SpectriaForce wrote:

spiroyster wrote:

I really hated the way pretty much every computer came in a shade of beige back in the day, ...I really hated beige... like really hated it.. and was quite happy when stylish non white computer cases started hitting the market (P4 era onwards)... but that thing could quite happily sit under my desk and I would be proud 😀.

COMPAQ, IBM, Fujitsu and even Escom already offered black pc's in the 90's.

Yes, but they weren't common place and cost a fortune if you wanted anything non white... for some reason the market demanded white, and so thats what 99.999% of desktop PC's came as. I had a black laptop, and sprayed my 486 black back then... I hated beige that much.

System 7.5.3 for Mac
39 disks total.
For my Macintosh classics and some games too.

spiroyster wrote:

OMG that case is an absolute thing of beauty. […]
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OMG that case is an absolute thing of beauty.

I really hated the way pretty much every computer came in a shade of beige back in the day, ...I really hated beige... like really hated it.. and was quite happy when stylish non white computer cases started hitting the market (P4 era onwards)... but that thing could quite happily sit under my desk and I would be proud 😀.

Is it possible to have some close-ups of the panel LED's? Do these things come up often on polish market places?

retropol wrote:

btw - swap to ESCOM possible 😁

🤣 thats exactly what I thought it was when I first saw it!

Only ADAX was in this case-style - there were also desktops or mini or big towers. I will try to find the ads brochure somewhere in my old computer newspapers and will put it here if found.

This case is very very heavy / massive. The very nice thing is this black semi-transparent cover and the icon-graphic leds. I will do a close-up of the panel for you today in the evening.

In Poland there was also attack of HIGHSCREEN brand, and I remember their COLANI (?) case style. That was also very nice design.
Of course ESCOM was the good example of something fresh on polish market but later ESCOM went down with the style of cases and started to be like any other...

Unfortunately this computers are not common now - the fact is people in Poland rather bought non-branded computers
(or mostly they bought OPTIMUS which was also very nice case-style at the beginning of their expansion).

Bought a Gateway 400SD4 laptop in good shape and did preventative maintenance: cleaned the heatsink and replaced the thermal paste. Has a Pentium 4 running at 2.4GHz, 512MB RAM, Windows XP Home SP3, 40GB HDD, CD-RW/DVD-ROM combo, floppy drive (something that didn't come standard on Pentium 4 laptops), 1 CardBus slot (has 2 doors for inserting a bigger CardBus card, like Xircom modem and FastEthernet cards or something similar to that nature), VGA, Parallel (printer), modem, Intel FastEthernet, 2 USB, FireWire 400, and audio in/out jacks/ports, ESS Allegro ES1988 PCI sound, and either a 14.1" or 15" TFT Active Matrix display. Main battery is flat and refuses to charge and the clock battery is an ML1220 (rechargeable coin cell), which is rather odd, however, no charger came with it, so I improvised and decided to use my ASUS X54C's laptop charger and it works perfectly fine, even my HP Pavilion N3350 doesn't have a charger and the ASUS charger does a good job.

detritus olentus wrote:

Got an IBM P260 monitor locally, time to learn WinDAS I suppose.

That's a very nice monitor. I wish I'll find something like that someday 😀

retropol wrote:

Only ADAX was in this case-style - there were also desktops or mini or big towers. I will try to find the ads brochure somewhere […]
Show full quote

spiroyster wrote:

OMG that case is an absolute thing of beauty. […]
Show full quote

OMG that case is an absolute thing of beauty.

I really hated the way pretty much every computer came in a shade of beige back in the day, ...I really hated beige... like really hated it.. and was quite happy when stylish non white computer cases started hitting the market (P4 era onwards)... but that thing could quite happily sit under my desk and I would be proud 😀.

Is it possible to have some close-ups of the panel LED's? Do these things come up often on polish market places?

retropol wrote:

btw - swap to ESCOM possible 😁

🤣 thats exactly what I thought it was when I first saw it!

Only ADAX was in this case-style - there were also desktops or mini or big towers. I will try to find the ads brochure somewhere in my old computer newspapers and will put it here if found.

This case is very very heavy / massive. The very nice thing is this black semi-transparent cover and the icon-graphic leds. I will do a close-up of the panel for you today in the evening.

In Poland there was also attack of HIGHSCREEN brand, and I remember their COLANI (?) case style. That was also very nice design.
Of course ESCOM was the good example of something fresh on polish market but later ESCOM went down with the style of cases and started to be like any other...

