First post, by Scraphoarder
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After 386_junkies posts about his Systempros i could not rest. I have a special love for SMP systems and Compaqs aswell, so i had to see if i could get one. Last year i found some parts like the systemboard, a 486 CPU card, memory board and a PSU so the vital parts came easy and cheap. After spending countless hours on the web i concluded that a case or complete system would be impossible to find. I began to see if any other cases could be used, but i gave up getting the real deal and better hope a miracle would occure in the future.
The trend for most of the recyclers online seems to only stock internnal parts for servers older than 8-10 years. Very few complete systems can be found and its understandable that the sheer bulk and size of a big server isnt attractive to let occupy the shelves for an infinite time. My advice is if you are eyeballing something, act before its too late. As a Compaq/HP server fan i see that anything older than the Proliant G3 are mostly gone now on eBay, but maybe they can be sourced other places. There are some older rack Compaq Proliants on eBay, but the asking price and shipping cost are too much.
Fast forward to threee weeks ago and i searched for some old Compaq and EISA stuff on eBay and there it was! A complete Compaq Systempro LT with a 386 dx33 CPU, WTF! My heart almost stopped and i had to act fast. The price were ok, but shipping was more than the server. I sent a message to the seller about the shipping and had to painstakingly wait till next day to get an answer. The answer was worth waiting for and the shipping cost was under half than eBays auto generated quote. After correction the deal was closed and i begged the seller to pack it carefully. After watching videos on how parcels are treated i could expect the worst even if the old Compaqs are built like tanks.
Yesterday i picked the package up on the post office and to my suprise it was undamaged and the weight and size was also lesser than expected. Got it inside my hous, but waited till today to open the package so here it is in all its glory!
Specs for this Systempro LT:
Intel i386DX-33 MHz CPU
2 x 8 MB EDO memory on memory board
Compaq Qvision VGA Card EISA BUS
210 MB Conner CP3201G Hard disk IDE ATA
3.5"' 1.44 MB Floppy Disk Drive
5.25" 1.2 MB Floppy Disk Drive Slim Mitsubishi
3Com ASSY 8772-01 ISA Network card
As mentioned earlier i got the orginal Systempro system board that can take two CPU Cards, but as for now i will not use it. Also i have to wait to later to play more with this server as i sadly got no room and time at the moment.