quickly tried a few games, and tested the wavetable, all working great. Descent also picks up the ESS option, that's a nice little extra.

My Compaq Evo N600C laptop uses an ESS Allegro ES1989 chip. It works under Windows 98, but when I load the DOS driver, it will not load properly.

Started digging out some of my hidden hardware. I've had most of this stuff since it was still in use. I also purchased a USR Courier modem off ebay last night, I do plan on setting up a bbs on vintage hardware. The Courier modem was always my "Grail" modem when I was younger.

These were just sitting in the corner of my desk drawer. The discoloration on the pentium is from a rubberised TIM pad that was on the cpu when I got it way back when, it does not clean off.

Anyone have any info on the IBM intel 286 chip? Have no idea what socket it would be.

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

At last I got around to trying this ESS card.

They don't look like much but work really well I've found - did you try out the ESFM? Also sounds good.

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

At last I got around to trying this ESS card.

Cool.
ESS cards indeed have a very good SBPro, OPL3 and Wavetable compatibility on board.
The digital PCM audio sounds great because of dynamic filtering like the SB16 but with a SBPro, so the ESS is much better in this matter than other clones which may or may not have filtering.
If the game also supports the ESS standard it will play 16bit 44.1kHz PCM sounds in DOS like the SB16.

badmojo wrote:

PhilsComputerLab wrote:

At last I got around to trying this ESS card.

They don't look like much but work really well I've found - did you try out the ESFM? Also sounds good.

Yea it sounded great indeed 😀

Veeb0rg wrote:

Anyone have any info on the IBM intel 286 chip? Have no idea what socket it would be. http://i.imgur.com/Moynwn3l.jpg […]
Show full quote

Anyone have any info on the IBM intel 286 chip? Have no idea what socket it would be.

http://www.cpu-world.com/CPUs/80286/IBM-CG80286-6C.html

I suppose that 68-pin PGA socket for 286 CPUs has no special name.

Spent a few hours reading old threads on various Thinkpad forums about the Thinkpad 770Z that I'm working on upgrading. Picked up a few interesting ideas, including upgrading the PII-366 CPU to something a little faster. How about a PIII-850? 😁 But that involves some BIOS modifications, hex-editing the CMOS values and even a few modifications to the motherboard. And that's not all, I saw some mentions that someone made it work even with a 1GHz PIII overclocked to 1.2GHz... on a laptop from 1997. 😎

(that was more complicated and involved replacing the clock generator chip on the motherboard to bump the FSB from 66 to 133MHz, as well as adding a supplemental clock generator to keep the AGP at 66MHz because the BX chipset provides 89MHz at 133FSB and the video card doesn't like that; as well as modifications to the CPU module)

Built a dos gaming machine.

Pentium 120,32 meg EDO ram, Diamond Stealth64 Video.
Can only find one ps2 mouse and the ps2 to db9 converter I have is dead. Very frustrating.

Got around testing a few things I bought last month. Just not enough time to test when it arrives...