Unfortunately this computers are not common now - the fact is people in Poland rather bought non-branded computers
(or mostly they bought OPTIMUS which was also very nice case-style at the beginning of their expansion).

Interesting info. yes brochure and piccys would be much appreciated thank you. The combination of those three colour LED's and the perspex cover are what make that case imo, it would be interesting to see other designs.

AMD-K6-2/500AFX

FIC VA-503+ -- got the processor above for testing/flashing, going to try to get my K6-III+ working on it

Upgradeware XP-TMC

Virtual IO i-Glasses VGA interface adapter (now I need the glasses!)

Vynix wrote:

Ooh the second one... It's a Chieftec Dragon, isn't it? But the first one, I have no idea 😦

You are correct - always wanted to have it, but when I was finally able to afford one, there were much better Chieftec cases. First one is also Chieftec, but I know only code name.

Does anyone know what this is and whether it's worth buying?

Since all important chips were removed and the PLCC sockets destroyed, it's useless. It is (or rather was) a 386sx CPU card for the Schneider Tower AT.

^^might be possible to repair, these sockets are very easy to replace and you could take the missing ICs from a damaged 386. Think these CPU cards are quite rare...

Intended not to buy that much anymore, but this 17 kg lot that arrived today seems to be fantastic:

6x SUNTAC 80286:

6x C&T 286/386

Micronics 386...already have a similar one, think the RAM card is the same:
search.php?keywords=micronics+80386+collection

80286 in a 386 CPU socket..? 😕

...
SS7 ATX with bulging caps...not worth any repair

Interesting SONY boards. Very heavy. Have to google what this was used for. At least some intersting ICs, e.g. 68030:

Predator99 wrote:

...
SS7 ATX with bulging caps...not worth any repair

IMG_2584r.jpg

Eh.. It'd be very much worth the repair for me; I need an SS7 board with AGP 😒

Predator99 wrote:

^^might be possible to repair, these sockets are very easy to replace and you could take the missing ICs from a damaged 386.

You would need to find the exact chips. These are:

Chips P82C812
Chips P82C815-12
Chips P82C811
Chips P82C206

And the question is if the card is actually working. The chips were most likely removed without care because the card was dead.

appiah4 wrote:

Predator99 wrote:

...
SS7 ATX with bulging caps...not worth any repair

IMG_2584r.jpg

Eh.. It'd be very much worth the repair for me; I need an SS7 board with AGP 😒

And it has the ALI Aladdin V chipset. Only downside is the max FSB looks to be 100Mhz since there are only 3 jumpers for fsb selection.

cyclone3d wrote:

appiah4 wrote:

Predator99 wrote:

...
SS7 ATX with bulging caps...not worth any repair

IMG_2584r.jpg

Eh.. It'd be very much worth the repair for me; I need an SS7 board with AGP 😒

And it has the ALI Aladdin V chipset. Only downside is the max FSB looks to be 100Mhz since there are only 3 jumpers for fsb selection.

Totally fine with me.

derSammler wrote:

And the question is if the card is actually working. The chips were most likely removed without care because the card was dead.

scrappers mostly do everything without care, they usually don't care (no pun intended) if it was actually working before or not.

imi wrote:

derSammler wrote:

And the question is if the card is actually working. The chips were most likely removed without care because the card was dead.

scrappers mostly do everything without care, they usually don't care (no pun intended) if it was actually working before or not.

It makes me cringe sometimes seeing how working cards are thrown and flipped carelessly about onto each other, or maybe I am just too paranoid about handling 20+ year old hardware, even the ones with less value. So it amazes me when somethings from a junk pile still work.

imi wrote:

scrappers mostly do everything without care, they usually don't care (no pun intended) if it was actually working before or not.

Why would a scrapper even remove the PLCC chips? Makes no sense to me. The chips were most likely removed by whoever owned the card before.

I guess it's because they get more if the "scrap" is pre-sorted, there's probably different prices /kg for different classes of scrap, metals, PCBs, ICs... hence why you find so many cards and boards with removed brackets, heatsinks ripped off, chips removed etc. it's a common sight.
I already bought scrap lots where the boards and chips got sold seperately (luckily from the same seller) and I had to puzzle them back together.

it's just that most people don't see any value in old electronics, it is literally scrap in their eyes, so they just care about $$/kg, same with the gold scrappers that would just smash up rare vintage cpus.